"La Colonia penal is a free interpretation of a story by Kafka. If I had to defend myself in court, I would say itwas a metaphor on conditions in Latin America" (Ruiz). A foreign journalist arrives on a small Pacificisland 200 miles off the coast of South America. Once a leper colony, the island was later transformed intoa prison and then, under U.N. mandate, made into an independent republic. Yet despite democraticstructures, the inhabitants-who speak a strange dialect composed of Spanish and English-still obey the oldprison rules. After sending back detailed accounts of the torture and repression seen everywhere, thejournalist realizes that she's fallen into the trap created for her by the islanders: lacking naturalresources, the island's main export is news. The clearest anticipation of Ruiz's later European work, ThePenal Colony is a powerful document of the tensions and contradictions in Chile in the months beforeAllende's electoral victory. Richard Pe-a