Free Escape from Shadow Island by Paul Adam

what use was anger? Anger wouldn’t get his mother out of prison. It wouldn’t clear her name. It wouldn’t help him find out whether his father was still alive. Only action could do that.
    He’d waited long enough. At the beginning, he’d thought that somehow everything would sort itself out. That the Santo Domingans would realize they’d made a mistake and release his mother. Or that the British government would see she’d been wrongfully imprisoned and do something about it. But nothing had happened.
    His mother had a lawyer in Santo Domingo who was supposed to be representing her, trying to get her case reopened, but he was getting nowhere. The British government was equally useless. Despite severalappeals from his mother, they had made no attempt to put pressure on the Santo Domingans to look at her conviction again.
    Max knew now that he’d been naïve. He’d spent too long relying on others. If anything was going to happen, he was going to have to do it himself.
    But how?
    Where did he begin?
    He reflected for a moment, then turned on his computer. He’d done some research on Santo Domingo when his mother had first been imprisoned there, but he’d forgotten a lot of it. He needed to refresh his memory, remind himself how the country worked, how its political and legal systems operated.
    He clicked on a few websites and read through them. Santo Domingo was a tiny country in Central America, so small that most people had never heard of it. Fifty miles long and about half that in width, it was dwarfed by the nearby, much larger states of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Santo Domingo seemed to have kept its independence only because there was nothing much there that anyone wanted. It had no oil, no natural gas, no minerals, no timber, just swamps and a lot of mosquitoes. The Spanish had conquered it in the sixteenth century, stripping it of its gold andother valuables and wiping out most of the native population in the process. It had then remained a Spanish colony until the mid-nineteenth century, when it was granted independence and the freedom to manage its own affairs.
    For more than a hundred years thereafter the country was run by a succession of military dictators, each as brutal and incompetent as the last, until, in the 1970s, a nationwide uprising removed the last of the generals and brought democracy and fair elections to Santo Domingo. The leader of the Partido Democrático Popular—the Democratic Popular Party or PDP—was a teacher named Juan Cruz, who became the president and spent two years reforming the country. He established a national health service, provided free education for all children, and took land away from the rich and gave it to peasant farmers. This made the generals, who also happened to be wealthy landowners themselves, decide that democracy wasn’t such a good idea. They staged a military coup, assassinated Juan Cruz, and seized back control.
    Then followed a period of savage repression. The PDP was banned, political opponents of the ruling regime were rounded up and imprisoned or shot, and the country returned to the squalor and poverty that it hadendured under every previous military government.
    Once the generals were firmly back in power, they restored the land to the rich landowners and took their revenge on the peasants. A large area of coastal territory near the capital that had belonged to small independent farmers was confiscated and sold to an international consortium of property developers, who proved just as greedy as the Spanish conquistadors.
    Santo Domingo didn’t have much going for it in terms of resources, but it did have two things that rich western tourists could appreciate—sun and sand. So the developers built the resort of Playa d’Oro, which meant “golden beach,” and turned Santo Domingo into a haven for the wealthy. Some came there simply for holidays, but many more came to live in