HALFWAY down the main avenue, through a blue door, was the telephone centre with 14 outside lines and booths for privacy. Seven stores further down, past the video arcade where you could play a game shooting up police officers, was the internet cafe with high-speed access. A bookshop across the way offered religious titles as well as an academic tome, La Tortura, with insights on mental and physical abuse. For lunch you could sit down in the local pizza restaurant or, if you were in a rush, grab a burger and beer from one of the stalls.This was the democratic republic of Pavon. Officially it was a prison farm outside Guatemala City, a patch of scrubland where inmates could grow vegetables and tend livestock in one of Latin America's more progressive penal institutions. Envisaged more as a rehabilitation centre than a jail, Pavon was situated at the end of a dirt track, invisible from the motorway, and ringed by an eight-metre wire fence.
Last week a very different image emerged. More than a decade ago Pavon, population 1500, 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 simply abandoned the prison. 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, spa baths, prostitutes, cocaine and internet access, all contained within the wire-fence perimeter. Those of modest means were condemned to squalid dormitories and indentured labour at crack and cocaine laboratories, as well as cannabis operations. Some inmates were forced to hand over wives and daughters to the committee as concubines, said Alejandro Giammattei, the director of penal services. "It was a state-within-a-state, one without sentiment or scruples."