Drugs, gun and gueril


Jeff Farrell on his action-packed freelance life reporting in Venezuela


T


he prison cop sat on a chair in the passage, his eyes rising up from the floor to the gringo approaching him – me. “Maxima wing,” I said. He stood up slowly, not bothering to answer, and took a truncheon from his


holster. He rapped it three times against a steel door. A hatch in the door slid back and two eyes peeped out. A bolt slid. The door eased open slowly. In front of me stood a teenager, no older than 18 or 19, dressed in white tracksuit bottoms. My eyes dropped to the long metal object dangling from his


hand. It was a shotgun. Why was this guard not in uniform? “Visita,” I said. “Paul Keany.” The gun-toting teenager stood aside. I stepped past him


into a hallway in the Maxima wing in Los Teques prison outside Caracas. A tall, lean guy wearing jeans walked up to me. “A quien buscas?” (“Who are you looking for?”) he asked. My eyes dropped down to his hand, which was casually holding a black revolver. The penny dropped – he wasn’t a prison guard but an armed inmate. My eyes rose back up to his face. ‘Paul Keany,’ I said. He nodded and walked off. After months of trying to get into Los Teques jail to interview a cocaine smuggler of Irish-British nationality, I was finally getting to talk to him. In the meantime, I watched the inmate with the shotgun dance salsa next to a Christmas tree with twinkling lights, the shotgun dangling as he twirled the chica. I shook my head at how bizarre it all was. Paul Keany stepped into the passage. I handed him a couple of bags of food I had brought. We spoke for only about 10 minutes. Through round-rimmed glasses, he gave me a questioning


look that said, ‘Who are you?’ I told him I was a journalist, and that Father Patrick, a Caracas-based Irish priest who visited him, had told me how to get into the jail to talk to him and hear his story. I left out the word ‘interview’ so he wouldn’t run off. “Father Pat!” Keany said, smiling now. Keany told me he had been caught at the airport in Caracas trying to smuggle six kilos of cocaine back to Ireland. He was in the early months of an eight-year sentence. I eyed up the guy with the shotgun still dancing. My gaze wandered to another man with a revolver. A few days earlier, I’d


12 | theJournalist


been robbed at gunpoint. This place was the last thing I needed. I got enough material from Keany for a short radio report


for Irish national broadcaster RTÉ. No story for a paper because he wouldn’t let me use his name. The three-minute audio piece went out at about 8am on a Saturday. No editors beat their way to my door for more stories. No fanfare. Nothing. And no book – and Keany’s story had the makings of one. After a year and a half in Venezuela, I’d already had my


byline in lights in the international media. I’d travelled to Caracas in early 2008 to be a foreign correspondent. I’d quit my job as a subeditor with a national paper in Ireland; I was offered a fat redundancy, and this was my ticket to get out into the world and write about it. I thought about where to go. Wars raged in the Middle East but I thought it’d be tough to


operate there as a freelance. Venezuela was in the news as the then president Hugo Chavez shook up the country in his bid for a socialist utopia that ultimately failed. He died of cancer in 2013, leaving the reins of ‘socialism’ in


the hands of Nicolas Maduro. Some eight million people fled the country from 2014 as the economy collapsed. He then stole elections in 2024 – giving the US an excuse to swoop in. All this came after my time reporting in Venezuela. What was making the international news in 2008 was


“


I knew I had a solid international story on the lines of ‘FARC guerillas run wild in Venezuela thanks to Chavez’


largely Chavez’s wild outbursts, from blasting George Bush as ‘the devil’ in a UN speech to hare-brained comments that assassin and terrorist Carlos the Jackal, a Venezuelan, was not a ‘bad guy’ but a ‘revolutionary fighter’. Venezuela seemed like a good option. I scanned bylines and reached out to an Irish correspondent there with a UK paper and learned few freelancers were there. As for Spanish, I could learn it easily enough. Wrong. I signed up with classes in Merida in the Andes; I figured out the grammar but could understand little on the street and speak only basic phrases. But I didn’t let this hold me back. Once my command of the lingo went beyond ‘dos cervesas’, I hit the road in Venezuela. I started my hunt for stories by tapping into the network of


Irish priests. One invited me to stay with him in his fancy residence in the mountainous area outside San Cristobal in Tachira state that bordered Colombia. The priest and his flock were a gold mine. The padre gave me a strong angle about FARC rebels who’d flooded into the area after a supposed nod from Venezuela’s lefty leader Chavez. The Irish priest said the guerillas rang him up once to


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