An American businesswoman has revealed what life is like inside Peru's nightmarish prison system.

Patricia Baronowski-Schneider was locked up in Peru from 2017 to 2021 after falling for a drug trafficking scam.

The grandmother had suffered a traumatic brain injury that meant she was easily duped under the guise of a business trip. She was stopped by Peruvian police with luggage that the scammers told her to take to a man in Hong Kong. When they sawed it open they found cocaine.

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"I had proof of my brain injury, I had a proof of everything," she told the Daily Star. "In the US you’re innocent until proven guilty - there it doesn’t matter."

Patricia then embarked on what she called "the Peru prison tour", spending time in lock-ups in Callao, Ancón and Lima. She also spent time on house arrest after advice from her Peruvian lawyer who promised it would count as time off her sentence. That wasn't the case. "I ended up having to do an extra year and a half because of him," she said.

Patricia described how she was kept in "rat and cockroach-infested rooms", forced to sleep on the floor with critters crawling over her at night. The rooms were shared by 18 to 22 people.

She said: "They hardly ever turned the water on which was the biggest problem I had because I was dealing with menopause, hot flushes and whatnot. Sometimes you’d go three to four days without water.

"One prison didn’t even have a toilet, you had to squat over a hole in the floor. And even if you had a toilet it wouldn’t flush, you had to fill barrels of water and pour it down. Picture 18 to 22 people with no water to flush a toilet for three or four days at a time. It was just disgusting."

There were also "riots" when Covid happened and authorities were forced to try and segregate prisoners. "They [the guards] didn’t know what to do, so were just giving them their way," Patricia explained.

She said most prisoners were "careful" around her because she was much taller. On one occasion she was forced to "get boisterous" with one woman who had been aggressive. Patricia said: "They picked on me financially, stealing me stuff as I slept, but in terms of anything physical I think they didn’t know what to expect from me."

And then there were her cell mates. Patricia recalled: "One girl who was in my room apparently murdered two of her husbands, apparently she stabbed them like 45 times. And she went home in two and a half years.

"Another woman had two kids. Apparently she killed them and chopped them up into pieces. And she got home in two and a half years."

Patricia is now rebuilding her firm, Pristine Advisors, which suffered massively and lost clients while she was trapped in Peru. She explained: "I always treat the clients like they’re my babies - when someone else is running the company, they treat it like a job. It didn’t take long for the clients to realise something wasn’t right, and they wound up leaving."

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