“He is isolated with 14 other people”

The ex of Rodolfo Sancho He remains in Thailand, where he travelled on 28 August to learn of his son’s sentence in person. Daniel Sanchofinally sentenced to life imprisonment for the premeditated murder and dismemberment of Edwin ArrietaThe chef, who had been in Koh Samui pretrial detention for a year, was immediately transferred to Surat Thani and received a visit from his mother here on Wednesday. It was the second visit and much more pleasant than the first, where both ended up tense and in tears. At the prison gates, the manager surprised everyone with a radical change of attitude and answered questions from the EFE Agency.

“Daniel is strong and is where he is, but he is fine,” she said calmly and resignedly. “I saw him on Friday and this Wednesday. They have compressed my visits because it is a weekly one”he explained. Bronchalo has revealed what Daniel’s conditions are like in this new prison, the second largest and most fearsome in Thailand: “There are more people, more prisoners of a different kind… but he, for the moment, is in a period of adaptation”. A period in which he is accompanied by other prisoners in his circumstances: “He is in an isolation module with 14 other people and then they are classified according to the sentence or what they have done”Before leaving, Silvia gave her son some advice: “Let it be a ghost, let it go unnoticed.”

Surat Thani prison houses 5,400 prisoners, more than double its capacity. Like all prisons in Thailand, it is overcrowded. It houses about 20 prisoners per cell, who sleep on the floor and receive only two bowls of food a day: one of rice and one of broth. Sometimes, it includes spoiled meat.

Conflict between mother and son

Silvia remains close to Daniel despite the distance that exists between them and that began last April, when the young man gave power to his father, Rodolfo, to take charge of his defense. A defense with which his mother did not agree and that she tried to recover through a petition to the Court that was denied. With pain, Silvia accepted her son’s decision and stayed away from the work of the Spanish lawyer García Montes and company, which has led to a life sentence that they plan to appeal although, according to experts in Thai legislation, with little hope of success.

Things got complicated in May, when Silvia filed a lawsuit against Rodolfo for insults and harassment. It was dismissed and shelved, but she is not willing to give up her fight and has hired new lawyers to appeal to a higher court. She made this known to Daniel last Friday, on his first visit to Surat Thani, and he, who had just learned of this parallel battle between his parents, did not take it well at all. Beyond the pain of a son seeing his parents at odds, he believes that this battle could harm his judicial future and asked his mother to let it be, but she has refused.