The rich and mighty about to lose their Judicial Platinum Card in Bolivia

La Paz - Bolivians go to the polls on Sunday but not to elect law makers; instead to elect judges.



It will be the first time judges in a Latin American country will be selected by popular vote.

In Bolivia voters will pick new justices to the Supreme Court as well as judges from three other lower courts. In all, 52 judicial positions will be voted upon.


President Evo Morales pushed for the election in order to "decolonise the judiciary", as he put it. Supporters say the election will help strengthen Bolivia's democracy and also transform a historically weak and inefficient justice system that disenfranchise the county's indigenous majority.


At the San Pedro prison in La Paz, the problems of the Bolivian judiciary come into sharp focus. The decrepit facility is more than 110 year old, has crumbling walls, and houses more than 2,000 inmates in a facility the size of an entire city block.


It's an open prison – with no confined jail cells - where all the inmates share an open space with a maze of makeshift rooms where inmates organize themselves by sections.


On Saturday, a team from Al Jazeera spent about an hour touring parts of San Pedro, where as many as fifty inmates were crammed into dimly lit rooms with no running water or bathroom facilities and forced to sleep on filthy mattresses on the ground.


A smell of mold, human feces, and marijuana mixed together.

Walls on the prison were rotting, and some second level floors housing dozens of inmates in one room were so flimsy they felt they could collapse at any moment.

All the inmates are poor, and most have yet to have their cases reviewed by judges. They remain in a state of limbo without the financial resources for top lawyer to push through their cases to a judge.


The obvious prison overcrowding, jail officials say, is a direct result of a poor judicial system that Sunday's election is meant to help solve.


In Bolivia, it's well accepted that people who are wealthy and well-connected have access to good lawyers and speedy justice.


Everyone else ends up at prisons like San Pedro