In this final installment, Erik Fearn, takes you on the darkest experience of his life.

Six Days in a Mexican Prison

Once you've been stripped of all dignity, you ask yourself what is left to define you as human. And when you are no longer human, and you lose your moral compass, right becomes wrong and wrong becomes the new norm.

I lived through a week in prison in a forgotten corner of the desert in Mexico. I saw torture and heard a rape. This is the story of the worst adventure of my life.

In the spring of 1986, I was attending university in Southern California. As I didn't have any family to spend Easter break with in the US, a Mexican exchange student friend of mine, Juan, invited me to follow him down to Mexico to stay at his parents' ranch for the holidays.

With little money but big plans, we jumped on a Greyhound bus and drove 18 hours south of the  border, deep into the Mexican heartland. The forbidding Mojave Desert here extends right to the Pacific Ocean. Our idea was to gather some of Juan's friends from his tiny hometown and go camping on the beach on Easter Week.

When the 12 of us pulled up at the beach, we found hundreds of tents stretching up and down the length of the beach. There were food stalls selling delicious tacos and Tecate beer everywhere. Life was looking good!

That first night, we walked a long way down the beach to find a quiet spot to build a campfire, gathering driftwood along the way. The guitar, beer and food were passed around and we partied until the wee hours.

As the embers died down and it started getting chilly, we strolled back, passing a jeep parked on a lonesome stretch of beach that hadn't been there earlier that evening. Odd. We stopped to peer in the windows.

Suddenly, from out of nowhere, police with rusty revolvers and torchlights jumped up from behind bushes and low walls, screaming for us to lie down. We were all handcuffed - not in any normal way - with one hand in front and one behind, cuffed in the crotch so that we couldn't stand upright or run away easily.

We were thrown - all 12 of us - into the back of an old pickup truck that hat a cage welded to the back. All the while, the police refused to tell us what was going on, not that I would have understood much; my Spanish was as rusty as their revolvers.

We drove for about an hour through the dark, along dirt tracks through cactus forests and sand dunes, until we reached the small village of Huatabampo. Here we were dumped out, strip-searched, given a thin blanket, and crammed into a concrete cell facing out onto a courtyard surrounded by other cells. There were no beds, sink or toilet. Nothing.