In Colombia's jails, escapes frequent as prisoners hold sway

Posted: Sunday, May 02, 1999

   BOGOTA, Colombia -- Cutting a path through a sea of surly glances, the crisply uniformed prison foreman escorts a reporter into a rainsoaked courtyard at the rough-and-tumble La Modelo federal penitentiary.

   Capt. William Gacharna ostensibly is here to provide security for the visitor. In reality, both lives are in the hands of a convicted paramilitary hit man.

   A short, gregarious 41-year-old with a gold-capped smile and a scar on his neck, Alberto Cano is the strongman -- or ''cacique'' -- of Cellblock 5.

   In Colombia's chaotic and violent prison system, the state's authority is negotiated, not imposed, and men like Cano command enormous respect. They are capable of inciting restless prisoners to violence or negotiating peace with outnumbered and fearful guards.

    With a polite handshake for his host, Gacharna asks Cano to come along on a tour of the dank corridors where 10 men were stabbed and shot to death a week earlier in a vain challenge to Cano's authority.

    The hit man assents, and Gacharna sighs in relief.

    ''This way I avoid confrontations, because he's with me,'' Gacharna says, nodding toward Cano. ''I'm here without any guards. I'm at the mercy of God.''

    The latest bloodshed at La Modelo prompted the firing of the national prisons director and raised to roughly 300 the number of inmates killed since 1997 in Colombia's crumbling, overcrowded and increasingly anarchic prisons. Over the same period, about 900 prisoners have escaped.

    The violence and frequent breakouts embarrass the government and are a long-standing concern for U.S. officials who worry that jailed drug barons wanted for extradition to the United States will escape.

   Some top traffickers continue to run their cocaine and heroin empires from jail, U.S. officials charge.

    Recent disgraces at the prisons have bolstered those concerns:

   n Last May, more than 300 prisoners, many of them guerrillas, escaped from a western Colombian jail when comrades on the outside attacked the prison.

   n In November, a hit man posing as a lawyer walked into a maximum security prison and fatally shot Helmer ''Pacho'' Herrera, former No. 3 leader of the Cali drug cartel, while Herrera watched a jailyard soccer game.

   n On New Years Eve, the leader of a fringe leftist rebel group who ordered the 1996 kidnapping of a brother of former President Cesar Gaviria escaped from a maximum security prison in Bogota. Police said he was smuggled out in garbage bags, and 17 officers were fired for negligence.

   n In March, 29 convicted or accused murderers tunneled their way out of the Villahermosa federal prison in Cali, fleeing through sewers. The prison wasn't aware of the escape until local residents called to report a group of grimy men swarming out of a sewer grate.

    Many of the problems plaguing Colombia's prisons are endemic in Latin America, where squalid conditions, Hollywood-style escapes and bloody rioting are routine.

   Making Colombia unique, though, is an inmate population that ballooned during 34 years of civil conflict and includes bosses of some of the world's most violent mafias.

    ''No country has a prison population like Colombia's,'' said Justice Minister Parmenio Cuellar. ''In the United States they may have drug traffickers, but they don't have paramilitary fighters, guerrillas and kidnappers.''

    Fueling an explosive human cocktail are corrupt, unionized prison guards, who earn the equivalent of about $250 a month while some inmates are millionaires. For a price, many guards look the other way as drugs, liquor, prostitutes, guns and cellular telephones flow freely into the most ''high-security'' jails.

    A cut from the bustling contraband trade goes to the ''caciques,'' who run businesses and sell rights to the best cells.

    ''There's an underground economy in the prison system which escapes all control,'' says Miller Rubio, a former prisons spokesman.

    Physically dilapidated, half of Colombian prisons were built more than 100 years ago and have no modern security equipment.

    During a March visit, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno asked how Washington might help Colombia tighten up its permissive prisons. Officials said they need new and more advanced jails, higher pay and better training for guards, and laws making it easier to fire corrupt guards.

    Prisoners' rights advocates are demanding sentence reductions and an end to lengthy pre-trial detentions. Nearly half the 46,000 inmates in 168 federal prisons are there just awaiting trial.

    Nobody can say how the cash-strapped government would pay for its proposal to build 16 high-tech prisons capable of housing 20,000 inmates.

    If and when new jails are opened, one of the first old prisons to be phased out will be La Modelo -- a 1960s structure holding 3,800 men in quarters designed for two-thirds that many.

    Inside the prison, money and connections mean everything.

    ''Here there are people who live very well, and there are others who live very, very badly,'' says Cano, showing the way around Cellblock 5 as his discreetly armed bodyguards followed close behind.

    The ''have nots'' clean themselves in squalid communal showers, relieve themselves in fetid fixtureless bathrooms and sleep on grimy mattresses in cold, exposed halls or electrical shafts.

    The ''haves'' sleep two or three to a room in conditions resembling a U.S. college dormitory. They spend their days watching television or listening to music in cement-block rooms with toilets.

    The contrast sharpens in neighboring Cellblock 3 -- home to about 400 fallen professionals, most of them white-collar members of the drug mafias. Satellite dishes bring television into their rooms. They can get a steak or grilled fish at inmate-run restaurants.

    ''You can get anything you want for money,'' says Sebastian Werther, a German consular official who regularly visits German prisoners.

   That includes hiring hitmen.

    On a recent visit to La Modelo, Werther stood at an entranceway waiting for a countryman when four shots rang out at close range. He turned, and a former soft-drink magnate lay dead a few feet away, his head blown apart. The gunman was long gone.

    Famous for living the high life behind bars are Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the Cali cocaine kingpins arrested in 1995. They have a spacious suite in the maximum security wing of Bogota's La Picota prison and control a lucrative food concession at the jail.

    Such situations could not exist without the complicity of guards and prison officials, experts say.

    A team from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons toured the Rodriguez Orejuela's wing two years ago and were shocked by the coziness between jailers and inmates.

    When an inmate shouted ''Gringos go home'' and aimed a water hose at the Americans, guards pleaded with him to stop.

    ''We were somewhat surprised,'' the U.S. group noted wryly in its report, ''that prison staff had to negotiate with the inmate before he finally voluntarily surrendered the hose.''


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