DRUGS 33
3-1g Democratic Transition
Chile took a turn to democracy in 1990 after 17 years of dictatorship, but Colonia Dignidad remained
unchanged. Allegations of abuses and humiliations that occur inside the colony increases.
National and international pressure intensified, but each time the police try to conduct investigations
at the site they are greeted with a wall of silence. Colonia Dignidad authorities remain powerful and
also have allies in the army and the Chilean right, who warn them in advance when the police preparing
a site visit.
Slowly Chilean public opinion begins to change, creating a growing feeling of resentment towards the
place, which many begin to perceive as an independent state within Chile, an enclave.
3-1h Life under Shäfer leadership
The inhabitants lived under a strange authoritarian system, where in addition to minimal contact with the
outside, Schäfer ordered the division of families (parents did not talk to their children, or did not know
their siblings), it prohibited all kinds of relations sentimental or conjugal, among adult women and men,
and enacted the residence of each sex in isolated areas. Schäfer sexually abused children and some
were tortured, as is clear from the statements of the German Dr. Gisela Seewald, who admitted the use
of electroshock therapy and sedatives, that her boss had claimed were placebos.
In stark contrast however the colony had a school and hospital in the enclave which offered support to
rural families through free education and health services. This would, ultimately, have a support in case
the colony was attacked. However, there are many cases uncovered in recent years that refer to illegal
adoptions of children from families residing in the surrounding areas by the Germans hierarchy in order
to deliver on the promise of free education.
3-1i Accusations of atrocities
3-1ia Child molestation
Paul Schäfer, a former Luftwaffe paramedic, was the founder and first leader (“Permanent Uncle”) of
Colonia Dignidad. He had left Germany in 1961, after being accused of sexually abusing two boys.
On 20 May 1997, he fled Chile, pursued by authorities investigating charges that he had molested
26 children of the colony. Schäfer was also wanted for questioning about the disappearance in 1985
of Boris Weisfeiler. In March, 2005, he was arrested in Argentina and extradited to Chile. Twenty-two
other members of Colonia Dignidad, including Hartmut Hopp] the second-in-command, have been found
guilty of aiding the child molestation. Schäfer was convicted, and died of heart disease in prison, on
24 April 2010, while serving a 33-year sentence at the national penitentiary in Santiago.
3-1j Torture
3-1ja Families of disappeared people
During the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet the Colonia Dignidad served as a special torture
center. In 1991, Chile’s National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation concluded “that a certain
number of people apprehended by the DINA were really taken to Colonia Dignidad, held prisoner there
for some time, and that some of them were subjected to torture, and that besides DINA agents, some
of the residents there were involved in these actions.” The March 1977 Amnesty International report,
“Disappeared Prisoners in Chile”, referencing a U.N. report, refers to the evidence in this way:
Another… detention center described in the U.N. document, in which it is alleged that experiments in
torture are carried out, is Colonia Dignidad, near the town of Parral…
3-1k Member abuse
Some defectors from the colony have portrayed it as a cult in which leader Paul Schäfer held ultimate
power. They claim that the residents were never allowed to leave the colony, and that they were strictly
segregated by sex. Television, telephones and calendars were banned. Residents worked wearing
Bavarian peasant garb and sang German folk songs. Sex was banned, with some residents forced to
take drugs to reduce their desires. Drugs were also administered as a form of sedation, mostly to young
girls, but to males as well. Severe discipline in the forms of beatings and torture was commonplace:
Schäfer insisted that discipline was spiritually enriching.
There are more than 1,100 desaparecidos (disappeared persons) in Chile, many taken to the Colony
where they were tortured and killed, and one of them is a U.S. citizen – Boris Weisfeiler - a Russian-born
mathematics professor at Pennsylvania State University, Weisfeiler vanished while on a hiking trip near
the border between Chile and Argentina in the early part of January 1985. It is presumed that Weisfeiler
was kidnapped and taken to the Colony where he was tortured and killed. In 2012, a judge in Chile
ordered the arrest of eight former police and army officials over the kidnapping of Weisfeiler during the
Pinochet years, citing evidence from declassified US files.
3-1l Weapons violations
In June and July 2005, Chilean police found two illegal arms caches in or around the colony. The first,
within the colony itself, included three containers with machine guns, automatic rifles, rocket launchers,
and large quantities of ammunition, some as many as forty years old; even a battle tank was found under
the ground: this cache was described as the largest arsenal ever found in private hands in Chile.
The second cache, outside a restaurant operated by the colony, included rocket launchers and grenades.
In January 2005, Michael Townley, then living in the United States under a witness-protection program,
acknowledged to agents of Interpol Chile links between DINA and Colonia Dignidad. Townley also
revealed information about Colonia Dignidad and the army’s Laboratory on Bacteriological Warfare.
This last laboratory would have replaced the old DINA’s laboratory at Vía Naranja de Lo Curro hill, where
Townley worked with the chemist Eugenio Berríos. Townley also gave proof of biological experiments,
related to the two aforementioned laboratories, on political prisoners at Colonia Dignidad.
3-1m Nazi ties
Both the Central Intelligence Agency and Simon Wiesenthal have presented evidence of the presence
at the colony of the infamous Nazi concentration camp doctor Josef Mengele, known as the “Angel of
Death” for his lethal experiments on human subjects during the Holocaust.
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