Bars, brothels and a regime of terror - inside the jail run by its inmates

Halfway down main avenue, through a blue door on the left-hand side, was the telephone centre with 14 landlines, each tucked into a wooden booth for privacy when making threats.

Seven stores further down, past the video arcade where you could play a game shooting up police officers, there was an internet point for those who prefer extortion via text. The 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 at a pizza restaurant, or if in a rush grab a burger and beer from one of the stalls.

This was the Democratic Republic of Pavón. Officially it was a prison farm outside Guatemala City, a patch of scrubland where inmates would grow vegetables and tend livestock in one of Latin America's more progressive penal institutions. Envisaged more as a rehabilitation centre than a jail, Pavón was sited at the end of a dirt track, invisible from the motorway, and ringed by an eight-metre wire fence.
This week a very different image emerged. More than a decade ago Pavón, population 1,500, stopped being a prison in the normal sense and became a feudal state ruled by druglords 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 facility. The macabre playground that evolved was a cross between Lord of the Flies and The Sopranos.

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