A British woman arrested in Venezuela for smuggling cocaine was locked up in a notorious “party prison” where lags armed with shotguns patrolled the walls.

Natalie Welsh said San Antonio prison, on the Venezuelan island of Margarita, was “like a war zone” with clashes between rival gangs.

She told podcaster Dodge Woodall: “The Guardia [police] wouldn’t even come in sometimes. There was just so much shooting the Guardia the police would just let them get on with it.”

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The prison, which was run by the inmates, notoriously had a swimming pool, restaurants and even a nightclub. “You can do anything you want in there, except get out,” Natalie said.

Natalie had gone off the rails at a young age, with violent abuse from her stepfather pushing her into ever-more extreme behaviour. She was eventually sent to a children’s home in her early teens – falling pregnant after forming a sexual relationship with a 34-year-old social worker at her care home.

At 21, and addicted to crack cocaine, she was recruited by a cocaine-smuggling gang. She explained: “I could see people that I was working with had nice houses and nice things, and I wanted that life.”

But Natalie’s dream of getting clean and buying a decent home for herself and her daughter Nikita was shattered when she was arrested with a suitcase full of cocaine at a Venezuelan airport. Police took her three-year-old child out of her arms, and locked her up in a filthy jail cell where there was one bucket serving as a toilet for 20 women.

She recalled: “If you needed a poo, then you put a bin then you put a carrier bag in the bucket and do a poo in the room, with no partition or anything.”

She was then transferred to the infamous San Antonio prison. She explained another inmate laughed when they heard Natalie was moving to the mixed-sex jail and told her to expect to have a lot of sex.

Natalie continued: “I was a young 21-year-old from Gloucester in England going into Venezuelan prison, not speaking the language, not having a clue what was going on.

“When I arrived, there were all these men patrolling the roof and I was just shocked at the state of them. They just looked rough – bare-chested, with big shotguns and they were patrolling the roof.

“I just didn't understand why they didn't have to wear a uniform. I thought ‘God, that's strange. Maybe it's because it's too hot or whatever.’ Then I found out afterwards that they weren't guards, they were prisoners. Prisoners with shotguns patrolling the roof of the prison.”

While male and female prisoners were allowed to mix freely, members of Venezuela’s two main criminal cartels kept to separate areas of the jail, with armed convicts on both sides making sure that nobody strayed out of their area.

But the uneasy peace would often be shattered by gang wars. “When it kicked off it would be crazy,” Natalie explained. “It was like a war zone in there sometimes. The Guardia wouldn't even come in … there was just so much shooting, the Guardia were just letting them get on with it.

“One day, there was this war and it went on for three days. This was going on 24 hours a day, it just didn’t stop for three days, and it was so intense. You’ve got 1,000 men trying to kill each other, and probably about 20 guards, maybe a few more outside."

Natalie said San Antonio was more like a small independent city than a prison. She continued: "You can do anything you want in there except get out. It’s a self-sufficient village contained within the perimeter of the walls. They've built restaurants …you can get every drug in there.”

Corruption was endemic and the gang leaders ran illegal businesses to keep their troops fed. “The director of the prison spends any money that comes in for the prison on a new car, so the prisoners are dealing crack cocaine to generate more money so they can have better facilities for themselves,” Natalie said.

Eventually, she was transferred to another jail and romance blossomed between her and one of the guards. After a couple of years, she and the guard began hatching a plan for her escape.

The former drug smuggler described how she had been entitled to day release trips, so with the help of her prison guard boyfriend, she arranged the suitable paperwork that would enable her to leave the prison, and dash for the Colombian border.

Having successfully made it to Colombia, Natalie was then able to fly back to the UK as she hadn’t been convicted of a crime in this country.

From there Natalie, accompanied by her boyfriend Jose, was able to get her life back on track, finding work and writing a book about her story.