Read "Papillon" by Henri Charrière online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
An extraordinary thing happened. I found the Venezuelans so appealing I decided to join my fate to theirs. No, I wouldn't go on a cavale. I would accept my unwarranted position as a prisoner in the hope that I would someday be one of them. It may seem paradoxical. The savage way they treated their prisoners was hardly likely to make me want to live with them, yet I came to understand why both prisoners and soldiers found the punishment normal. If a soldier did something wrong, he got a whipping too. And, a few days later, the same soldier would be talking to whoever had flogged him as if nothing had happened.
This barbarous system was the product of the dictator Gomez and had outlived him. There is still a civilian official who punishes the people under him with lashings of the bullwhip.