Mexico's converted island prison ready to receive tourists

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

Getting to Islas Marias, however, will be a challenge for even the sturdiest tourist: a five-hour boat ride in often choppy waters.

But 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.

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 María Island, the largest of the four islands and the only inhabited one more than 60 miles off the coast of Nayarit state. Frequently buffeted by hurricanes scraping along Mexico’s coast, the government closed the prison in 2019.

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador had it converted into an environmental education center, though which some 150 youths have passed. Now the government wants to make it an ecotourism destination where visitors can watch sea birds and enjoy the beaches.

Last year, authorities said they would now 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...