”I look at myself in my full-length mirror. I’m horrified. I have disappeared and somebody I don’t recognise is looking back at me. I cannot tell how old she is, how much she weighs, whether she has a kind or a sad face, the length of her hair.” Muslim journalist Zaiba Malik had never worn the niqab, so she was shocked by how it made her feel — and how strangers reacted to it.

Officially the ”Democratic Republic of Pavón” was a prison farm outside Guatemala City, a patch of scrubland where inmates would grow vegetables and tend livestock in one of Latin America’s more progressive penal institutions. Recently a very different image emerged.