A former New York drug runner who was locked up in Ecuador’s notorious Garcia Moreno prison claims inmates “made their own rules” and even ran shops from their cells. Oscar Castro told podcaster Matthew Cox how he had been transferred to the feared lockup after initially being held in another jail.
Oscar said that weapons were easy to come by in the jail: “I’ve been shot at, I’ve been stabbed, I’ve seen people get shot in front of me. Things were just crazy in there, there’s no law.”
Because inmates had easy access to weaponry, Oscar says, prison riots were more like pitched battles between prisoners and police: “The inmates had guns, machetes, knives, grenades – anything you could think of.”
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He adds that during riots: “The guards were held hostage inside the prison– we’re strapping them to the weight benches we’re strapping a gas tank to them. There’s people with gas tanks on their backs with the hose and they light the flame up.
“We got helicopters over the prison there’s CNN up on the mountain filming us – my mother saw it live on CNN.”
Oscar added that the extreme violence wasn’t just reserved for the occasional cell-block riot, and lifers with no hope of parole would hire themselves out as hitmen within the prison.
He said: “There’s so much corruption …there’s people that have sentences that they’re not going home and they have no one that comes and visits them, so if you’ve got an enemy and and there’s somebody that wants to do harm to you and you don’t want to pay another 25 years and you don’t want to do that you can hire someone and you pay them. They’ll do the dirty work for you.”
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But as brutal as life could be inside Garcia Moreno, Oscar says that many inmates managed to serve out their sentences in luxury: “We have like $2,00 or $3,000 cells that had everything – it’s got a carpet it has modified queen-size beds it’s got got a 30” TV, it’s got a DVD player, it’s got a hot shower. It’s got a separation between the bathroom and the room side where you sleep.”
Wealthy drug lords could customise their cells even further, Oscar says: “The big drug traffickers, like the Colombians and a lot of foreigners that had money would buy five or six thousand-dollar cells with air conditioning; it’s got ceiling fans, carpeted marble floors … it was just insane.”
He adds that super-rich cartel bosses would even buy themselves a couple of adjoining cells:” They’re knocking down the walls between them and they’re making an apartment.”
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In some cases, Oscar claimed, the high-rolling inmates would go even further: “They were making a nightclub so when the prostitutes come in they’ve got the poles there so it’s like a go-go bar … it’s crazy, there was so much corruption. You could do anything inside these prisons.”
He says that very little was off-limits and as long as they had enough money, lags could get anything they wanted: “You could pay a guard $20 to go bring you in some liquor.
“There was a lot of corruption in Ecuador. The guards were being paid $180 a month by the government. Imagine making $180 a month and then you’ve got to go and take care of these drug traffickers that make more money in jail sitting there – even selling drugs inside the jail than you do working every day, so corruption was just everywhere.”
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