Cabo Riquelme—the friendly guard who saw my cellphone glow but laughed it off.

Cabo Penailillo—guard with whom I had cordial relations.

Mario Salas—quasi-evangelical guard with intellectual limitations; spoke English with me about my dermatologist's findings.

Comandante Carla Toledo—senior officer; recipient of English correction I happily did for her daughter, needing to pass the school course; introduced cordially to Pamela during visitation.

Lawyers and judicial figures

Guillermo Améstica, Fabiola García, David Zúñiga, Francisco Bustos—my pre-trial and trial defense lawyers; Guillermo Améstica continued through the trial. All worthless. No one spotted the lack of bullet exit holes in the evidence or knew enough about ballistics to insist on hiring a true ballistics expert to show my innocence, and raise doubts about the Ahumada injuries or the “bullet” holes in the radiator and gearbox of Daniel Molina. I was sentenced partly on account of their incompetence and partly because of the ideological biases of judges and prosecutors amid public frenzy from the Left against me.

Gonzalo Morales Morales—my post-conviction public defender (also Miami’s); obtained the Transparency Act documents on expert witness Arancibia and got the court to order that my guns be returned to me.

Sebastián Undurraga del Río—Public Defender's office attorney who principally argued my Supreme Court appeal. Also, ignorance about ballistics and the need to question the forensic evidence. He could have freed me if he were more competent. He did achieve a sentence reduction from 11 years to just over 6.

Claudio Fierro—Public Defender’s office star attorney whose presence at the Supreme Court had been anticipated and who appeared in a supporting role. Yet, he suffered from the same failings as Undurraga and the lawyers before him.

Paola Rojas Caro—the District Attorney whose ideologically driven prosecution refused to acknowledge that Luis Ahumada Villegas’ wound could not have been caused by a bullet (no exit hole in the hospital report, no exit hole in Ahumada’s pants, and no bullet recovered from the thigh); identical pattern in the Daniel Molina Meza case (impossible ricochet angle, missing bullet, 25-millimeter entry holes that could not have come from my 10.6-millimeter .40-caliber rounds, and likely not even the 7-millimeter “entry” hole in Ahumada’s pants); she presented evidence that a bullet fired with and angle of incidence of 1° could ricochet at 15° off smooth concrete against the laws of physics, perpetrated by lying police ballistics experts who knowingly drew impossible angles diagrams; she perpetuated the false narrative and likely coached false witnesses; under PDI investigation by detective Cristián Severino in 2026 for obstruction of justice.

Hernán Ferrera—prosecutor who handled the Supreme Court portion of the case against me; he replaced Paola Rojas, who handled the lower court phase.

Carlos Oliva Ballón and Rita Díaz Torres—communist lawyers from INDH (the Chilean National Institute of Human Rights) who worked to ensure my conviction after I defended myself against their political allies who had come to destroy Reñaca on November 10, 2019; Rita Díaz Torres had signed in support of the 1998 detention of Pinochet in London.

Justices Haroldo Brito Cruz, Leopoldo Llanos Sagristá, Juan Manuel Muñoz Pardo, Diego Munita Luca, María Cristina Gajardo Harboe—the Supreme Court Second Chamber panel that heard my appeal.

Other recurring figure

Don Pelayo Ediciones / Sebastián Izquierdo—the Chilean publisher who took on Llevando la Cruz (the Spanish translation of Bearing the Cross volume I) in 2025; a bold Catholic defender of the political Right who took to the streets during the 2019 insurrection to confront communists destroying property. He was one of the few bold enough to go on social media in my support, going so far as to call me a “hero.”

“You need to boil it for at least five minutes,” counseled Miami. “Rats contaminate the prison well water,” added Rubén. I was not looking forward to what was now on the horizon, ever since Sergio came back from his kiosk run—for the third straight day—without water. There was no flavored water, juice, or soda pop either. Likewise, no one in módulo 118 had any to sell. It was a precarious situation indeed. Carlos gave me a package of Sprim citrus powder—after hanging a blanket over my window so that no paco could see me using my cellphone at night. I gave him a tip of 2,000 pesos, then reluctantly boiled water in my electric tea kettle—for the first time, destined to be drunk rather than used for bathing. Even though the bad-camping-trip science was on my side, I was still displeased with the prospect of having to partake of the purified infectious prison water. “What more should I expect from the River Styx?” I mused. “This is no country club,” went through my mind as an unusually high number of door bangings in 114 and 115 continued throughout the afternoon.

The Apostle Peter wrote to suffering believers scattered across Asia Minor with words that have sustained the afflicted church for two millennia: “For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your faults, ye shall take it patiently? but if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God” (1 Peter 2:20). I had read that verse hundreds of times in my study and from the pulpit. But a man does not truly comprehend what it means to “take it patiently” until he has boiled rat-contaminated water in a tin kettle and forced himself to drink it because there is simply nothing else. Patience in the abstract is a theological virtue; patience in a Chilean prison cell is a grinding, daily, unglamorous war against despair—and it is precisely in that grinding that God refines His people.

The Earthquake Beneath and the Menace Within

At least I had slept through the minor earthquake jolts that were felt over the past few mornings of 2020: a 4.3 Richter scale event at 4:58 a.m. preceded by a 3.8 one at 3:50 a.m. on December 16th; a 4.1 tremor that hit at 4:59 a.m. on December 15th; a 4.5 one at 4:15 a.m. on December 12th. These were no big deal by Chilean standards—Miami, Pamela, and some others still noticed them—but Castro’s presence in charge of 118 that day reminded me that I faced far greater threats than earthquakes.

Castro was the scrawny gendarme who seemed to take particular pleasure in making the lives of inmates miserable. Every prison has such a man—petty in stature, petty in authority, yet capable of wielding his sliver of power with a malice disproportionate to his rank. He was the human earthquake, unpredictable and impossible to prepare for, and his shifts were days when every man in 118 walked a little more carefully and breathed a little more shallowly.

The curtain covering my cell window had to be installed urgently, as Cabo Riquelme and his colleague had apparently seen me using my cell phone while they were opening the downstairs door to 118A across the patio the night before. It was remarkable that, through such a dirty, stained plexiglass window and with the internal cell lights on, they could see my cellphone’s glow from two floors down across the patio. Thankfully, Riquelme was one of my many fans among the gendarmes and acted quite jovially about the incident. “Hey, Gringo, stop using that cellphone!” he yelled, laughing, with me making some curt wisecracks through my window in reply. Then the two guards came up to my cell door and remarked about what happened—at first seriously (in a joking way) and then later laughing with me about the day’s events, where political prisoner John Cobin had again been on the television newscasts. Nevertheless, I thought it best to avoid anyone who happened to be down in the patio area from detecting my cell phone use. The next guards might not be friendly.

A cellphone in a Chilean prison is both a lifeline and a liability. It connects a man to his wife, his lawyer, his supporters, his books-in-progress, and the outside world that is slowly forgetting he exists. It is also a punishable offense that any ill-disposed gendarme could use to add charges, confiscate property, or simply make life worse. The calculus of risk never ceases. One must weigh the spiritual and practical necessity of communication against the ever-present possibility that the wrong guard will see the wrong glow at the wrong moment. Such is the daily arithmetic of endurance behind bars.

Legislation, Courts, and the Torture of Hope

I was featured in the top story on several news channels once again, this time related to newly proposed legislation introduced by eight senators from the hard left and center left. This legislation would provide amnesty to all yet-to-be-prosecuted criminals who took part in destroying much of Chile’s infrastructure in late 2019 and much of 2020. However, pardons would also be extended to people like me who had been preliminarily convicted of crimes related to these protests. I discussed the matter with my lawyer Guillermo, Miami, Rubén, Ismael, Delfín, and the aforementioned two prison guards. It seemed too good to be true that I could be set free under such legislation, and center-left President Piñera was against signing the bill should it ever reach his desk.

I figured that the jailed police officers and I were being used as a sweetener so that just enough senators and representatives from the Right would join with the Left and override Piñera’s promised veto. But my legal consultant, David Zúñiga Vera, thought the proposed legislation would never be approved. Nevertheless, Miami and I optimistically held out some hope that at least during my Supreme Court arguments—which serendipitously could be heard the next morning—this new bill could be brought up in my favor.

Hope is one of the cruelest instruments in a prison. It arrives unbidden, inflates the heart, makes a man begin to calculate how many more nights remain, and then—when the court hearing is postponed yet again, when the legislation stalls, when the veto holds—it deflates with a violence that leaves the sufferer worse than if he had never hoped at all. My lawyer said the hearing would most likely be rescheduled for the following week. Of course it would. The Chilean judicial system operates at its own glacial pace, indifferent to the fact that each postponement adds another layer of psychological weight to the man sitting in a cell waiting for justice that never arrives on schedule.

Castro’s Slave Labor

The next day, Castro was back in charge, and the day started with a twist. My cell door was opened halfway, and Castro peered in and said, “Come on. I need you and some other guys to help carry some chairs.” I set my open Bible on my bunk, left my quesadillas cooking in my little oven, and followed after the scrawny man. The others called to do slave labor were Ismael, Cristián, and Raúl the younger. It was not clear why we were picked, but Castro must have had a burr under his saddle to have selected us four over so many others.

The job was simple enough: walk outside, then over to the administration building, up the stairs, then across the way into the normal visitation hall used by 118’s reos (inmates). There were about ten tables set up inside, with two 1960s public-school chairs at each one, and we had to carry fourteen of these small metal chairs—with wooden seats and backs—to the patio for the reos convicted while underage, located next to the psychiatric módulo 117. Some chairs were broken, while others did not stack nicely. I carried four, albeit awkwardly, and the others three or four each. The round trip was no more than four hundred meters, but days like that reminded me that I was no different than a slave in the eyes of Castro.

Roll call had yet to be done, and Castro was in a hurry to get back after the chairs were delivered. He was bothered that quasi-evangelical gendarme Mario Salas was speaking to me in English about the highly noticeable blotches on his face that his dermatologist had identified as significant areas of skin discoloration or possibly cancer. So, Castro called me to come, and I bolted after the scrawny man, then went straight to my cell to get my plastic armchair, backpack, and quesadillas—what I typically carried down every day. While I was on the last flight of stairs coming back down, Castro started yelling up the staircase for stragglers to get in line. I was the last one to make it to formation, which was very rare for me. I called off “once”—eleven—as the last man in the lineup.

A few hours later, I was eating lunch in the dining room when Castro barged in and asked Cristián, Ismael, and me to haul the chairs back from módulo 116. The other two had already left. Once the order was clarified, I put my lunch away and headed down to the foyer, where I had left the chairs earlier. All four were still there, evidently unused. I was not just a little delighted to see Castro carrying the one chair I had left behind. The chairs were deposited outside, and Castro sent the three of us back to 118. A while later, Castro returned with Ismael and Cristián to put the chairs inside, while I read a book and played chess.

The reader may wonder why I recount such trivial episodes. The answer is that prison endurance is composed almost entirely of trivial episodes. It is not the dramatic crises—the earthquakes, the stabbings, the court hearings—that break a man. It is the ceaseless accumulation of small indignities: being ordered about by a petty tyrant, missing a meal because a guard was in a foul mood, losing forty minutes of reading time to carry chairs that were never used, standing in a lineup and calling off your number like a numbered thing rather than a man made in God’s image. These small abrasions, compounded daily over months and years, constitute a grinding assault on the soul. And it is precisely here that Peter’s admonition finds its application: “if, when ye do well, and suffer for it, ye take it patiently, this is acceptable with God.”