Director reveals why lights are never switched off in ‘world’s most dangerous prison’

Director Belarmino García’s deliberate administrative decision to keep the high-intensity facility lights burning twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, is not a mere quirk of prison architecture, but a stark, calculated statement of total state power and surveillance. Under this permanent, unyielding illumination, there is no true night to mark the passage of time, no private, shadowy corner to escape the gaze of guards, and no easy mental retreat into restful dreams. Inmates are constantly counted, rigidly drilled in formation, preached to by authorities, and locked away inside their cramped cells for an astonishing 23 and a half hours every single day, with a brutal, isolated punishment cell waiting for any individual who dares to resist. For a nation that was once drowning in unprecedented domestic bloodshed and violence, this extreme level of confinement is presented by the government as the necessary, unyielding price of long-term societal peace. Yet, deep inside those perpetually lit walls, a profound question quietly lingers: at what ultimate cost to the human soul?