Cops and Robbers and Prisons

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Too shocked by the events I just haven't been able to update the blog during the last week. However, now I am back on. I'll start backwards, starting with the visit to the women's prison in Quito yesterday.

The women´s prison
I had heard about the prison already a while ago through some forum and had already thought about possibly going there and visiting the foreigners (there are also some German women there). So when the SAEC (South American Explorers Club) suggested a visit to the prison for Saturday (yesterday) I thought it would be the perfect completion of my experience of the Ecuadorian legal system (full story of the police story further down). So we went as a group of 8. We needed to hand the guard our passports, and our bags were searched multiple times by a dog. Our bodies were also searched and then we received two stamps on the arm. We then were allowed to enter the actual prison area. We first went into some kind of a narrow yard. From the walls on both sides (several storeys high) there was laundry hanging out everywhere on long sticks (reminding me of the HDB buildings in Singapore). The yard was full of women and children and some men. Officially the prison can house 250 women, but there are currently 550 in there plus 250 kids. Some of the kids leave the prison during the day to go to school, but most of them don't. The majority of the women are in there for drug trafficking, only two of them for murder. There are around 10 foreign women, we met most of them. Three of them are from Germany. All of them spoke quite openly about their situation, and admitted freely being guilty. I was especially impressed by one of the South African women. She talked with us for a long time and was very open. She said that prison had changed her life for the better. Before, and even during her first two years in prison she was very wild and rebellious and did just whatever came into her mind. In prison she found meaning to her life and even became a believer. She is now working in the section where they design greeting cards. This is run by some missionaries who then sell the cards overseas. The South African girl said she is very grateful to the missionaries, they are doing a lot for the girls in the prison. They also provide reading material, counselling etc. I also talked to the German girls. Each has their own story, of course, and finds different arrangements with life of prison. One fo them said she was tricked into drug trafficking by her ex-boyfriend in Germany, a guy from Africa, who talked her into going to Ecuador for some business, but she found out only later it was drug trafficking. She is coping with the situation by reading all day long and sleeping a lot. Another of the German girls got into painting. An Ecuadorian painter is visiting them frequently and is teaching them to paint. Most of the girls are hoping to be transferred to their home countries soon. Most of them have been there already for 2 - 4 years and have a total sentence of 8 years or so. They all said that they are being treated fairly ok, and that there is not too much violence, and that the main problem is just being locked up and that there is a lot of gossiping. The food is really bad, but most of them are cooking their own meals. They share a cell with either 2, 3 or 5 of them. We got to see one of the cells, they are absolutely tiny, just one bed above the other. Drugs are sold in the prison for a dollar each, so it's really difficult to come off drugs there.

Overall it was a really impressive experience, especially to see that all the women are just real human beings. Obviously one can see that they are suffering in there, some of them have really bad teeth and skin - it might be from the the drugs, though. They have a medical station there, but all they get is pain killers. It's really difficult to get transferred to hospital, you have to be close to dying or wait for three months.

The police
Now back to my own story: I have been to at least one of Mariscal's multiple police stations basically every day of last week. The bureaucracy here is incredible. The first place I had gone to on the first day with the owner of the hostal was just for the seguro (insurance - which I don't have). Then they sent us 10 blocks down to another station where they said they were not the appropriate police station and sent us up then blocks again to a third place. Here we had to wait for quite a while, then they told us that on Monday we had to go to the fourth place. On Monday at the fourth place we had to tell the whole story again, it was all typed up again, then I had to go make a photocopy (costing 5 cnts inside the police station) and we were told to come back the next day. When I was back I was sent to the third flour of the fourth police station, where new stamps were put on all documents, then I was told to go to the third police station, fourth floor. Here they told me I should go down again, across the street to the copy shop, take two copies of the one document and one of the other - which I did. Up to the fourth floor again, always past the homicide section, more stamps on all documents, and I was asked to come back to next day at 8:00 a.m. to the third floor. When the queue was allowed to come into the police station at 8:20, the documents still had not come down from the fourth floor to third floor, and I had to wait about 30 min until the girl in the ski jacket found the chance to walk up the one floor. When she came down she had to talk for a while with various of her colleagues, then put more stamps on the documents. Some time later a short, elderly police man talked to me and said we would now go together to the hostal to question the ´empleados´. We were joined by his boss, a slim, tall, younger guy and without further stamps or photocopies walked down the 10 blocks to the hostel. Here we found only one of the cleaning ladies, not the main suspect. Anyway, it was quite interesting - as far as I was able to understand the Spanish - to follow the investigation of investigator Slim, with investigator Short listening and taking notes. We then walked back the 10 blocks, up to the third floor, to the opposite wing where everything was typed up again by anothe guy, asking me the same details again, as all the others had before (Note: nobody speaks a word of English and my Spanish is vey limited). Typing the ten lines with two fingers took one hour, but then the real work only started: the printer would not work, so about another half hour was spent trying to fix the connection and then trying to save the text on a floppy disk. My offer of my USB stick finally put a grateful smile on Inspector TwoFinger´s´s face, but didn´t mean this was the end to it all: the PC would not allow saving the text directly onto the USB stick (Inspector Slim later explained that that was because there was a virus on TwoFinger´s PC). I then had to take over from TwoFinger and managed the task by saving first on the the hard disk and then copying onto the stick. When we were finished, Slim came in, took over the seat and re-typed the text and the whole procedure started again fom the beginning. Before the end of the day I was released and asked to come back the next morning at 8:30. Next day at 8:33 Slim, Short and I leave without stamps, photocopies, printouts or USB sticks and this time take the car to the hostel (as today at 20C it is too cold to walk, although Slim and Short wear fancy warm sweaters). At the hostal we meet the main suspect and another investigation is started. I only understand parts of it, but it is clear to me that Slim and Short have made up their mind that he did it. The suspect is asked to come to police Station 3 on Saturday, and I on Monday. Today is Sunday, and I must say it felt strange to spend the weekend without any visits to a police station and I even kind of missed Slim and Short.

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