San Pedro de la Paz prison inmates protest in 2013.Demotix/ Carlos Sanchez. All rights reserved.“I couldn’t leave the country without coming to see you,” Pope Francis told his audience, a crowd of inmates assembled from seven different prisons across Bolivia.
He was speaking yesterday, on a bright Friday morning in Palmasola Penitentiary, a sprawling maximum-security complex covering several blocks in the lowland city of Santa Cruz.
Prisons in Bolivia, like many across Latin America, are notorious for their levels of violence and extortion. In the case of Palmasola, years of neglect finally detonated on 23 August, 2013, when a fight broke out in Sector PC3, nicknamed Chonchocorito.
