Mexico's Alcatraz Is Now an All-Inclusive Resort, So We Went There

ISLAS MARIAS, Mexico — For over a hundred years, the isolated Islas Marias penal colony was the stage of daring escapes and riots, and home to some of Mexico’s most notorious mass killers. Golden age prison films were shot along its lonely coasts, and it housed a range of infamous prisoners, including political dissidents and criminal Lucha Libre wrestlers.

Sitting on the biggest of a practically deserted archipelago of islands that lie a five-hour boat ride from the pacific coastal town of Mazatlán, the Islas Marias prison had been shuttered since 2019. Nearly three years later it reopened as a bioreserve and an all-inclusive sleep away prison resort, and the latest of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s controversial pet projects. The Islas Marias project is huge compared to the United States renowned tourist trap Alcatraz, and feels more like Jurassic Park than a prison because of its expansive coasts and lush, green untouched forests.

Plain clothed members of the navy run every aspect of the experience at Islas Marias, serving as waiters, gift store clerks, and tour guides, who they refer to as “biosphere protectors.” A taped up schedule outlined a tight military-esque schedule for the weekend: Dinner, Tour, Sleep, 5:30am Hike, Breakfast, Beach, Lunch, Tour, etc, filled with highlights like a tour of the abandoned maximum security prison, the salt mines where prisoners were forced to toil under the harsh island sun, and the chimney that expelled the toxic fumes from fires, manned by the inmates, that burned at 900 Celsius degree heat. 

The 40 or so tourists who decided to take the president up on his offer—an affordable two night long all-inclusive escape to an isolated paradise filled with nature and history—arrived at the principal prison colony: Puerto Balleto. It serves as a sort of glossed-up basecamp, allowing tourists to sleep in refurbished barrack-style mini apartments where some of the more well-behaved prisoners used to live. 

Islas Marias was first discovered by Spanish conquistadors but remained uninhabited for years after as Mexico and various nations argued over who controlled them. Founded in 1905, it was the last island penal colony in the Americas until its closure in 2019. The region's seclusion created a unique set of biodiversity on the island, with several endemic species, and it was designated as a biosphere reserve by UNESCO in 2010 while still an active prison.

It might look like a natural paradise now, but the remaining relics of the penal system serve as a reminder to visitors today that many prisoners endured something sinister here. While reforms to the Mexican penal system did bring an end to much of the torture and some of the harsh forced labor, the island was anything but paradise for the prisoners. Many tried to escape via the shark-infested waters surrounding Islas Marias. Fernando Rivera, one of the biosphere protectors, told VICE World News that it's unknown how many successfully escaped or potentially died in the shark infested waters beyond its coasts.

“When they took away the prisoners, they had a list of 16 people who were [unaccounted for] on the island. But not all at that time. They dated back many years,” said Rivera. 

A noteworthy escape took place in 1989, when a convicted murderer, Carlos Miralrio Mujica, became known on the island as a talented musician. He reportedly escaped after being invited to play the guitar at a staff holiday party. When the guards and other prison officials were wasted, he slipped off the mother island by swimming to the nearby Isla Magdalena, where he built a raft and spent 13 days on the ocean before reaching mainland Mexico. But he was arrested eight months later for robbing a church, and returned to prison.

Many activists and government critics were imprisoned at Islas Marias especially in the first half of the 20th century, including Mexican literary icon José Revueltas who did two bids on the island before the age of 21. He wrote one of his most famous books about his experience called Los Muros de Agua—The Walls of Water—which is the name of the cultural center on the island.

The island is a monument to leftist figures, with Revueltas lionized side by side with former South African president Nelson Mandela who spent decades behind bars while fighting to end apartheid. President López Obrador, often referred to as AMLO, is known to see himself as a revolutionary leader in Mexican politics, and throughout the island there is a sort of constant nod to his self-affirming legacy. 

AMLO has been a divisive force, revered by a fervent base mostly among the country’s poor and middle class, while reviled by large swathes of the rest of Mexico.

AMLO’s government’s other public works projects, like the refurbished second Mexico City airport and Southern Mexico “Maya Train” have received harsh scrutiny across the political spectrum, from opposition politicians and the conservatives, to environmental and indigenous activists. 

“We all make mistakes. The President is not infallible,” said César Meza, a 49-year-old dentist from Mexico City while sitting on a beach where families played volleyball just a stone's throw from high security barbed wire fences. 

Meza thinks that AMLO is “fighting against the current” and admitted that he was worried the project will not be accepted “like many other projects that [AMLO] has sought, by a sector of the population that only insults [him].”

Meza unabashedly said he and his wife were AMLO supporters because it’s “the first government that has been able to find a way to distribute a little better, the wealth of this country. This country is very rich in every way. And unfortunately that wealth has been hoarded by some.”

No doubt the president is hoping that the debut of the Islas Marias bioreserve will be a win for his administration. The design and language of the Islas Marias experience is tinged with a defensive stance of the project and an underlying contempt for AMLO’s predecessors, taking a particular aim at longtime nemesis and former president Felipe Calderón.

The museum and tour basically mock a high security prison on the island built by Calderón’s government in 2009 that was closed just four years later in 2013, “due to the lack of water, the rotting food, and the abuses of the custodians that caused a riot,” according to one sign. 

The ghosts of the old inmates also remain, who are said to have constructed nearly every building on the island, especially around the prison cemetery, in which many of them are now buried.

Arguably the most notorious prisoner was José Ortiz Muñoz, aka El Sapo or The Toad in English, who supposedly killed over 100 people.

“From a very young age, 9 years old, he began to murder,” said biosphere protector Francis Ávalos, standing over their graves. “His first murder was a schoolmate simply because he was jealous or because he was the teacher's favorite,” she said, claiming that El Sapo murdered the other child with some sort of compass he found in the classroom. 

After leaving reform school at 17, he joined the army, then reportedly murdered a colonel.

“But the curious thing is that they didn't put him in jail, they didn't discharge him, they didn't do anything to him at that time, because the army took him as a weapon,” said Ávalos. He became used as a sort of killer-for-hire for the government, and admitted to murdering over 100 protesters with a submachine gun at a demonstration in 1946. 

El Sapo was eventually sentenced for his crimes and sent to prison, where he committed several more behind bars on the mainland, before ultimately being sent to Islas Marias.

It was here that El Sapo met the island’s priest, Juan Manuel Martínez, known as Padre Trampitas—a slang word for trickery. Padre Trampitas reportedly gained the nickname hustling when he was a child, before leaving the street life behind and joining the church. He eventually converted El Sapo to christianity, who repented for his years of killing. But El Sapo was murdered by other inmates and buried on the island, and years later Padre Trampitas final dying wish was to have his body returned to Islas Marias and buried next to him.

Hotencia Bejar, a gregarious 78 year old tourist from Michoacán state, chuckled at the mention of Padre Trampitas throughout the tour, a strict pastor she remembered from her childhood growing up as the daughter of an Islas Marias guard.

She lived on the island from the age of six, and stayed until just after her 13th birthday.

“I have a photo of myself on the pier when I turned 13 years old. I was wearing a beaded dress that my mom made me,” Bejar remembered with tears in her eyes. Earlier in the year a doctor gave her a discouraging health diagnosis, so she decided it was time “to retrace my steps.”

With the opening of the island to the public felt serendipitous, so the grandmother traveled to Islas Marias with her daughter, son-in-law, and two grand-kids, to visit the island.

While she remembered it as a care-free paradise where the children of guards and prisoners mixed normally and attended school together, the island’s history is on full display. She too was an admitted AMLO supporter, and said that he “is doing something for the country, for the people.”

Over the course of the weekend, it became clear that almost everyone on the excursion were part of AMLO’s ardent base. Groups who filled up the restaurant during meals praised the president, and were an echo chamber of disdain for opposition figures and issues on an island in the middle of nowhere. But whether AMLO’s latest public project will actually be sustainable and profitable will boil down to whether Mexicans outside of his supporters decide to also visit the island and walk its haunted paths.