By María Verza | Associated Press
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. Visitors will stay in the old houses – of prisoners or workers – that are being rebuilt to avoid having to construct new buildings that could damage the archipelago’s nature reserve.
The island now is nothing like the dirt-floored warehouse-like prison dorms with five bathrooms for 500 women that Maldonado remembers. “We lived in a chicken coop,” she said. In later years, it was known as a “prison without walls” where some prisoners lived with their families in semi-freedom and relatively good conditions.