The headquarters that has housed the General Archive of the Nation since 1976 was once one of the cruelest prisons in Mexico, considered ‘Hell on Earth’. Regarding the 123rd anniversary of its inauguration, we remember the most famous prisoners of the Lecumberri Palace.
Who designed the Lecumberri?
This enclosure was designed by engineers Miguel Quintana, Antonio Torres Torija and Antonio M. Anza, with a style of panoptic prison architecture, which consisted of the construction of a series of corridors that all culminated in one point, with a surveillance tower. to the center so as not to lose details of the inmates.
At first, this place housed about a thousand people, but over time the number quadrupled, so the individual cells had to be occupied by three or more people and it ended up being a place where inmates ended up lose your sanity.
The punishment cells were in deplorable conditions, there was no bathroom and illnesses and infections were a daily occurrence, causing the death of the prisoners. As the years passed, the penitentiary stopped receiving maintenance and the prisoners had to survive inhumane conditions.
On August 17, 1960, the Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros entered the Black Palace of Lecumberri, where he remained for four years accused, among other crimes, of carrying prohibited weapons, dangerous attack, damage to other people’s property and social dissolution. pic.twitter.com/vpLsjQgl9D
— Cronicas de Banqueta (@cronicabanqueta) January 23, 2021
Among the most chilling rumors surrounding this prison, it stands out that the prisoners did not have food and were exhausted to the bone, in addition to some claiming that several students from the 1968 student movement ended up there being tortured and murdered.
Who are the most famous prisoners who were in the Lecumberri Palace?
Among the most famous people who were imprisoned in the Lecumberri Palace, the following stand out: Pancho Villa, José Revueltas (writer), David Alfaro Siqueiros (painter), Ramón Mercader (murderer of León Trotsky), Francisco ‘El Chalequero’ Guerrero (known as the first serial killer of the country), Álvaro Mutis (novelist) and even the singer Juan Gabriel.
It was on August 27, 1976 that the history of the Lecumberri Palace ended and it was designated as the site to store the country’s documentary collection with the aim of creating a cultural center in an area that lacked this type of services.
2023-09-29 21:27:11
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