Last island prison to close
Mexico is to close its infamous Islas Marias prison, the last island penal colony in a hemisphere once dotted with remote island jails like the one depicted in the book and movie Papillon.
President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said yesterday that Mexico would relocate about two-thirds of the 659 remaining inmates and free about 200 others from the islands, 110 kilometres off the Pacific coast of Nayarit. The four islands – only one of which is inhabited – will be turned into a cultural and environmental education centre.
The prison founded in 1905 on Maria Madre passed through periods of infamous brutality. When Panama closed its Isla Coiba penal colony in 2005, Isla Marias became the last one remaining in the Americas.
‘‘It is the history of punishments, of torture, of repression for more than a century,’’ Lopez Obrador said of the prison, which as recently as 2003 held 8000 inmates.
Far from the bloody reputation of places like Devil’s Island – the French Guiana penal colony closed in 1946 – towards the end the Islas Marias had harboured many lower-risk or well-behaved inmates for whom the ‘‘prison without walls’’ was viewed as step toward release or rehabilitation. Some prisoners were even allowed to live their families.
The islands had suffered severe environmental degradation from over a century of use as a penal colony, said Ramon Ojeda Mestre, the former head of the environmental recovery programme for the islands.
Ojeda Mestre has battled to reforest the island with topical hardwoods, which were largely cut down to build and furnish the penal colony, and to rid the uninhabited islands of invasive, nonnative feral goats, dogs and cats.
Latin America began turning its back on island prisons decades ago. Chile closed its Santa Maria prison in the late 1980s. Costa Rica’s Isla San Lucas penal colony closed in 1991, and Brazil’s Isla Grande in 1994. Peru dramatically ended its El Fronton island prison in 1986 – gunboats blew up most of the buildings to put down a riot, killing more than 100 inmates.