A Look at Panama’s Coiba Island outside of the tourist confines

(News Australia) AT FIRST glance it appears to be a pristine stretch of coastline where cruise ships full of excited tourists dock.

Here, they grab the chance to stretch their legs while taking in the beauty of Central America’s largest island, Coiba, which seems like a typical, secluded tropical getaway.

But they daren’t wander too far from the shore.

Because little do they know that they’re only seeing a tiny part of the picture. The tourist part of this island in Panama is located to the north, it’s a tiny section that’s well-maintained and secure. It has great diving spots, and even a pet crocodile trained to fetch your soccer ball (yes, really, but good luck trying to get it back).

But those who venture just outside of the touristy area — which is very few as a permit is required — step into a whole other world.

Here, paradise morphs into a place that’s straight out of a nightmare.

Adventurer, war correspondent and former US Army Ranger been to Coiba around eight times in recent years and knows the area well.

“The island is absolutely malicious, I’ve been around the world and I’ve never been anywhere where I felt so much like nature was trying to kill me,” Mr Holton tells news.com.au.

“Everything on that island wants to bite you, everything is poisonous. It’s not a fun place to go camping. It’s probably the most Indiana Jones-style adventurous place I’ve ever been in my life.”

Mr Holton visited as recently as last year, and is planning another expedition there in 2016. What he has discovered was so fascinating and disturbing that he started writing a book about his time in this forgotten world of terrors.

Essentially it’s a huge, unforgiving landscape which can turn on you in an instant.

“The island is quite large (503 square kilometres), it’s the size of a country, yet it’s never been formally explored,” Mr Holton said.

“For the last 10 years we’ve been running expeditions into the interior of the island, exploring places where no human being has ever been.

“It is like the land before time — it’s amazing, and beautiful.

“There are cruise ships that stop there, they stop at the north end of the island where they keep it trimmed and nice … but the real interesting part of the island is further south.”

We’re talking about a place with mutant animals, trees that can hurt you and crocodiles that lay hiding in wait.

“There are lots of species of animals that exist there — there are mice the size of watermelon, deer with short legs, strange lizards you don’t see anywhere else, as well as gigantic bats.

“There are trees that when it rains, as the water filters down it produces an acid that will burn you if you’re standing underneath. There are also snakes that fall out of the trees.”

But the one thing that will be forever burned into his memory is what he saw inside the island’s prison, the scene of unimaginable horrors.

Until just over a decade ago, Coiba was one of the largest operating island prison systems in world history — next to only Australia.

Built in 1919, the now-abandoned Coiba Island Prison housed 3000 inmates at its peak — many political prisoners — in about 30 camps.

It was virtually inescapable, with some known as los desaparacidos, or “the disappeared” — held in secret, never to return.

It was a place of great torment.

This extract from a Human Rights Watch report is the tip of the iceberg: “Credible reports indicate that inmates at the Coiba Island facility were also severely and systematically abused by their jailers in 1991.

“Two inmates at Coiba who died in July are believed to have been victims of torture by prison officials, and more than 170 fellow inmates have complained of serious physical and psychological abuse.

“Government sources have acknowledged that abuses at the Coiba facility were confirmed in reports by lower-ranking prison officials that were later suppressed by the Ministry of Government and Justice.”

Mr Holton said he first learnt of the prison when he was involved in the American invasion of Panama in 1989.

He heard stories of its history, where prisoners formed tribes and would engage in raging gang wars. There were also reports of cannibalism and failed escapes.

“Prisoners would sometimes escape in 80s, tired of forced labour. The guards wouldn’t even bother to look for them, as they’d either die or come crawling back in.

“The guards were notoriously brutal, and used torture tactics.

“They had this ritual for new prisoners, the guards would take them into the jungle, blindfold them, line them up and have a mock execution. The would put guns to them, count down ‘three, two, one, fire’, intimidating them.”

When Mr Holton saw the prison for the first time, he was on a team mission to search the entire building. What they found was shocking.

“There were some political prisoners there who were being held there on the island, but what we didn’t know was there were a few cells that were packed with people,” he said. “The guards that were left there told us not to go in as they all had AIDS.

“We realised that several of the men in the cell had perished in the days before we got there. The dead had been left with the living, you can imagine the smell of several corpses that had been rotting.”

And then, a sight of utter despair.

“There was also a man who had been put in a cell, essentially a concrete box with no windows, light, toilet, or furniture. He was fed once a day through the bottom of the door.”

They had to pull him out, and after having been in there for seven months he couldn’t cope.

“He had gone insane, and was living in 8 inches (20cm) of his own filth. He was rolled up in a ball, screaming and demanding to be put back inside as the sun hurt him.

“There was a lot of misery there.”

In later years, inmates wandered away from the prison.

“The guards had fled so the prisoners were roaming around the island freely in probably the worst living conditions I’ve ever seen,” he said.

What happened to the animals on the island is also disturbing.

“The scariest thing on the island now is the prisoners had some livestock, when they closed the prison in 2004 and took prisoners away, much of livestock wandered off and turned feral.

“Several times we went to settle down for the night in our camp, and heard bulldozer-like sounds, as mutant animals ran past.”

He said it’s incredibly difficult to explore the island, and you never know what you’ll come across.

“The first time we tried to cross the island in 2007 we failed. We had tried to go in a straight line over the land, but the foliage is so thick that we were making less than a mile a day, it was like hacking through a brick wall.

“So the second time, a year later, we decided to wade in one of the creeks and follow it to its source and jump over one mountain range then follow another creek.

“We didn’t have to use the machetes too much, we stuck to the sandbars. But the danger in that is there were a lot of caiman crocs, laying in the bottom, waiting for someone to walk along then drag it underwater, so we had a couple of close calls, stepping close to them and seeing them at the last minute.”

Crocodiles aren’t the only animals you have to watch out for.

“There are scary lizards that hang out on the bank of the river, when they get startled they run across the water fast, explosively, so you don’t notice them there until you get close and they decide it’s time to run away. It’s heart attack after heart attack.”

“There’s also a large flock of scarlet macaw here. They are the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen, but we found out the hard way at night they roost in the trees and if they get startled they call out with a sound like a pterodactyl that’s going to eat you.

“They also have bugs that are like sand fleas and because there’s not much to eat out there, when you show up on the beach, after about 3pm it’s like someone sprinkled pepper on your skin. They’re tiny, but they must be nothing but teeth, it’s like being stung by a bee.

“There’s 500 of them that descend on you at the same time. We wore gloves, long pants and head nets, they are horrific.”

He said as the area is so little explored, that it’s become a haven for drug runners — many of them armed — who use it to refuel.

“There are still a detachment of Panamanian coastguard staying on the island to keep squatters and drug runners away. The narco traffickers like to use the island as a stopover for their fast boats going there.

“Last time I was there they’d found a drug runners camp, they saw from the plane. They ran off into the jungle so the coastguard took their boats, food, everything, left them in there.

“The day before we showed up on our last trip they came stumbling out of the jungle and gave up.”

It’s not all horror here — some remarkable discoveries have been made in recent years, including what Mr Holton says is evidence of a secret CIA base built after WWII.

In the 1980s it was turned into a base for Panama’s special forces but they abandoned it when the American invasion happened, booby-trapping it with landmines.

But the most exciting find of all could end up rewriting history.

“In the 1990s some of the prisoners started finding these artefacts in one of the river beds on the island. Somehow one of them got to someone from the Smithsonian (the world’s largest museum and research complex) who said they were pre-Colombian tools.

“They believe somewhere on the island there’s a lost city.”

Panama sent a group 150 explorers out there after the discovery, who stumbled across a large, recent mass grave where it’s believed guards had been killing prisoners for sport and throwing them into a pit. So they abandoned the mission.

It’s hoped next year will be the year the ruins are discovered.

“We’re working on the same expedition now,” he said. “We have some aerial photos that would suggest man-made ruins on the mountaintop, and we’re working on funding.

“Weather is the main challenge, we have to wait for transitional period between the wed and dry season. Once, we were almost washed out to sea during one mission, due to a flash flood in the middle of the night.”

It will take a lot of preparation.

“Previous expeditions have been to accomplish crossing from coast to coast, which nobody in living memory has ever done. But they haven’t been archaeological in nature. We want to do this one right.”