Prisons and Brazil

I just finished reading a rather disturbing book by a German guy who in his youth had been caught trying to smuggle a kilogram of cocaine from Brazil and served four years in prison as a result. I think a couple of screenings Midnight Express and a reading of this book will convince Pedro that selling drugs is just not an intelligent career option. The inevitability in prison of getting constantly abused, humiliated, and engaged in sodomy, willingly, makes it something you want to avoid. Especially among damn foreigners.

Not for the German guy, though, who declares everything, including himself, to be wholly positive. It’s a typical tourist story of some rather innocent Western kid who comes to Rio, immediately falls victim to its many carnal attractions which include cocaine and plentiful women. This is facilitated, the author informs us, by his good looks and let’s us know that girls for him were easy in Germany as well; he’s not one of those ugly foreign geezers able to get woman only because they were foreign. Modesty is not something that comes through with this guy although he’d list modesty as one of his many attributes.

After his first visit in a bacchanal role, he decided that bringing back a kilogram of coke was doable and even advisable. He’d left home at 15, worked as a cook (an excellent one, he kindly informs us), had severed contact with his family and was independent and strong. And pretty fucking stupid.

The first scene is him getting strip searched and he spares us no details of having his orifices perforated by policemen intent on humiliating him. The narrative traced back how he had come to this point, his forays into the favela facilitated by his excellent Portuguese, and the friendships he made here. It was clear that he was no ordinary tourist, and had immersed himself into the real Brazil which in his mind consisted of men who dealt drugs and woman who did them and sold their bodies to get more.

On his second and fatal visit to Brazil, he teamed up with a transvestite and seemed to have no problem with the sexual ambiguity involved in that. He bought a brick of cocaine for eight thousand dollars off a guy known as the ‘boliviano’. He packed it into the epaulettes of his jacket and was caught.

I visited a prison in DC once with some lawyers from Hungary. The woman accompanying us from some civil organization was rather chunky and as soon as we entered the main building, from the cells above came the chants which included such welcomes as ‘come on fat bitch, I want to fuck you right now.’ It was a rather awkward moment for our group, here to see first hand American prisons. But God, what a grim place to be in an environment where hope was actively stamped out.

Prisons in Brazil are ten times worse than that and are smoldering cauldrons of pent up violence that constantly flairs. One hundred and eleven inmates were killed in the Carandiru prison riots in 1992 and death is a constant in these overburdened hellholes that house people society not only doesn’t care about, but actively disdains.

You don’t want to be a paedophile or rapist and be sent to a Brazilian jail. Not only will you surely die, you will have a shitty time getting to that point. Literally, at least according to our esteemed author, these poor bastards are tied up next to the toilet and you can imagine what they are made to do. In a macho society, rapists are considered losers because they’re incapable of getting a woman in a conventional sense and have to resort to violence.

He spent his first eighteen months in an institution where he couldn’t go outside. He was inside a massive warehouse, the cells divided by twenty meter walls that had an opening above them. The inmates would go between the cells on this wall where if you fell you’d be dead. Our author was in a cell with other foreigners, including three Nigerians, best of mates it seemed initially, who smoked crack for three days straight and then when there was nothing left tried to kill each other.

Because of his affability and now native Portuguese, the author gets on with everybody and is accepted by everybody. It seems he can’t help being cool. There is a transvestite wing in the jail, that does a good business but Monica, ‘a stunning woman’ (well sort of) falls for our hero and doesn’t charge him.

He becomes friendly with some Czech guy who’s a big time dealer and the two of them try, by way of payment to the main gang leader in the prison, to escape. This proves a dud business because the gang leader split the money with the guards and gave away the details of the plot.

He is moved to another prison with a football field where he shines and proves to Brazilians that he can play. He becomes the hero of the prison in the organized game against the local police team. He starts a Portuguese class with a man who later becomes his protégé and mentor in some religion called Rational Christianity. He quickly becomes top of the class, predictably in a sense.

He sees some appalling manifestations of savagery in the jails both between inmates themselves and they and the institution: death by beating, shooting, stabbing, strangling, machine guns mowing down inmates who’d just decapitated one of the guards, the beloved prison cat being horribly killed, brutal collective beatings by the police. His best friend commits suicide, and he loses seven teeth over the period. It was certainly no holiday in the sun.

The problem is you know just the kind of guy the author is and can’t garner any affection for him. He blows his fucking trumpet the whole time, it’s like he’s read all those books about how you should love yourself and overdosed. It’s amazing some editor or the translator didn’t say, ‘look, dude, you kind of sound like an asshole, you don’t have to remind the reader for the ninth time how well you speak Portuguese.’

But he has a book published and these observations may just be sour grapes from one without such a distinction. I hope never to go through what he has; experiences you can get a book out of even if you write like shit. Such is life.