Secrets of the world's worst prison in the middle of a tropical paradise

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Few know that one of the creepiest prisons is located in the sunny tropics of South America. The colony of French Guiana was considered a terrible hard labor, from which few people managed to get out. Now it is a popular tourist attraction.

Former hard labor Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni located in the most picturesque place in South America. This settlement in the middle of tropical forests looks too clean and tidy as a place of detention for the most dangerous criminals of the XIX-XX centuries.

A penal colony along the Maroni River was opened in 1850 by order of Napoleon III. For nearly 100 years, between 1852 and 1946, 70,000 prisoners lived and worked in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. One of the most famous convicts is Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer wrongly accused of treason.

The horrors of Saint-Laurent-de-Maroni were told to the world by the Frenchman Henri Charrière, who wrote the book of memoirs “Papillon” about his imprisonment and escape. It was used in a Hollywood movie starring Steve McQueen.

Thanks to Charière's book, the details of the terrible life of the prisoners in the colony, their torment in damp dark cells, including being alone on Devil's Island, became known. The sinister camp in the tropics became associated with harsh living conditions, corporal punishment, filth and abuse of power.

In Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, convict prisoners worked from 6 am to 6 pm. From the local red clay, they built their homes, all the infrastructure and all the buildings of the colony: hospitals, court, prison, as well as the railway to another colony of Saint-Jean. The severity of the work varied depending on the sentence of each offender. Therefore, some built roads, felling forests, chopping sugar cane and erecting concrete walls, while others worked in the prison garden or cleaned the premises.

The prisoners also lived in different ways. Some had their own huts with small plots of land. Those who had committed more serious crimes slept in the barracks, lying in dozens in a row on a concrete "bed". At night they were chained with metal shackles, which did not allow them to turn around. The personal space of the prisoners was limited in every possible way. You could even wash yourself only outdoors.

The most dangerous recidivists had their own claustrophobic cages measuring approximately 1.8 by 2 meters. The prisoners slept on boards with a wooden block instead of a pillow and with shackles on their legs.

Such a large crowd of prisoners living in cramped conditions did not go without clashes and deaths. But in most cases, no one was punished, because for this it was necessary to conduct an official investigation and fill out documents. The guards allowed natural selection to take its course: the weakest died in fights, from hard daily labor, tropical diseases, or unsuccessful escape attempts.

If at the same time the jailer was injured, then a guillotine was placed next to the barracks. The execution was carried out by two prisoners, while the official uttered the words: "Justice serves in the name of the Republic."

Escape attempts usually ended in failure. The prisoners could easily leave the territory of the prison, but further it was necessary to overcome the wild thickets of the rainforest. If the fugitives managed to get to Suriname or Venezuela, the local authorities still sent them to the camps.

Convicts who had served their time remained in Guiana anyway. In order to cleanse France of the "undesirable element", as well as to populate the colony, the liberated were obliged to live in the vicinity of the prison for another five years. At this time, they independently earned money for an expensive ticket home to the metropolis.

The past decades have not spared the settlement of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. Indeed, in the tropics, buildings deteriorate very quickly. Moisture causes wood to rot, and fast-growing trees destroy masonry. The prison town was restored in 1980, after which it became a historical monument. These days, standing on the central courtyard in the shade of a large mango tree, it is hard to believe in the horrors that were happening here.

While French Guiana was used primarily as a prison, the overseas possessions of other countries were actively developing. See amazing retro pictures of Mozambique in the 1920s.