📸 Photo

- BANGED UP ABROAD: HELLHOLE -

regular taxi like the ones we'd been taking to nightclubs. Maybe we weren't so shafted after all?

But such thoughts were soon banished when the guard in the front pulled out his gun and said, 'You try and run, I shoot you in the head.'

I thought, 'Shit, this is serious now.' And then I thought, 'I'm eighteen and I won't get out until I'm forty-eight.' It was November 14th, 1996. We'd be old men by the time we out in 2026.

If we lived to tell the tale.

* * *

The taxi wound its way up into the mountains for ages, until we reached a National Guard compound. Once in the checking-in office inside, they immediately took all our belongings - our passports, bags and jewellery: 'Right, rings off, earrings out!'

The ten kilos of cocaine were placed into a little cupboard, and then they marched us through several iron gates, finally ramming us into a stinking concrete room that, at about ten foot by six foot, was only about as big as a garden shed. There were no windows, it was boiling hot and it stank of sweat, fear, piss and shit.

No only that, but we were crammed in with a few crazy bastards: one kept singing mad songs in Spanish, while another nutter was reading pages out of the Bible at the top of his voice.