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INTRODUCTION TO COLONIA DIGNIDAD

Alex Constantine - March 2, 2010

colonia dignidad - INTRODUCTION TO COLONIA DIGNIDADLocation: Colonia Dignidad is a settlement founded by German immigrants in 1961 and is located along the banks of the Perquilauquen river and the El Lavandero estuary, near Catillo in southern Chile.

Duration: Survivors' testimonies have verified that the German colony was used as a detention and torture center during the 1973-77 period but precise dates are not known. Collaboration with the DINA, in form of property leases, began in late 1974. Although it no longer possesses the status of a charitable organization, the colony still exists today, under the name of Villa Baviera and is the subject of an ongoing investigation by the Chilean judicial system.

Prisoners: An unknown number of people were detained at Colonia Dignidad.

Conditions: "In Villa Grimaldi I had access to the filing cabinet which contained records about people who were wanted or who had been detained..."

(Read the testimony provided by Samuel Fuenzalida D., former DINA agent, 1979.)

Research by Amnesty International and the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Rettig Commission) led these organizations to conclude that the colony collaborated with the DINA intelligence agency which was the predominant repressive agent of the period.

From the Rettig Report

This Commission should not make statements about issues or controversies that go beyond its mandate. However, it cannot avoid examining and making known its conclusions regarding denunciations about the use of Colonia Dignidad, through some kind of agreement between the DINA and the colony's leaders, for holding and torturing political prisoners. Colonia Dignidad has been denounced as the place many of the disappeared prisoners were last seen. This examination and these conclusions are part of the Commission's mandate to report not only the most severe human rights violations committed during the period covered by this report, but also their background and circumstances.

To examine this issue, the Commission received numerous declarations, testimonies and other evidence used in judicial files in Chile and the Federal Republic of Germany as well as documentary information and a large amount of circumstantial evidence and contextual references. The Commission requested, in writing, authorization to visit Colonia Dignidad, but this request was rejected by the colony’s leaders, also in writing.

Taking into account all the facts, the Commission has reached the following conclusions:

It is proven that there were diverse relations between the DINA and Colonia Dignidad. It confirms that once the DINA was created as "DINA Commission" in November 1973, its agents used properties such as Colonia Dignidad’s "El Lavandero" and the "hijuelas" of the former "San Manuel" estate in Parral for the DINA’s purposes, either for training its agents or other institutional ends. It also confirms that a house located on Ignacio Carrera Pinto street, formerly 262 Union Street, in Parral was acquired by the Sociedad Benefactora y Educacional Dignidad (Colonia Dignidad) through a written property agreement on May 24, 1974, registered under its name the following year and sold in 1986. It is known that this house was used by the DINA, specifically for its regional intelligence brigade. It is also known that the DINA Director and other DINA agents visited Colonia Dignidad and appeared to maintain cordial relations with its leaders.

"...My body was full of cuts and bruises. I was rotting everywhere. I had pus in my eyes, my nose. My mouth was completely numb. I could feel nothing in my penis and I couldn't feel my limbs. My body was full of cigarette burns..."

(Read excerpt from the book "After the First Death: A Journey Through Chile Time Mind", Toronto, 1996)

The Commission received a large number of declarations from individuals who were arrested by the DINA in Santiago and who said they were taken at some point to Colonia Dignidad, where they were held blindfolded and subjected to torture there. It also received declarations from people who were arrested in the Parral area or nearby cities of the region and brought to Colonia Dignidad, where they received similar treatment. A significant number of these declarations validate their claims and they are so similar to each other and with other information, including declarations by some former DINA agents and even former members of Colonia Dignidad itself - that there is no doubt about their truthfulness. The Commission must therefore conclude that a certain number of people arrested by the DINA were effectively taken to Colonia Dignidad, held there for a while, and some tortured, with not only the DINA agents' participation but also with that of people who lived there.

The Commission likewise received specific denunciations regarding disappeared (other than those who were only temporarily held at Colonia Dignidad), whose trace had been definitively lost in Colonia Dignidad. Apart from the fact that the Commission effectively considers these people disappeared, and the existence of indications that they may have been taken to Colonia Dignidad after their arrest, only one individual - alvaro Vallejos Villagran, can strictly be said to have disappeared forever after being transferred to Colonia Dignidad.

The Parral House

The DINA's Regional Intelligence Brigade (BIR) operated from the building on 262 Ignacio Carrera Pinto Street in the city of Parral. The BIR apparently had operative responsibilities and/or support that went beyond the immediate zone. Detained people were also held in this building, though there is no knowledge of fatalities among them.

History of Colonia Dignidad

A group of Germans who arrived in Chile in the mid-1950s founded La Sociedad Benefactora y Educacional Dignidad and were joined in 1961 by their eventual leader Paul Schaefer, who fled to Chile from Germany where he faced child molestation charges.

The colonists carried out agricultural and commercial activities on the 13,000 hectares of land they lived on as well as charitable activites such as running a free hospital and school. Throughout the years, there have been numerous incidents and public denunciations about Colonia Dignidad's activities and living conditions inside the colony. In 1991, then president Patricio Aylwin stripped Colonia Dignidad of its non-profit status and the colony re-organized under the name Villa Baviera. More than 50 charges were filed in the 1980's and 90's against Paul Schaefer and Colonia Dignidad from the labor board, customs service and the internal revenue service but the most notorious charges Schaefer faces are for several counts of sexual abuse of minors. As of early 1998, Schaefer remains a fugitive from the law despite a massive manhunt operation conducted by the Chilean police, including several raids on the Villa Baviera compound.

http://www.chipsites.com/derechos/testimonio_dignidad_1_eng.html
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German Settlement Stirs Controversy in Chile
Court Blocks Effort by Bonn to Investigate Allegations of Forced Labor, Sexual Abuse
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post | Dec. 25, 1987, p. A29

Colonia1 300x177 - INTRODUCTION TO COLONIA DIGNIDADPARRAL, Chile—The settlers came from West Germany looking for a hideaway and found one down a long, dusty road in the sparsely populated foothills of the Chilean Andes.

But the sullied past of their spiritual leader, the secretiveness of the vast enterprise they built here and the recurring horror stories about their lives have kept them in the news and under suspicion for more than two decades.

Leaders of the settlement, known as Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony), insist that it is nothing more than a disciplined agricultural community whose members want privacy. But chilling declarations from the few who have fled from behind the colony's double barbed-wire fences tell of forced labor, sexual abuse, mind-altering drugs, corporal punishment and the segregation of men from women and parents from children.

A former secret police agent and a police informant have backed up claims by several one-time detainees that political prisoners were tortured and killed at the colony in the early years after Gen. Augusto Pinochet took power in 1973.

After a quarter-century of either ignoring the colony or at times even fraternizing with its members, many of whom are German, West German authorities have decided to try to lift the veil surrounding it. The West German ambassador and chief consular officer visited the colony in early November to conduct interviews. According to Bonn officials, the diplomats came away with the impression that colony members were not able to speak to them freely.

A special commission appointed by the West German government arrived in Chile Dec. 13 to probe further. The colony blocked the investigation with a court order and the delegation left Chile Dec. 18.

A West German Embassy spokesman said the mission, despite its failure to gain access, would present a report to Foreign Minister Hans Dietrich Genscher.

A parallel effort by a German judge to sort fact from fiction is moving forward after years of delay, now that a Chilean court has approved a request to take depositions from 33 individuals connected with the settlement.

"There have been investigations before, ending with our society being cleared," Harmut Hopp, a doctor who serves as colony spokesman, said in a telephone interview. "We don't understand why so many German authorities are interested in us now. We don't have any importance in international politics."

As part of an apparent response to the probe, the settlement, which usually is closed to journalists, allowed a reporter from the pro-Pinochet Chilean newspaper El Mercurio to visit earlier this month. The resulting double-page spread portrayed an austere commune whose ways may be a bit eccentric but not sinister.

According to the article, family life there takes a back seat to work, and relations between the sexes are regimented. Youths are discouraged from marrying until they are 21. Children are kept in single-sex dormitories until they leave to marry. Young people are not permitted to watch television or listen to the radio. Women do not wear trousers or short skirts.

Colony members put in long hours without pay. "Work should be the purpose of human life, and one should not feel that one must rest after eight hours of work," Hopp was quoted in Mercurio as saying. "There is a malformation in modern man that makes him think he is obligated to rest and have fun after eight hours of work."

In a departure from past practice, the Catholic University television station was allowed to show scenes of children playing and members of the colony working in the bakery and dairy. On its news show Dec. 16, it quoted the colony's president, Hermann Schmidt, as saying criticism was "all lies."

The settlement's strict ways and its bitter confrontations with critics over the years have instilled a sense of unease among some Chileans who live nearby.

"People here are afraid," said Sister Paulina, one of three nuns who were legally evicted from property claimed by the colony after months of harassment in 1984. "People know they can buy the colony's products and even go to its hospital for medical care. But they also know that confronting the colony past a certain point means danger."

The colony was founded by Paul Schaefer, leader of a breakaway Baptist sect who left West Germany in 1961 as police sought him on charges of sexually abusing children at a youth home he ran in Sieburg, near Bonn. Schaefer turned up in Chile in 1962, bringing about 60 adults and children. Some of the youngsters had come with their parents' consent; others, according to filed complaints, were taken under false pretenses. Since then, the colony has grown into what its critics describe as "a state within a state." It maintains its own airfield, 65-bed hospital, wheat mill, bakery, meat processing factory, dairy and cemetery, according to visitors and colony officials.

According to witnesses, the settlement has a fleet of heavy trucks, a mechanics workshop, a power plant and facilities for making bricks and slate tiles. It also has a powerful radio communications system, with which it stays in touch with ancillary operations, including an office in a house in Santiago.

It operates a school and provides free medical attention to neighbors, a service that supports the settlement's claim to be a charitable organization.

The colony opened a roadside restaurant near Bulnes two years ago, where its brown bread, honey, cheese, sausages and cakes are sold. The colony also changed its name recently, to Villa Baviera (Bavarian Village), reflecting its affinity for the southern German state of Bavaria and the governing party there, the conservative Christian Social Union, whose chairman, Franz Josef Strauss, is prominently displayed on posters at the colony.

About 250 adults and 100 children live at the settlement, according to colony officials, but no public record exists of births and deaths there.

Invited guests are often treated to banquets and choral singing in a pastoral mountain setting. The uninvited are brusquely turned away.

At a remote-controlled gate some distance from the colony's main entrance, a woman's voice warns visitors through an intercom not to take photos from the road of the colony's property without written permission. The main entrance is 22 miles east of Parral and the settlement sprawals across 12,000 acres.

The colony first broke into the news in 1966 when Wolfgang Muller, then about 20, escaped and accused Schaefer of a reign of terror. Muller said he had been forced to work long hours in the fields for no pay and was frequently beaten. He also told authorities that he had been sexually abused by Schaefer before they came to Chile and that Schaefer had used memory-altering drugs on him when he became rebellious.

According to Muller's accounts, children were separated from their parents in the settlement and later instructed to address them as aunt and uncle. Muller said a number of former Nazis lived in the settlement, but he denied that Nazi or anti-Semitic ideas were part of the community's ideology.

If Muller's declarations sounded fantastic, those of the second person to flee that year, Wilhelmine Lindeman, were supported by medical evidence. She told of being drugged and was found to have had several injections.

Days later, however, Lindeman denied her statements and agreed to return to the colony.

Her decision came after a visit y Schmidt, who informed her that her husband had just arrived from West Germany and was waiting for her at the settlement. Nothing more was heard of the Lindemans.

The outcry caused by the two cases led to questions in the Chilean Senate and an official inquiry. A commission entered the colony but said it found nothing. Amid accusations of bribery, the inquiry was dropped.

Three years after the 1973 coup that brought Pinochet to power, a United Nations human rights report referred to testimony about dogs at the colony trained to attack intruders' sexual organs, experiments testing torture tolerance limits and the use of drugs to break detainees.

"It seems," the report said, "that in Colonia Dignidad there is a specially equipped underground torture center with small soundproofed cells, hermetically sealed. The detainees' heads are covered with leather hoods, which are stuck to their faces with substances that are supposedly chemicals. In these cells, interrogations are carried out through electronic equipment, including loudspeakers and microphones, while detainees are tied naked to metal frames to receive electric shocks."

Allegations that the colony had become involved in political repression under the Pinochet government received dramatic support in 1977 from Juan Rene Munoz Alarcon, a former Socialist Party member who turned collaborator with Pinochet's secret police and was later imprisoned by the government for trying to protect a one-time leftist colleague.

In a taped deposition to the Vicariate of Solidarity, the Catholic Church's human rights group in Santiago, Munoz identified the colony as one of several places where persons who had disappeared after being seized by security forces were held. He later was found stabbed to death.

Uninvited visitors get no farther than a remote-controlled gate marked with the colony's logo. The roughly 350 residents run a hospital, a bakery and a dairy.

Also in 1977, the West German magazine Stern and the human rights organization Amnesty International published reports accusing the colony of being a site of secret-police torture of political prisoners. Supporting the allegation were statements from several former prisoners. An ex-agent, Samuel Fuenzalida, testified that he had delivered prisoners to the colony on two occasions in 1974, were he was received by a man known as "the professor," whom he later identified form photographs as Schaefer.

The colony sued Stern and Amnesty International for libel, accusing them of a leftist-inspired campaign of lies. But the colony has since dodged requests by the West German court hearing the case to inspect the camp.

Last month, Stern published harrowing accounts form several people who had escaped the colony three years ago. One was Hugo Baar, a Baptist minister and a Russian-German exile who fled the Ukraine, established a religious colony in Germany's Westphalia in 1955, then moved to Siegburg—where he met Schaifer and helped organize the colony. After a falling out with Schaefer, Baar slipped away from the colony in December 1984.

Three months later, Georg and Lotti Packmor also bolted, leaving an adopted son behind. In testimony to West German authorities that Stern quotes, the Packmors recounted beatings, drug injections and other sadistic treatments that they said were intended to destroy individual personalities and turn colony members into virtual slave laborers.

These fresh reports, on file at the West German Foreign Ministry since 1985 but kept confidential, prompted the German Embassy in Santiago to cool what had for years been rather cordial ties with the colony. Foreign Minister Genscher is said to be intent on exposing it. The Bonn government sends $48,000 to $80,000 in pensions to colony residents each month, according to German press reports.

Among the things German officials are known to be looking into is the possibility that 20 to 30 children who have disappeared from West Germany may have been taken to the colony.

http://www.maebrussell.com/Articles%20and%20Notes/Colonia%20Dignidad%20in%20Chile.html

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