Credit, Daniel Arce/BBC Mundo
Hundreds of crabs flee when we step onto the beach. As we unload the boat, we only hear the waves on the white sand and the rustle of the dense undergrowth that, like a green wall, hides the heart of the island.
Coiba, in the Panamanian Pacific, is an isolated and virgin natural paradise.
But this archipelago of crystal-clear islets, located about 25 kilometers southwest of the coast of Veraguas on Panama's west coast, has a history of violence and horror.
For 85 years it operated as a feared open-air prison where torture, forced labor and a brutal massacre were recorded.
Dangerous criminals and, during the Panamanian dictatorship (1968-1989), political opponents were detained there.
After its closure in 2004, the island was completely dedicated to being a natural reserve to preserve this memory, which earned UNESCO its declaration as a World Heritage Site.
The decades in which it was a prison helped maintain its ecosystems and biodiversity almost untouched by human intervention.
Until now.
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In June this year, after a massive escape from a large prison in the capital, Panama sent 29 prisoners to a naval air base located on the island.
Then, in August, three more people were transferred.
"The transfer to Coiba was carried out in accordance with national security needs. This is not a discussion about a reservation, but about the security of Panamanians," said President José Raúl Mulino at the time, whose government did not respond to BBC Mundo's requests for information for this article.
His intention, the president claimed, was to strike a blow against the criminal structures that operate within the prison system.
However, the measure is generating controversy in the country and worrying scientists and environmental leaders.
Coiba is the largest marine park in Central America and, together with its land area, covers 270,125 hectares, making it a gigantic open-air laboratory.
This is what we found during our visit, on a hot and humid weekend in May, when the Panamanian government's plans were still unknown.
We traveled with a group of researchers and a park ranger who, a few years earlier, had been arrested in exactly the same place that he later went on to protect.
Credit, Caroline Souza/BBCMundo
"Mali Mali"
"The day of the murder was November 29, 1986. I was 23 years old," Narciso "Mali Mali" Bastidas, now 63 years old, tells me. He is originally from Guna Yala, an indigenous region on the east coast of the Panamanian Caribbean.
We talked and spent the night with him at the AIP scientific station in Coiba, a set of mobile huts facing the beach, surrounded by jungle and located in the northeast of the largest island in the archipelago.
According to a court ruling, Mali, who is now a research assistant and also a park ranger for Panama's National System of Protected Areas, was convicted of murdering the owner of a restaurant where he worked.
"They arrested me as the mastermind. Two years later, they transferred me to Coiba", he continues.
There, he served a 10-year sentence. He insists on his innocence.
Credit, Ronald Ávila-Claudio / BBC Mundo
"In the 80s, Panama was governed by the military, by the boot. [The authorities] arrested me and, beating me, forced me to sign," he says.
Unlike other convicts, who were transported by sea, Mali arrived in Coiba by plane. From above, he remembers, he looked out over the fields where he would eventually work.
“Still, I thought it was beautiful,” he says.
The penal colony was founded in 1919, during the presidency of Belisario Porras, with the intention of being "self-sustainable". The prisoners, without receiving a salary, dedicated long days, from early in the morning, to working on cattle farms, planting and harvesting what they consumed.
In this system, Mali's task was to enter the jungle and deforest it. “They called us war dogs, we men armed with machetes,” he recalls.
Although there was a concrete prison, most of the inmates lived in camps spread across the main island, built by themselves with branches, palm leaves and materials found in the region.
Throughout Coiba's history, there were more than 20 settlements that occupied 20% of the island's territory. The rest remained untouched, according to scientific research in which the same ranger participated.
"Thanks to the prison, the island remained as it is," he says.
This does not prevent him from recognizing the mistreatment suffered by prisoners, which even gave rise to his nickname.
"When I arrived, I was a little chubby. A sergeant saw me and said: 'I'm not going to kill you, but I'm going to make you slowly waste away,'" he says.
And he adds: "'Mali Mali', in the Guna language, means thin, bony."
Credit, Ronald Ávila-Claudio/BBC Mundo
The darkest moment
Since its creation as a penal colony, Coiba has been plagued by conflicts between inmates and accusations of violence by guards, Ezer Vierba, an expert in the History of Latin America at Yale University in the United States, told BBC Mundo.
During the 21 years of the Panamanian dictatorship, when Omar Torrijos and, after his death, Manuel Noriega were in power, the military officers who ran the prison "did not respect any concept of human rights," he says.
"We are talking about punishments that amount to torture," he declares.
In the report of the Panama Truth Commission, published in 2002, testimonies from former prisoners describe excessive work, "brutal beatings", insufficient food and lack of medical care.
Mali has witnessed and experienced this firsthand many times. "If we were cleaning the corn harvest and someone ate some of it, that would be a sin. If they asked who it was and we all remained silent, we would get our ass hosed," says the park ranger.
Sometimes the severity of the punishment depended on the severity of the offense, and other times on the mood of the guards.
"During the militaristic period, the police would order you to climb a palm tree and fire bursts of gunfire to make you let go and fall. If you tried to escape, they would tie or handcuff you to a tree so that the chitra (an insect whose bite causes swelling) could feast on you," he continues.
Credit, Daniel Arce/ BBC Mundo
Although there are no official numbers, "a lot of people" died in Coiba, says Flavio Méndez, lawyer and supervisor of scientific operations at the Center for Historical and Anthropological Research in Panama.
Not only because of the punishments, but also because "it is a very dangerous natural environment, where there are poisonous animals."
Furthermore, gang rivalries often persisted.
Unlike other Panamanian prisons, the penal colony had no bars and inmates had freedom of movement.
One of the most violent moments in Coiba's history was precisely the conflict between two rival groups in 1998, during an attempt to escape by four prisoners.
"Those who tried to escape were in the south of the island. But Coiba has very strong sea currents that come from the Galápagos Islands. The sea, instead of taking them to the continent, took them to the north, where their enemies were," recalls Méndez.
The four were victims of their rivals, who beheaded them. "At that time, I was the driver of the boat of one of the prison commanders. I went with him to collect the bodies", says Mali, remembering the brutal scene.
The so-called prison massacre generated great outrage and contributed to accelerating its closure, which finally occurred in 2004, explains Professor Vierba.
The historian also clarifies that there were economic reasons behind this: even under those abandoned conditions, financing a prison on the high seas was very expensive for the Panamanian treasury.
Credit, Archivo Biblioteca Nacional de Panama
Jurassic Park
We travel on a fishing boat packed with supplies, sample collection equipment, and a huge barrel of gasoline that, due to the rocking sea, one of us sometimes has to hold up with one leg.
We need extra fuel to explore this archipelago of more than 30 islands and islets, whose main island covers an area of 500 km².
We pass flocks of birds and occasionally catch a glimpse of dolphin fins in the distance. We entered an estuary to cast a huge net. After a few hours, bull sharks appear, which Mali and the researchers remove one by one.
There is a frenzy of voices on the boat. Experts move nimbly to hold, measure and collect DNA samples by cutting a small fragment of this species' fins. The work is directed by marine biologist Edgardo Díaz Ferguson.
For him, Coiba offers a unique opportunity to study pristine ecosystems and understand how natural areas altered during the prison period recover on their own.
"These are islands that have remained untouched for 12,000 years, making them a modern-day Jurassic Park," he says.
To study Coiba's marine wealth, scientists analyze the health of its reefs and track the migratory routes of various species, such as whales and sharks.
Díaz Ferguson explains that this activity allows us to understand the role of the island as a "natural nursery" that regenerates marine life and supplies fishing on the mainland.
On land, according to UNESCO, its ecosystems have an "exceptional" level of endemic species and are a refuge for animals that no longer exist in much of Panama, such as the crested eagle and the scarlet macaw.
Being here, says the marine biologist, "allows us to understand the damage we have caused to the continent and how we can rebuild what we destroyed."
A film-worthy transfer
To announce the transfer of 29 prisoners considered "high risk", the Panamanian government released a video showing them handcuffed, barefoot and shirtless, arriving at what appears to be Coiba.
The decision was announced on June 14, just days after the escape of around 195 inmates from La Joyita, a prison in the province of Panama.
According to authorities, the 29 are being held at a naval air base located near the former central prison of the penal colony.
In August, Panamanian media reported that three other people, including the former mayor of the city of Colón, Carlos Lee, were transferred to Coiba.
In that case, all three were accused of crimes against public administration, although none were convicted, according to local reports.
Before all this happened, during our visit in May, we tried to access the area to see the remaining ruins of the penitentiary where Mali was imprisoned several times during his sentence.
But agents from the National Aeronaval Service, who have guarded this area for years, prohibited us from entering, as well as from filming or taking photographs. They didn't give any explanation.
After the prisoners were transferred, we tried again.
We asked whether the measure would be temporary or permanent and whether it would be possible to return to the base to check the status of the facilities and inmates. We didn't get a response.
Credit, Caroline Souza / BBC Mundo
Organizations such as Panama's Environmental Defense Center have expressed concern about the presence of prisoners in the national park.
In a statement signed in June by this and dozens of other entities, it was argued that the law that protects the reservation does not contemplate the presence of detainees.
Furthermore, according to the press release, the legislation establishes that the territory must be used exclusively for park administration, scientific research and ecotourism.
According to the Ministry of the Environment, there is no environmental impact in Coiba, as it was not necessary to build new infrastructure to house the prisoners.
On the other hand, in August, a group of family members of prisoners taken to the reserve held a protest in front of the Government Ministry.
They demanded to see their loved ones and that their lawyers also have access to communicate with them, something guaranteed by the right to due process.
In our case, for example, getting from Panama City to Coiba took six hours by car to the nearest city, Santa Catalina, followed by an hour and 15 minutes by boat.
The transformation
Since the arrival of the first scientists to the archipelago in the early 1990s, Mali has become an assistant to many of them.
After serving his sentence, and until 2019, he worked as a park ranger in the national park itself.
Now, he protects another natural area near the Panamanian capital.
"When I started working with the researchers, with the doctors, everything changed. I no longer felt like a prisoner, but simply another citizen here", says Mali.
Researchers such as Edgardo Garrido Pérez, a botanist who is also part of the AIP Coiba team, say that Mali's help in their projects is essential.
Together, they venture into the jungle to understand how areas that were previously agricultural fields and pastures are regenerated.
Amid vines, trunks and leaves, we see the two measuring plants, licking tree bark and installing recording equipment to capture the birds that disperse their seeds.
"When I have questions that other historians cannot answer [about the impact of the inmates' work on the ground], Narciso [Mali] can. He was the protagonist of these events and also dedicated himself to studying them", says Garrido Pérez.
The park ranger has two books about Coiba: one already published and another in progress.
Still, he insists, "I'm not an expert on anything." But he recognizes that he knows "a little bit of everything, in general, about biodiversity".
For now, the transfer of prisoners does not affect research work, scientists say.
For Mali, the decision is more a response to a security emergency than a long-term plan.
"I find it hard to believe that they will reopen the island as a penal colony, because they would have to build new facilities."
His hope is that Coiba will be preserved "for future generations" because it "completely changed his life."
Due to his worldview as an indigenous Guna, he feels part of nature, which he considers a "family". "If Coiba was once my suffering, today it is my gratitude."
Writing and research: Ronald Alexander Avila-Claudio
Text review: Ana Pais
Maps and illustrations: Caroline Souza and Daniel Arce
With additional reporting by Óscar Sulbarán
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