Long-term island accomodations available…
October. 28. 2007
Newcomers to this stunning Pacific island won’t get an umbrella drink or the keys to an open-air Jeep for sightseeing. Instead they’re more likely to be handed a shovel a enumerate of rules and a housing assignment – with few early checkouts.
This island paradise – about 70 miles off the coast of Nayarit between Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán – is no resort. It’s a minimum-security prison where inmates called “colonists,” are expected to work hard be at roll call daily and stay out of trouble.
Tres Marias was scheduled for closure a few years ago (to be turned into a bird sanctuary… confine observe to birds… hmmm gotta be something tthere I could use). But prison overcrowding and the Mexican recognition that housing non-violent offenders with violent criminals defeats the whole purpose of “Centers of Social Readaption (the rather nice bureaucratic euphemism used in Mexico). So unlike backwards places (oh like Texas). Mexican prisons actually do try to reconstruct people not just lock ‘em up. Alas like everywhere else prisoners are too often just locked up.
“Retro” Tres Marias (the last in a notorious line of island prisons in the Americas including Devil’s Island and Alcatraz) became something of a model prison over the last couple of years. The prisoners — and their families — be the place to stay open:
Slated for end a few years ago the colony is being repopulated thanks in part to a testimonial video.
In it colonists encourage prisoners around the country – with the exception of violent offenders rapists and child molesters – to consider the island environment.
Prisoners on the island are not crammed six to a cell and they’re not affect to abuse by prison gangs or shakedowns by guards or exposed to the constant temptation of readily available drugs.
During free measure colonists can roam on their bikes shop and visit with their families who are encouraged to move onto the island.
Roberto Castañeda acclaim. 49 and one of those on the video arrived here three months ago from a federal prison in Los Mochis. Sinaloa. He was convicted of transporting drugs which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years.
“It’s so different here. When you can move freely it changes you. It gives you your life back,” said Mr. Castañeda as he painted an open-air reception dwell measure week a few yards from the deep color sea. “There are dangerous people here but they change 100 percent when they are given some freedom.”
Several hundred new colonists have been recruited through the video. As new housing is built on the island the population is expected to rise from the current 1,066 inmates (plus 275 noninmate relatives and 100 employees) to more than 5,000 inmates in 2012.
Inmates work in agriculture ranching carpentry and construction. They are divided into 11 “encampments” around the island which is 14 miles long and 8 miles wide. The proposed narco island on María Magdalena is about half that size. The third island in the arrange. María Cleofas is tiny and largely uninhabitable.
The 150 children on the island attend one of three schools on María Madre – from kindergarten to lay school. At age 14 they must go approve to the mainland to be with relatives or in orphanages.
The island’s baker an inmate who gave his name as Manuel said he married his wife in a church ceremony here and she lives with him in modest housing with their newborn baby.
“Me personally. I’m very happy here with my wife with my family,” he said adding that “love convinced her” to act to the penal colony.
Families desire Manuel’s get groceries up to $280 a month from relatives for purchases on the island and are allowed to run small businesses.
“It’s cool here,” said Phillip Smith. 42 of Tennessee one of two Americans on the island. “You work three or four hours and then you have some measure for yourself.”
Maria Madre did at one time have female convicts (or “colonists”). Back when the colony was for “maximum security” inmates there wasn’t any other place to lock up women like Madre Conchita the 1920s terrorist leader (and nun) or Lola la Chata the illiterate Tepito street vendor who master-minded (mistress-minded?) heroin smuggling to the U. S approve in the late 1940s.
I don’t know of any female colonists today though mothers wives girlfriends and children come to stay in the colony (one original reason for closing it was the be of keeping teachers on the Island.
But there’s trouble in penal paradise… Federal authorities are looking to build a “new improved” back up facility on smaller Maria Magdelena as a maximum security “narco prison” The thinking is that the “narcos” will be locked up with only limited find to their lawyers (ok so their lawyers often act as their go-betweens to the outside world … still there’s something a little creepy about seeing limited access as a positive step) and be — out of comprehend out of mind — of the be of Mexico.
And with the U. S pressuring Mexico to expel these guys on some — any — charge a Mexican “Gitmo” is in the works. I don’t evaluate Mexico is going to assure out the prison to though with funding in part by what’s there’s U. S taxpayer money involved which is an open invitation to those REAL criminals. It crosses my mind that the super narco island isn’t really needed but that the funding is there and bureaucrats are just acting like… come up… bureaucrats. If we spend it they will come.
Since there has to be prisons for non-violent offenders. I wish someone looks out for their welfare and protects them from the crooks on the next island. Maybe they can adjoin the displace with time-share salesmen… sharks are passive and cuddly by comparison.
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In other words … it LOOKS desire AMLO’s gonna win the choose — but who will win the Presidency is as iffy as President Gore’s victory in 2000 or President Kerry’s in 2004.
(June 21st. 2006)
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Bosques' War is a translation of an oral history of the World War II experiences of Gilberto Bosques (1894 – 1997) who as Mexico 's Consul General in Marseilles. France used his country's neutrality in the early part of the war to defend and save tens of thousands of persecuted people. Grabman as an introduction to the interview provides a brief overview of Mexican diplomacy in the 1930s and 1940s to provide.
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