More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In Mexico City, the driving is dreadful (partly because the driver’s test was abolished a few years back after examiners became so corrupt that it was difficult to pass without paying a bribe).
new disciples of La Familia Michoacana, a bloodthirsty Mexican drug cartel, are reportedly forced to read the works of John Eldredge, an American author of Christian self-help books.)
Harsh.
unlike most golf clubs, prison gangs kill those who renounce their membership.
The elaborateness of the Familia’s rules, which run to six articles and dozens of subsections, may say as much about the boredom of prison life as it does about the gang’s organization. (The same is probably true of some of its other more Boy-Scoutish activities, which supposedly include making bombs out of match heads, writing secret messages in urine, and communicating in Náhuatl, the ancient language of the Aztecs.)
I go to visit the Najayo jail, a women’s prison in San Cristóbal, just west of Santo Domingo. As one walks through the front door, it becomes apparent that the prison is nothing like most of the jails in Latin America. A large plaque in the entrance displays the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a charter that is routinely ignored in most of the continent’s penitentiaries. Artwork by inmates hangs on the corridor walls, and in the reception area there are trophies for singing, dancing, and dominoes that prisoners have won in contests against other local jails. In a quiet room to one
...more
reserved exclusively for members of the 18th Street Gang. A raid on a prison in Acapulco, Mexico, a few years ago discovered that inmates had managed to “smuggle in” one hundred fighting cocks, nineteen prostitutes, and two peacocks.
why peacocks?
We know this because, unbeknownst to Pete, his phone was being tapped by the Dutch police (who, incidentally, are incorrigible snoops, with a phone-tapping order being issued for roughly one in every 1,000 working phones in the country).
