Mexico to close infamous island penal colony, region's last

Source: Associated Press

Mark Stevenson, Associated Press Updated 9:58 pm CST, Monday, February 18, 2019



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FILE - In this May 12, 2005 file photo, inmates line up on the pier after arriving at the Islas Marias federal prison island, located 90 miles south of Mazatlan, Mexico. President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said on Monday, Feb. 18, 2019 that he will close the famed island penal colony and will have it converted into a cultural and environmental education center.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico will close its infamous Isla Marias prison, the last island penal colony in a hemisphere once dotted with remote island jails like the one depicted in the movie "Papillon."

President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said Monday that Mexico will relocate about two-thirds of the 659 remaining inmates and free about 200 others from the islands, 70 miles (110 kilometers) off the Pacific coast of Nayarit. The four islands — only one of which is inhabited — will be turned into a cultural and environmental education center.

The prison founded in 1905 on Maria Madre passed through periods of infamous brutality. When Panama closed its Isla Coiba penal colony in 2004, Isla Marias became the last one remaining in the Americas.

Lopez Obrador said the new Islas Marias cultural center will be named after Jose Revueltas, a novelist who was imprisoned there and wrote the novel "Walls of Water."

"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 2013 held 8,000 inmates.

Read more: https://www.chron.com/news/world/article/Mexico-to-close-infamous-island-penal-colony-13624982.php