GORGONA

GORGONA  PENITENTIARY

For 25 years, the only ones who could enjoy the sight of humpback whales were the prisoners at the Penitentiary of Gorgona that between 1959 and 1982 housed inmates from various parts of the country. Today, visitors can not only enjoy full freedom of humpback whale song but can tour the remains of what was once the country's most secure prison, for having as a sentry watch at sea and the jungle, it was hard to escape there.
A former prison Gorgon, also called the Colombian Alcatraz, inmates were sent Colombia's most dangerous. Usually convicted of murder and rape. When an inmate enters prison, lost their personal identification and in return he was assigned a number to be identified in prison. During their stay, the inmates were in constant abuse by the authorities and by the prisoners themselves. Besides this, they had to live daily with venomous snakes and tropical diseases which often take the lives of many inmates.
The penitentiary was built based on models of the Nazi camps. Inmates slept on beds without the right table to a mattress or pillow. The bathrooms were simply a hole in the floor where the inmates made their physiological needs, and due to constant rape and murder that takes place in them, they had to lower the walls so that the guards could see what was becoming one of the inmates in each bathroom. Punishment cells were rooms that ranged from 80 X 80 cm. to 3 X 3 meters. They were the symbol of total discouragement, because if the prisoners were not killed or died due to illness, dying of loneliness and grief.

It is known that only one person managed to escape from prison. Daniel Camargo Barbosa, known as the Colombian Sadist, managed to leave the island on September 24, 1969 taking advantage of the feast of Our Lady of Mercy, hid in the bushes on the island outwitting the authorities and a small pond built of logs tied together with vines and creepers of the forest, left the island and came a day after the Pacific coast. Although his happiness did not last long as three years later he was recaptured and returned to be sent to the penitentiary, until 1985 when the prison was closed permanently.

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