Off to Oblivion

Sharks are the guards and ocean waves the walls at Mexico's Islas Tres Marias prison camp, a trio of tiny, sun-baked islands about 70 miles off Mexico's west coast. The 1,072 inmates sweat out their lives in dazzling white salt pits, tend henequen fields and weave rope. They live in straw-roofed huts; there are no iron bars, but escape is next to impossible. In cells at Mexico City's Black Palace Prison, coldhearted murderers weep like little children at the prospect of banishment to the Three Marys.

By comparison, the famed Black Palace is almost a felon's delight. Colonel Francisco Linares, the warden, boasts that he runs it a la Mexicana, which means nourishing food, little work, the traditional weekly "conjugal visits" to cells by prisoners' wives. But the big Black Palace (official capacity 2,000) is crammed with 4,485 convicts, and 40 new prisoners arrive each day. Occasionally Linares must hold a cuerda a las islas--a roundup for the islands.

At noon one day last week, by special messenger from the Bureau of Prisons, came orders for a cuerda of 215 prisoners. The grapevine quickly spread the dread word. In cell block C, the Black Palace's toughest cons beat out the prison's nervousness in a clomping rhythm of heavy shoes. Off-duty guards rushed back to double the vigil; desperate inmates have been known to head off exile to the Three Marys by knifing fellow felons, thereby turning themselves into murderers awaiting trial rather than convicts eligible for island exile.

Soon after 5 p.m., the roundup began.

Salvador Paz Guerra, forger and prison-jumper, who had smilingly lighted a cigarette when a judge gave him 20 years, had to be dragged from his cell. Jose Colombres, a six-foot, pock-marked murderer, knelt tearfully and begged to stay. When a convicted murderess' name was called, she split the air with a scream, "Virgin of Guadalupe, have mercy on me!"

But that night, the banished filed resignedly out the Black Palace's back gate. Each got 20 pesos, three packs of cigarettes and a packet of food, then climbed into a guarded boxcar drawn up on a spur. At Manzanillo, 600 dark miles later, the convicts would embark in a troopship headed up the coast. After that, for unending years, life for them will be only the salt and henequen of the Three Marys.

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