“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons,” wrote the author of Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky.
This observation’s justice is wholly confirmed by El Lío del Gringo (The Gringo’s Predicament), the third and most riveting self-published book by Dr. Timothy Schwartz. I can think of no writer who could have done a better job at enduring, researching, understanding, and describing life inside a Dominican prison and what it means about the larger society.
A seasoned anthropologist who has spent decades living and working primarily in Haiti’s challenging countryside (see his first best-selling book from 2008, Travesty in Haiti), Schwartz’s spare, ironic, self-aware, and almost conversational prose makes all of his output a pleasure to read. But El Lío is a particular page-turner because throughout it the reader wonders: how the hell is he going to get out of this one?
Twenty-two years ago, Schwartz was living and working in a rural village on the Dominican Republic’s remote northwest coast, west of Puerto Plata. (Due to his anthropological ethics to “do not harm,” he gives the town a made-up name, Punta Perdida, as he does for all of the individuals he portrays in the book, with the exception of Dominican and U.S. officials who ended up in the news.)
On Nov. 14, 2004, he sold his 32-foot sailboat, the Sophia, to a Dominican boat captain, brokered by a friend from town. Two days later, poor Dominicans tried to make an “illegal voyage” to the U.S.. The captain sailed out of town into a storm, the Sophia sank, and 29 people drowned. Outcry erupted, a scapegoat was needed, and Schwartz ended up being the perfect fall-guy. “The Prosecutor told me I would be incarcerated for at least 15 years,” he writes in his prologue.
That is the starting point of his harrowing journey through the Dominican criminal justice system. “Stripped of his identity and armed only with the tools of his trade, Schwartz turned his personal nightmare into a raw, unflinching ethnography,” the book’s jacket explains. “He documented the prison’s brutal social structure, its black-market economy, and the powerful unwritten codes that govern life and death inside the walls.”
The first characters we meet are two lawyers who show up at his arraignment: “Both are dressed in expensive suits and heavily scented with cologne… My Spanish is basic, and they’re being vague. I don’t really understand. All I know is that they’re lawyers, and I desperately need one right now. By the time I figure out what is going on, these guys will have made my case far worse, and I will have to pay them $20,000 for it.”
Then Schwartz takes us along on his first stop, a local jail (El Cuartel), where he is immediately robbed upon entering one of the two crowded holding cells. However, “for the most part, the men in my cell are a good bunch: a couple of killers, some wife beaters, several Dominicans deported from New York penitentiaries.”
Although he’s there for only a week, we get our first lesson about who ends up in jail, and why and how, like the guy who’d been in for two months because he couldn’t pay a $10 fine. Schwartz also details the codes of conduct, the fights, the guards, and attitudes and advice of the other detainees to the unusual but possibly useful “gringo” in their midst. That episode closes with his cell’s leader, Scarface, calling his mother after declaring: “I’m tired of this place.”
“The Dominican police and jailers often defer to a detainee’s mother,” Schwartz explains. “If she comes to get her son, they will usually let him leave with her. But if she won’t come and take responsibility, or she tells them to keep him, the detainee stays in jail.”
Therefore, “Scarface is pleading. ‘I swear, Mommy, I’m going to be good. I won’t kill the guy.’”
This is a preview of the core of El Lío in which Schwartz gives an alternately shocking and endearing account of his four month stay in one of the DR’s most notorious penitentiaries, La Fortaleza, in Puerto Plaza.
“Originally built to hold 80 men,” Schwartz explains, “at the moment I arrive, it houses 280 men in nine 24-by-75-foot cellblocks that can be ranked like barrios: from impoverished to relatively well-off.”
He describes in detail all elements of this world, for example: “The poorest cellblocks are on the ground floor. Each is a shanty-town-like maze of cardboard and scrap-wood sleeping quarters where tattooed gang members, petty criminals, murderers, and the cognitively impaired are packed together.”
We meet a long list of characters – Darwin, Apache, Pussy Mouth, Mingo, Chang, Idi, the Preacher, and Batfuck, to name just a few. One of the most chilling profiles is of Hector, the bat-brandishing psychopathic top-dog, who heads the Comisión, the prisoner-led body that effectively runs the penitentiary. It metes out a sometimes brutal and arbitrary, sometimes nuanced and considerate form of justice, keeping the human cauldron, filled with tension, anger, frustration, and despair, on a razor’s edge from exploding into a deadly riot, or motin.
But despite all its horrors, La Fortaleza is better than the new “Modern Model Prison” recently built next door, where “the guards wear bright blue uniforms; the prisoners, bright orange jumpsuits.” The inmates there are “locked down…, eight people to a cell, for all but two hours per day and meals,” Schwartz explains. “The Model Prison destroys what is most precious to all of us: our relationships to the outside world, communication, and time spent with our parents, brothers and sisters, children, spouses, and coworkers.” In short it “is a living death.”
Schwartz also explains, counter-intuitively, how the divides between Dominican and Haitian, white and black, foreign and indigenous, and between gangs, regions, and languages become secondary or irrelevant within the prison’s pecking orders, alliances, agreements, and rules.
Some prisoners remain in prison for years because they don’t have the money to buy their way out, or their paperwork has been lost somewhere in the justice system.
El Lío also lays out in detail how the police, prosecutors (fiscals), and judges work in the DR’s La Justicia, and how “the biggest human rights violators… are arguably the lawyers.”
While Schwartz dissects all these realms generally, we also see it in concrete detail as he relates his own personal journey through the Dominican “justice” system. Without giving too much of the story away, suffice it to say that it is almost a fluke or miracle that he was able to get out of his pickle when he did. But even then, he remained in a limbo purgatory for over a year, stuck waiting in Santo Domingo for a trial in Puerto Plata, unable to work and dependent on others for his food and rent.
But in the end, when served lemons, Schwartz managed to make lemonade by writing El Lío del Gringo, although he only published it in November 2025, well after Travesty in Haiti and The Great Haiti Humanitarian Aid Swindle (2017), which will probably be considered his magnum opus.
Reading Schwartz’s books reminds me of learning about the world while running with friends around the fields, woods, and streets of my youth. One kid would find and pick up a stick, rock, bug, salamander, rusty horseshoe, or lost belonging, and the other kids would gather around commenting on how weird, cool, scary, or amazing this or that feature of it was. Schwartz injects this element of wonder and discovery into his descriptive anthropology, the novelist’s equivalent of a plot twist.
Schwartz is a miner and made many big finds in his digging. The first was the Dominican government’s astonishing hypocrisy. It unjustly accused him of organizing an illegal voyage and locked him up for months when Dominican authorities were not only turning a blind eye to impoverished people fleeing in boats toward the U.S. but helping to organize the voyages. After all, “The Dominican Republic is a wretched and hopeless place to be poor,” he writes.
But his biggest discovery was that the U.S. government knows perfectly well about this duplicity, while trumpeting “the resounding response by the Dominican Navy to the organizers of illegal voyages,” as U.S. Ambassador Hans Hertell said in an Apr. 25, 2005 press conference.
“Hertell’s loyalties were with money and keeping the loans and foreign aid flowing to his Dominican pals,” Schwartz concludes. “Hertell is no different than the lawyers and the fiscals: his loyalty is to keeping the rotten system functioning.”
So El Lío is a little gem of a book which educates and entertains in equal measure, even though it is relating a Kafkaesque nightmare, which just becomes worse and worse.
One can only hope that the Dominican Republic and Haiti, where Schwartz has followed travails and tragedies for so many years, can one day soon find better justice, less crime, and more peace, although it may require a revolution… and some good luck, like he found.
