Gorgona Island, one of Colombia’s richest and most diverse ecosystems, has become a site of protest as Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities and local environmental groups fight the construction of a military complex and tourism development on the island that threaten its fragile ecology.
The controversy surrounding the island has reached the highest spheres of politics, pitting leftist President Gustavo Petro, who has already green-lit the construction, against Vice President Francia Márquez, an Afro-Colombian and environmental leader. Márquez has stated that she stands with the activists because development shouldn’t be achieved at the cost of the well-being of humans and nature.
Just five miles long and one-and-a-half miles wide, with mountains in the middle and rivers and jungles cascading down to the white sand beaches that rim the island, Gorgona Island sits in the Pacific Ocean, seventeen miles off the coast of Colombia. This tropical oasis, blessed with its very own lush, self-sustaining ecosystem (comparable to the better-known Galápagos Islands), and with protected status as a national park, has nonetheless long been known as la isla maldita—the cursed island.
In the sixteenth century, as Spanish conquistadores sailed south across the American continent in search of gold, Francisco Pizarro used Gorgona Island to launch his crusade to conquer Peru. During the seven months he camped out there waiting for reinforcements, Pizarro lost many soldiers to poisonous snake bites, for which he dubbed the island Gorgona, for the mythical Gorgon Medusa, the daughter of Greek sea gods endowed with wings, fangs, and snakes for hair. Spanish and English pirates later used the island as a base where they could restock their ships, bury treasure, and hide out from the law, as did runaway enslaved people and criminals. The Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities in the nearest mainland towns used the island to fish and to carry out religious rituals, and considered the island sacred and an integral part of their ancestral traditions.
In 1959, due to its distance from the mainland and shark-infested waters that made escape nearly impossible, the Colombian government started building a maximum security prison designed for the most dangerous male prisoners. Soon after it opened in 1960, however, political prisoners were sent there as a way to discourage people from rising up against a corrupt and violent government.
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Kurt Hollander
The entrance of the abandoned prison on Gorgona Island, 2025.
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Solitary confinement cells in the abandoned prison on Gorgona Island, 2025.
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An overhead walkway for prison guards at the abandoned prison on Gorgona Island, 2025.
Islands have long been used as prisons, including Alcatraz in San Francisco, California, Panama’s Coiba Island prison, and the Île du Diable in French Guiana. The architecture of the prison on Gorgona Island was influenced by Nazi concentration camps, with elevated walkways that allowed for constant surveillance and electrified barbed wire to keep the inmates from escaping into the jungle. Over the years, the prison economy led to the near-total deforestation of the island. In 1984, the prison was shut down and the island was converted into a national park.
Today, there are several current threats to the island’s unique ecosystem. Industrial trawlers overfishing in international and Colombian waters deplete marine life and affect the migratory patterns of whales, turtles, and other sea creatures who come to breed on and around Gorgona. In the past couple of decades, much of the cocaine trafficked from Colombia and Ecuador is transported along the Pacific coast, some of it passing by Gorgona Island, with speedboats used to transport the drugs from the Colombian interior via rivers to the ocean where small, makeshift submarines smuggle them north. These high-speed boats can cause water contamination and impact marine life.
To purportedly counteract the illegal fishing and drug trafficking in the region, the construction of a Colombian Coast Guard substation was begun on the island in 2010, with funding from the U.S. Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. But it sat uncompleted until a terrorist attack on the island in 2014 by leftist guerrillas in which one soldier was reported to have been killed. After the incident, financing for a military base on the island was quickly approved. To speed the process through the courts and senate, consultations with local Afro-Colombian and Indigenous environmental and community leaders, a prerequisite for any development on ancestral land, were bypassed, and a construction license was granted within thirty days without the legally required environmental studies.
In 2023, it was exposed in the press that U.S. embassy functionaries had visited the island to inspect the construction of the still incomplete military base. It was a clear violation of Colombian sovereignty. In response, U.S. aid was rejected, and the defense, environment, and commerce ministries of Colombia covered the costs of constructing the 132-meter dock, a 7,000-gallon gas tank, and three new buildings in which to house members of the Colombian Navy.
To ameliorate the political damage of taking money from the U.S. government for the militarization of the island, Petro announced that the $12 million that the United States had allotted for the military base would instead be used to fund ecotourism, scientific research, and the energy transition of the region, including solar panels to be installed on the island instead of gas generators. As of the time of writing, none of these projects have been realized while the construction of the military base and tourism center have plowed ahead.
The militarization of Gorgona is unlikely to end illegal fishing or drug trafficking. It could, however, increase corruption and violence in the region and cause severe environmental damage. The operation of a large dock on the island will affect the health and migratory patterns of many of the local marine and land animals that live in or around the island, especially the humpback whales, one of the island’s biggest tourist attractions.
Besides the construction of a military dock, a sophisticated surveillance military radar—which provides long-range, three-dimensional detection of up to 500 targets within 250 miles—is planned to be installed atop a tower located on the highest point of the island. Local protests in 2024 led to a suspension of the construction of the base and the use of the tower for military purposes, from one of Colombia’s four high courts. The emission of its electromagnetic waves could potentially disorient bats and birds and cause them to crash into the tower and cables.
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Colombian military personnel stationed on Gorgona Island in 2025.
The installation of hi-tech, anti-missile surveillance has no real regional or national benefit but rather is part of the U.S. military’s “theater” architecture spread across several Pacific islands in Latin America that serve global military interests, such as monitoring Iran, Russia, and China, as well as extremist organizations such as ISIS and Hezbollah.
To make matters worse, the small town located on the island, originally built to house prison workers, police, and the military, is now being renovated and expanded as a tourism center that can accommodate up to 100 tourists at a time. The tourism center will offer services that will be prohibitively expensive for Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities on the mainland, favoring foreign tourists and the upper classes from Colombia’s major cities. Tourists visiting the island will be restricted to the prison grounds and some beaches, and must be accompanied by an official guide at all times. Nonetheless, the transportation of tourists and all the goods needed to service them to and from the island, especially during peak tourist season, will put a strain on the island’s fragile ecosystem.
High-end tourist retreats and military bases are two of the worst polluters and are among the most disruptive in terms of damage to the environment and local culture. Law enshrined in the 1990s recognizes the right of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities to the island as a “collective property,” as well as their social rights to this “ethnic territory,” making them the caretakers of the island. In November, Petro announced that Colombia would no longer share intelligence with the United States after the U.S. attacked boats in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans, claiming they were carrying drugs. This could lead to a withdrawal of U.S. military personnel from military bases in Colombia—an event which might actually lift the “curse” of Gorgona Island.