Former British expat and drug dealer describes nine years in Ecuador prisons: ‘I lost count of the murders’

By Carrington Walker and Rory Gannon

A Gloucestershire man has revealed how he managed to survive nearly a decade in Ecuador’s most dangerous prisons, witnessing fellow inmates being murdered “in every way imaginable.”

Pieter Tritton

Pieter Tritton, who was raised in Stroud, became a drug baron, putting his life on the line to satisfy his, and others’, addiction to narcotics. However, his criminal activities eventually caught up with him and his world collapsed, leading him down an even darker road.

He was arrested, convicted and imprisoned twice in Ecuador’s most savage and corrupt prisons, where he wtinessed a series of horrific killings. Now free and a changed man, Pieter has shared his extraordinary tale of how he managed to avoid trouble.

Speaking candidly to GloucestershireLive, Pieter confessed that he was exposed to drugs from an early age, with his family being regular cannabis users. This eventually led to him becoming a drug dealer in the 1990s, before he was caught for the first time in Ecuador. He served only a few months following that conviction.

“Dealing drugs is almost as addictive as taking them yourself,” he confessed. “You get addicted to that adrenaline rush, the excitement of it, the challenge. It’s a lot of mental chess against the system.”

While he was incarcerated the first time, Pieter developed innovative methods of drug smuggling, known as “cocaine impregnation”, whereby narcotics were embedded into apparently harmless items like plastic chairs. Eager to test this technique upon his release, his enterprise began expanding globally with traffickers from Colombia and Chile becoming involved.

Over the years, the criminal group he belonged to began exporting cocaine from Ecuador imbedded in the fabric of tents. Each shipment contained about five kilograms of coke and earned £300,000.

Pieter described his group’s considerable success before everything unravelled when one of the members betrayed him. Pieter, along with his then-girlfriend, was arrested a second time in Ecuador in September 2005. Although his girlfriend was released, he received a 12-year prison sentence that was eventually reduced to nine years.

During his imprisonment, Pieter was stunned by the extent of brutality and number of fatalities that would occur without forewarning. “I mean, people would just get shot in front of you sometimes, just out of the blue,” he recalled. “You’d be walking around and having a nice day and then someone will get shot and they’d be on the floor dead, brains all over the place.”

The ferocity and variety of the violence came as a shock to Pieter. “I’ve seen people killed in every way you can imagine — electrocuted, hacked to death, blown up, hung, and decapitated.”

Pieter confessed that he “lost count” of the number of prison killings he witnessed. Following the turmoil of prison life, Pieter was diagnosed with severe PTSD, which left him in a constant state of paranoia about his own mortality. “Every single day for over nine years, you were thinking, ‘Will I be alive tomorrow morning? Is this my last day on the planet?’ I really didn’t know,” he said.

He was eventually transferred to a prison in Guayaquil, where he contracted tuberculosis which he battled for three years.

When questioned about how he managed to survive his ordeal, he explained his strategy of making himself “essential” to those perpetrating the violence, deceiving them about his potential usefulness in the future if they kept him alive.

In 2014, he was returned to the UK to complete his sentence at HMP Wandsworth, but not before being made to pay an $8,000 (£6,000) fine to Ecuadorian authorities.
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Credit: GloucestershireLive