Mon, Apr 11, 2022 page6

• Mexico’s converted island prison waiting for tourists

  • AP, MEXICO CITY
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  A small archipelago off Mexico’s Pacific coast that had been home to an island prison colony is now ready to receive tourists.

  However, getting to Islas Marias would be a challenge for even the sturdiest tourist: a five-hour boat ride in often choppy waters.

  However, some people, like Beatriz Maldonado, are already imagining the voyage. When Maldonado was imprisoned between those “walls of water” — as a Mexican writer also confined there described it — she thought she would never see her mother again.

  

  A mural of former South African president Nelson Mandela adorns a gateway on Mother Maria Island in Mexico on Saturday.

  Photo: AFP

  Maldonado only spent one year of her six-year sentence there for drug and weapons possession, but it was the most painful.

  “I lost my smile, my happiness,” she said.

  Now at age 55, a laundry worker and an activist advocating for other imprisoned women, she wants to return to close wounds.

  The Islas Marias prison colony was founded in 1905 on Mother Maria Island, the largest of the four islands and the only inhabited one more than 100km off the coast of Nayarit state. Frequently buffeted by hurricanes scraping along Mexico’s coast, the government closed the prison in 2019.

  Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador had it converted into an environmental education center, through which about 150 young people have passed. Now the government wants to make it an eco-tourism destination where visitors can watch sea birds and enjoy the beaches.

  Last year, authorities said they not would allow camping or build hotels, because it is a protected reserve. It was unclear if any lodging would be provided in the existing buildings, but without it, drawing tourists could be difficult.

  It is not as easily accessible as Alcatraz, the infamous prison accessed from San Francisco. It could end up like the Panamanian island prison colony Coiba, closed in 2004, that is being reclaimed by the jungle.

  The Mexican island now is nothing like the dirt-floored warehouse-like prison dorms with five bathrooms for 500 women that Maldonado remembers.

  “We lived in a chicken coop,” she said.

  Now a colorful mural of former South African president Nelson Mandela, himself held for years on an island prison, welcomes visitors to remodeled buildings, a whitewashed church and a cultural center.

  “What was a hell is becoming a paradise,” Lopez Obrador said.

  There was a time when it was considered the “tomb of the Pacific.”

  Writer Jose Revueltas, imprisoned there during the 1930s for his work in the Mexican Communist Party, said the prison was much more terrible than he could describe in his book Walls of Water.

  The worst could not be described, he said, because of modesty or because you do not know how to show that it is really true.

  Island prison colonies were common around the world to make escapes nearly impossible or to rehabilitate through forced labor. Most tried to be self-sufficient.

  Prisoners on Mother Maria Island harvested salt and farmed shrimp. They tried to make a little money brewing their own alcohol from fermented fruits, illegally trading exotic birds or killing boa constrictors to make belts.

  In later years, it was known as a “prison without walls” where some prisoners lived with their families in semi-freedom and relatively good conditions.

  That changed when then-Mexican president Felipe Calderon launched the war against the drug cartels in 2006 and hundreds of new prisoners were sent there.

  In 2013, the inmate population reached 8,000.
• Most Popular

  • 1

    Bologna advance to face AC Milan in Coppa final

  • 2

    Bukele proposes prisoner swap with Maduro

  • 3

    Wild’s top line too much for Vegas Golden Knights

  • 4

    Taiwan draws attention at World Expo

  • 5

    China turns on the charm for Taiwan businesses: study