OfClara Valenzani
The prison is located 3,600 km from Chile, but the 12 inmates can sculpt miniature moais and they almost feel like family: “It’s a beautiful place”
More than 3,600 km from the coast of Chile, in the Pacific Ocean, Easter Island is located. Adjectives to define it: remote, fascinating, perhaps even heavenly? However, it is difficult to think that this term could be associated with a prison.
Nevertheless, prisoners refer to the penitentiary as “a hotel, a nice place”: the 12 prisoners, 10 men and 2 women, they fit in very well in their cell. There are no watchtowers, the 23 guards they have no uniform, and the ocean is a deterrent to escape: those who escaped returned two hours later. In the structure, not recent but well maintained, there is a vegetable garden, private bathrooms and a laboratory where reproductions of moai can be sculpted in wood, the gigantic, mysterious faces that have made the island famous despite its remote location. Tourists can buy them, and with the proceeds the prisoners buy fresh tuna and ribs to roast on the grill.
In one year, their number doubled in conjunction with the drug trafficking. Ana Miraji, 40 years old, was a trafficker: «Initially I was in Valparaíso prison. There it was hell, here it was paradise”, she reports El País. The reasons are not only those above: there is also a nice atmosphere between fellow prisoners. They know each other and help each other, just as they did before they were arrested: the island only has 6,000 citizens. «This is my cousin, that too…everyone is my family!», adds Ana.
The inhabitants of the “big island”, this is the meaning of the original name Rapa Nui, “have always felt like prisoners”explains the president of the Council of Elders Carlos Edmunds, describing how the British had transformed the place into a sheep ranch and forced the locals to live only in the district of Hanga Roa until 1966, when they were granted Chilean citizenship. A forced and historically imposed habitwhich ironically helped inmates better tolerate their imprisonment.
May 13, 2024 (changed May 13, 2024 | 4:20 pm)
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