Halfway down the main avenue, through a blue door on the left-hand side, was the telephone centre with 14 landlines, each tucked into a wooden booth for privacy when making threats.
Seven stores further down, past the video arcade where you could play a game shooting police officers, there was an internet point for those who prefer extortion via text. The bookshop across the way offered religious titles as well as an academic tome, La Tortura, with insights into mental and physical abuse. For lunch you could sit down at a pizza restaurant or grab a burger and beer from one of the stalls.
This was the Democratic Republic of Pavón. Officially it was a prison farm outside Guatemala City, a patch of scrubland where inmates would grow vegetables and tend livestock in one of Latin America’s more progressive penal institutions. Envisaged more as a rehabilitation centre than a jail, Pavón was sited at the end of a dirt track and ringed by an eight-metre wire fence.
Recently a very different image emerged. More than a decade ago Pavón, population 1 500, stopped being a prison in the normal sense and became a feudal state ruled by drug lords who thrived on extortion, kidnapping and intimidation. Known as the ”order committee”, these alpha gangsters were the sole authority because successive Guatemalan governments abandoned the facility. The macabre playground that evolved was a cross between Lord of the Flies and The Sopranos.
Inmates with money had access to plush homes, restaurants, prostitutes, cocaine and high-speed internet, all contained within the wire-fence perimeter. Those of modest means were condemned to squalid dormitories and indentured labour at crack, cocaine and marijuana laboratories. Those who angered the committee faced beatings and banishment to a punishment block known as the ”North Pole”.
Some inmates were forced to hand over wives and daughters to the committee as concubines, said Alejandro Giammattei, director of penal service. ”It was a state within a state, one without sentiment or scruples.”
It all came to an end recently when 3 000 soldiers and police swept in with teargas, armoured cars and assault rifles. Seven inmates were killed and the rest were herded to another prison, leaving Pavón a smashed, silent ruin.
”It was a surgical operation to end a centre of drug trafficking, kidnapping and all kinds of illicit activities,” said the interior minister, Carlos Veilmann. He urged the Guardian to visit tourist sites instead of the prison. ”Guatemala is not Pavón.”
Others disagree. They say the rise and fall of this extraordinary institution was testament not only to the power of organised crime but to the nation’s fragility and corruption. ”Pavón was a reflection of Guatemalan society. It was an oligarchy, a very arbitrary one,” said Alejandro RodrÃÂguez, a human rights activist and penal reformer.
Opened in 1976, Pavón initially hosted 800 low-risk detainees. But three decades of civil war flooded the centre with brutalised young men.
As criminals became more violent and organised, the penal authorities ceded control of Pavón and several other jails, partly because they were bribed, partly because it meant less hassle, said RodrÃÂguez.
On September 6 1996 Pavón’s handover was formalised in a six-page document, containing 48 articles and an official stamp, seen by the Guardian, which transferred administrative responsibility to the drug lords, who were termed the ”order committee”.
In return for imposing order and preventing escapes the gangsters were given free rein, said Giammattei.
The penal service director’s appointment last year was welcomed by some as a sign of a government cleaning up its act before elections next year.
Others, however, worried that the Pavón raid signalled that the army, sidelined after years of military rule, was once again pulling strings.
Giammattei said the problems inside Pavón were magnified versions of ailments affecting Guatemala, such as rapacious capitalism and imperfect representative democracy.
Prisoners elected their committee president with a show of hands, but they were intimidated into voting a certain way and saddled with the victor until his release. After being elected three years ago Luis Alfonso Zepeda, a murderer serving 27 years, brought his son Samuel into the compound to help, even though he had no convictions.
In one sense Zepeda kept his end of the bargain. While other prisons were convulsed with occasional riots — with decapitated heads impaled on sticks — Pavón was relatively tranquil.
Forensic scientists are to search the site for human remains, but so far there is no evidence of killings. A potential omen, among a pile of abandoned books, was a psychosocial text titled Torture, Effects and Symptoms.
There is little doubt brutality was prevalent. Those banished to the North Pole were deprived of blankets and drenched in cold water.
For the committee, farming meant milking fellow inmates for every privilege: $1,30 for a spouse to visit, $5 for a phone call, more for electricity and medical attention. It generated about $20 000 a month.
The outside world was another source of income. Hit men were temporarily released for jobs and kidnap victims were held in the prison, said Alvarus Matus, a police detective. Computers with internet access and cellphones were used to extort money from outsiders, he added. A registry of title deeds detailed prisoners’ property purchases. Upon release they were obliged to sell.
One avenue boasted a maze of hamburger stalls, cafés and restaurants with names such as La Costa Sur and Pizza Familiar. There was an egg shop, a brewery, a film processing laboratory, a barbershop, a pool hall and a motel for liaisons with prostitutes.
A video arcade offered 12 ice-cream flavours, two mounted motorbike games, as well as arcade games. Some houses had widescreen TVs and waist-high speakers. Floors were littered with packets of condoms and photographs of inmates grinning, drinking rum and playing the guitar. It was not all hedonism. There were churches, and Jorge Pinto, a Colombian drug trafficker, sponsored art classes.
Pinto and Zepeda were among the seven killed during the raid. Officials said the men provoked their deaths by shooting and lobbing grenades. Some survivors said the dead men offered no resistance and were summarily killed. The interior minister waved away the claim as an irritant. ”You can’t believe a word, they’re criminals.”
Independent human rights watchdogs, who have been denied access to the site, have expressed concern.
Inmates who control Cantel, another jail, worry they will be next. In a letter to local newspapers they addressed the authorities in unusually polite terms. ”We will cede control at whatever moment you deem convenient.” — Â