Islas Marías: the history of the penitentiary that will become an artistic and cultural complex

Last Friday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) visited the Marias Islands, where he set sail from the Port of San Blas, in Nayarit. They functioned as a federal prison for more than 100 years, until 2019, when the current federal president signed a decree for the territory to be adapted as a center for arts, culture and environmental knowledge.

It was through social networks that the president reported that “now, the coast of Sinaloa, Nayarit and Jalisco are part of a region for tourism, cultural and environmental development.”

In mid-2021, López Obrador shared photographs with the progress of the construction of the 'Walls of Water-José Revueltas' Environmental Education Center, in Islas Marías, which will open to the public in three months, said López Obrador.

AMLO has also stated that the Islands will receive limited visits so as not to affect environmental conservation. The goal is for visitors to travel around the island in the morning and leave it in the afternoon.

And the fact is that the Marías Islands hosted one of the most feared and isolated prisons in Mexico. It was opened in the middle of Porfiriato, in 1905, and closed in 2019. Renowned personalities, such as the writer and political activist José Revueltas, passed during its cells, and in total, the time it functioned as a prison, it housed about 45,000 prisoners.

The prison building, which was located on María Madre Island, the largest and only of this group of islands that has ever been inhabited, has been renovated with the aim of looking towards a sustainable future, becoming a unique nature reserve. In total, the archipelago is made up of four islands, where wildlife abounds.

On March 8, 2019, the last 624 prisoners went out in an operation that lasted a day and a half. The former prison facilities are located about 120 kilometers from San Blas, on the coast of the state of Nayarit, and about 170 kilometers from Mazatlan, Sinaloa, where the boats leave as a base of the Navy. During the visit of López Obrador on Friday, he himself reported that he took 4 hours to reach the destination.

It was Porfirio Díaz himself who established the prison of the Marías Islands in 1905. At different stages of its existence, the prison had different degrees of repression and dangerousness. In prison, there were also women prisoners, however, the number of men was always much higher.

Initially, people arrived who had committed repeated crimes, such as theft, the circulation of counterfeit currency or vagrancy. However, between 1929 and 1931, with the amendments to the penal code, prisoners of high danger began to be sent. Political prisoners also began to be sent, not only during the Porfiriato, but in the post-revolutionary era, when communists and cristeros were sent.

In the Marías Islands, many of the prisoners lived in semi-liberty, which means that they were confined to the island, but without being behind bars and working outdoors in the various companies that were there, including a shrimp or a sawmill in the later stages.

There were also prisoners who lived with their families, so there were stages in which there were hundreds of children on the island, up to about 600. Families could stay for periods of weeks or months of visiting.

However, in their later days as a prison, families were declining. In the final eviction, seven families left, including five girls and five boys.

José Revueltas inspired one of his books called The Water Walls, in his two stays in prison, one in 1932 and the other in 1935. He was sent to prison, accused of being a “communist”.

That is precisely the name that the AMLO government decided to give for the “Center for Environmental and Cultural Education”.

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