Ushuaia It is a tourist city in Argentina that is located in the south of the American continent in the area known as “Land of fire” or “End of the world”, because it is located as far south as the American continent.
In this region is located the jail most emblematic of the country, which although it closed several decades ago, continues to be a place that thousands of tourists visit year after year for its history.
The “end of the world” penalty
According to the Argentine government, the Ushuaia prison Construction began in 1902 and that year, the prisoners themselves became involved in the construction of the maximum security prison that would hold them captive.
Formally, construction was completed in the 1920s and although it was initially intended to have cells with only one inmate, the prison came to house up to 600 prisoners in 386 cells that were located in five pavilions.
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The Prison Museum mentions that in this place there were prisoners who committed serious crimes and that they were even sentenced to life imprisonmentSome of them were Mateo Banks, Cayetano Santos, nicknamed “The short big-eared one”, Pedro Bidegain, Carlos Montes, Mario Cima and Emir Mercader, several of them were political prisoners.
The prison did not last even 30 years activeas it closed in 1947 by order of President Juan Domingo Perón for several reasons, but one of them was for the humanitarian side, as the extreme climate that is experienced in that area, being relatively close to Antarctica, affected both the pprisoners and staff alike.
Another argument for its closure was that the former president sought to modernize the penitentiary system. Finally, the building of the “The End of the World” prison It was sold to the Argentine Navy to create the Ushuaia Naval Base.
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After the 1990s, the place finally became the headquarters of the Ushuaia Maritime Museum and the Prison Museumplaces where part of the history of Ushuaia.