Ivanna Pereyra Rojas

Applied Intercultural communication: Poland

Analysis of the Book: Marching Powder by Rusty Young

About the book Marching Powder tells the story of the time an English drug dealer spent in the most bizarre jail placed in Bolivia. Thomas McFadden is an English man who was convicted of cocaine trafficking by a Bolivian court in 1995 after he was caught with 850 grams of cocaine in the main airport of La Paz, Bolivia when we was trying to take a flight to his home country. McFadden spent almost 5 years in San Pedro prison in La Paz and he found himself in the darkest and corrupted environment, reflecting all that is wrong with South American society. This book tells why San Pedro is not an average prison, at least not for Thomas McFadden. Prisoners have to pay an entrance fee and buy their own cells or sleep outside at the courtyard and die of exposure. Some inmates run shops and restaurants in order to make a living. Women and children live with imprisoned family members. It is a place where corrupt politicians and drug lords live in luxury apartments, while the poorest prisoners are subjected to squalor and deprivation. Violence is a constant threat, and sections of San Pedro that echo with the sound of children by day house some of Bolivia's busiest cocaine laboratories by night. In San Pedro, cocaine -"Bolivian marching powder"- makes life bearable. Even the prison cat is addicted.

Ivanna Pereyra Rojas

Applied Intercultural communication: Poland

Thomas was threatened and beaten a lot in San Pedro because he was a gringo, but he found that acting tough and fighting back were effective ways to avoid persecution. He needed to adapt to the cruel life there in order to survive. As the time passed by, McFadden gained the trust of inmates. He realized that with money to pay bribes (such as fuel for the governor's car, his household electricity bill and school uniforms for his children) he can win friends and the respect of most of the inmates; McFadden became a powerful person in San Pedro. He learned that in a place like San Pedro money was everything. Thomas ended up making a living by giving backpackers tours of the prison after an appropriate payment to the officers at the gate, and these tours became famous on the South American backpacking circuit. When he was told that for a bribe of $5000 his sentence could be overturned, it was the backpackers who sent him the money. Rusty Young was backpacking in South America when he heard about Thomas McFadden. Intrigued, the young Australian journalist went to La Paz and joined one of McFadden's illegal tours. They became friends instantly and then became partners in an attempt to record Thomas's experiences in the jail. Rusty bribed the guards to allow him to stay and for the next three months he lived inside the prison, sharing a cell with Thomas and recording one of the strangest and most compelling prison stories of all time. The result is Marching Powder. After five years and several bribes to judges, police majors and some other public institutions, Thomas McFadden was released and was able to go back home. Analysis Sometimes shocking and sometimes ironically funny, this book is a story of survival. Sadistic guards, the terror of solitary imprisonment and the desperate need of freedom, all this changed Thomas McFadden. The infiltration into the South American drug culture forced him to adapt himself to this crazy world.

Ivanna Pereyra Rojas

Applied Intercultural communication: Poland

All over the book you can see how McFadden became one more involved in this corrupt and dark culture of the drug business. He describes the process of packing cocaine in suitcases so that even the sniffer dogs cannot find it and how he surveys an airport and identifies who the drug-busting security personnel were and how he will conduct himself to throw them off his trail. Elsewhere he describes the process of sending small amounts of cocaine by regular postal mail without the customs finding it and how he uses probability as one of the tools. Other interesting aspect is that Thomas even got used to situations that in another time would be unacceptable for him. When a young six-year old girl got raped and murdered inside the prison, the inmates vowed to catch and punish the perpetrator with a sense of determination that is not found in civil society outside. Suddenly he found himself in an environment where you look for justice yourself, even if this means to kill a person with your own hands. Because of all the descriptions mentioned above I would say Thomas McFadden used integrations as an acculturation strategy. He adopted the values of the inmates, of the whole system in San Pedro but he kept his original culture. He know as soon as he got outside he must change his life. The psychological changes that results from spending those years in San Pedro were the strongest. McFadden saw so much injustice, so many innocent people getting into jail; a world he never thought it could exist. But in order to survive he became one member of this dark society. He had to.