ently refer to as ‘Lady Heroin’ the BMWspull up alongside junk automobiles withcracked windshields, heavily indented bon-nets and vacant side-windows.

The Timberland-booted BMW driversare in and out quickly. They look out ofplace among the roughshod, tank-toppedmajority who are for the most part extreme-ly emaciated, like El Greco figures. Oneespecially harrowing example approachesthe van. His face is sunken, his cheekbonespronounced. He has no chin to speak of.He is, as Hamlet would have it, quite chop-fallen. The open shirt of another poor crea-ture reveals a blood stain which has gath-ered around a small slit in his throat.Searching hopelessly for a vein, he hasresorted to injecting straight into his neck.The wound hasn’t healed because his bloodlacks coagulating agents (i.e., iron) neces-sary for scabbing. Conditions here, unsur-prisingly, are far from sanitary. Manolorelates the story of an old neighbour whohad been bitten by one of the many rats.Within days his head had swollen to threetimes its size. Within a week he was dead.

There are children here too. I see one tod-dler bouncing obliviously on the back seat ofa truck. ‘Why do the authorities not inter-vene?’ I ask. Because only social services, notthe police, are authorised to take childrenfrom their parents, is the answer. Social ser-vices never set foot in the place.

What I can’t stop wondering is why suchflagrant drug activity is allowed. I can’timagine any equivalent sites on the out-skirts of London. The only cries I’ve heardin Hampstead village are ‘Strawberries!

THE SPECTATOR 6 November 200428

On the outskirts of Madrid, onthe other side of the M40from the terracotta towerblocks of Spanish suburbia,there is a place locals refer

to as Baranquilla. It translates, ‘a smallchasm or cliff’. Once a rubbish dump, it isnow Spain’s premiere heroin pick-up point.

You can tell which exit to take from theM40 by the dribbling trail of pedestriansand a long line of vehicles. The cars are acurious mixture of old bangers and pristineMercedes. We are in an old van. We makeour way past sunburnt pilgrims, headsdown, eyes fixed before feet. Each pilgrimcarries a plastic bag.

Baranquilla is difficult to describe. It isat once a marketplace and a tip, a gypsycamp and a pleasure palace. There is a

sprawling proliferation of ramshackleproperties: brick shacks which are themere shells of buildings, separated only byfences made from mattress-springs. Onone side there is a railway line; on anotheris the wall of Madrid’s car pound, its topcoated with barbed wire. Dozens of peoplesit in the shade of the wall. Further downthe valley there is a gypsy camp, andbeyond, marking the boundary of thecamp, two mountains of rubbish with aveneer of dry grass.

We disembark from our van, stepping outon to a carpet of used needles and flattenedbeer cans (the aluminium of which is anessential piece of kit). A hot breeze sweepsthe sand. There isn’t much noise except forthe cries of men selling accessories: ‘Chuta!Plata!’ (Syringes! Silver!). I see a man ofmaybe 60 sink a syringe into the inside of hisleft arm. Then he nurses it like a child.

This is the tenth circle of hell. The vanwhich has ferried me here belongs toBetel, a church-based drug rehabilitationcentre. There are only a few external agen-cies brave enough to enter Baranquilla:the police and Betel. For 20 years Betelhas shipped thousands of men and womenfrom Baranquilla to its safe houses, wherethey are cared for, helped through coldturkey and given a job.

Manolo is driving the van today. He leftBaranquilla and gave up drugs four yearsago, but returns every afternoon of the year.Flinging the van’s back doors wide open, hegives yogurt and cakes to anyone who wantsthem. For many this snack is the staple diet.As a crowd gathers at the back of the van,Manolo’s eyes shine with both compassionand anger. I watch as he pleads with one per-son to leave Baranquilla, but the man refus-es. He says he doesn’t want to sign up for aprogramme with fixed procedures (i.e., nodrugs). ‘I am free here,’ he declares. Manoloreplies, ‘You see that rat? He’s freer thanyou are.’ And then, in an aside to me, ‘Thisplace is run by the Father of Lies. We bringthe truth in here. And it leaves with us.’

Baranquilla begins to remind me of BenHur’s leper colony, the place from which agrim-faced Charlton Heston retrieves hisforsaken mother and sister. That outcastplace was accessible only by basket.Baranquilla, however, is accessible byBMW. They are driven by the ‘recreational’users. In their quest for what addicts rever-

Love inthe ruins

James Mumford visits the tenth circle of hell — a Spanish shanty town for drug addicts —

and finds hope there

T. 020 7828 3564 F. 020 7834 8755E. rp@robinsonpelham.co.uk

www.robinsonpelham.comcatalogue available on request

by appointment only

ROBINSON PELHAMJEWELLERS

I want my I.D. portrait painted by

Lucian Freud.

028-029_spec_6.11.04new.qxd 3/11/04 12:48 pm Page 1

if it wasn’t for Tepper’s refusal to give up. In the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in

Madrid there is a painting by MarcChagall, ‘The Virgin of the Village’. Highabove the muddy conurbation, a man withflowers and angels with trumpets float freein a soft sky. Months before his Aids-relat-ed death, Raul Casto, Betel’s first liberat-ed addict and first indigenous priest, wasasked to account for the ‘ecstatic’behaviour, jubilant hymn-singing, aban-doned dancing, etc., so unseemly in theeyes of the sophisticated West and so com-mon to Betel’s worship services. ‘We dancebecause we cannot fly,’ he explained.

THE SPECTATOR 6 November 2004 29

Three for a pound!’ But Baranquilla isapproved by the government as part of acampaign to confine hard-drug activity to aremote region out of harm’s way. You hearthe purring of police cars all over the site.The law patrols Baranquilla to preventoutbreaks of violence, and to carry awaythe bodies of the two or three addicts whooverdose each week. But it is not just thosethat overdose who die. No one whoattempts to cheat the salesmen or stealheroin will leave alive.

There used to be four other puntos —Celsa, Torregrosa, Los Pitufos, PersNegores — but their inhabitants have beentransferred to Baranquilla. When they toredown the settlements in Celsa, Manolo tellsme, many bodies were found in the gapsbetween the walls of the shacks. He bendsdown to draw a diagram in the sand: twoadjacent lines, and in between them a stickman. The bodies had been soaked in limeso their flesh corroded. Only their bonestructure was left. I pinch myself to remem-ber that this is the West. It seems likeanother world, a world to which I send mymoney via flashing numbers at the bottomof the television screen.

I am reminded of Joseph Conrad’sdescriptions of the black chain gang forcedto build a Congo railway for the BelgianTrade Company. The place the Polish writ-er understands as the heart of darkness —the shady grove of ‘mournful stillness’ — isuncannily like Baranquilla. ‘They weredying slowly — it was very clear. . . theywere nothing earthly now — nothing butshadows of disease and starvation, lyingconfusedly in the greenish gloom. . . thesemoribund shapes were as free as air andnearly as thin.’ But that was 19th-centurycolonialism, not 21st-century socialist Spain,not liberal Europe, not the free world.

Even in the UK, however, 35 per centof young men and 24 per cent of youngwomen have taken an illicit substancewithin the past year. (And it’s not allcannabis: class A drugs accounted for 12per cent of use among young men.) MostBritons who take drugs are recreationalusers, but Baranquilla shows us whererecreational use can lead. ‘They all beginas recreational users,’ says one Betel work-er as we watch an addict pick up used butresaleable needles.

Yet it’s not all doom and gloom. Betel(the Spanish for the Hebrew ‘Bethel’, mean-ing House of God) has seen more than75,000 addicts come through its doors sinceit was founded by Elliot Tepper in 1985.Tepper, 58, is an American, a Cambridgegraduate, a Harvard MBA and a professor ofeconomics. But while some of his classmatesare billionaires, Mr and Mrs Tepper live inrented accommodation in one of Madrid’smost impoverished neighbourhoods.

Arriving in Spain as members of theWorldwide Evangelisation for Christ,founded by the English cricketer andChinese missionary C.T. Studd, theTeppers could no longer bear the devastat-

ing school-run sights of men injectingheroin. So they built up Betel, house byhouse. Tepper funds 96 per cent of theenormous costs of running the centrethrough small businesses — import/export/furniture-making/gardening — in whichex-addicts find initial occupation. Tepperalso established Betel as a church whosepriests are all recovering addicts in theprogramme. In 1993 Betel went interna-tional. Tepper set up rehab houses in Italyand the US and now it operates in 12countries outside Spain. At present thereare 737 people in Spain and 627 interna-tionally who wouldn’t be coming off drugs

‘It followed me home! Can I keep it?’

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