Villa Baviera: Chile's Torture Colony Tourist Trap
Villa Baviera: Chile's Torture Colony Tourist Trap
By Monte Reel February 27, 2014
Courtesy Villa Baviera
Scene from Villa Baviera
The easiest way to get to Villa Baviera, a resort in Chile’s Andean foothills, starts with a four-hour train ride south from Santiago past small vineyards, villages of sun-faded stucco, and swaying windbreaks of Lombardy poplars. From the drowsy train station at Parral, you’ll need to raise dust on about 12 more miles of loose gravel roads, one of which leads to a small guardhouse and a closed gate. My driver pulls up to the gate. A woman emerges from the guardhouse, checks my name on a list,and flashes him a smile. “They all know me,” he says, “because every week I pick up a psychologist from Santiago at the train station and drive him here to work with the residents.” I spot a lookout tower rising above the roadside trees. “That’s from the old days,” he explains. “To prevent escapees.”
54-square-mile territory was known as Colonia Dignidad. Founded in 1961 by a group of German immigrants, the colony’s publicized aim was to deliver Christian charity to the local communities who’d suffered through the strongest earthquake ever recorded, a magnitude 9.5 that killed more than 4,000 people. The colonists built their own hospital, staffed it with their own doctors, and provided free health care to thousands of Chileans. But the group’s leader—a former Nazi nurse with a glass eye named Paul Schäfer—was fleeing a child molestation rap in West Germany. Safely ensconced in this remote alpine village, he spent the next three decades transforming the countryside, where pines and palms form unlikely alliances, into a place of terror. Schäfer controlled the 300 residents with absolute authority, railing against the corruption of the outside world. Children were separated from their parents and siblings and raised communally in groups of 6 to 15. Televisions, computers, and calendars were banned. Sex was forbidden without Schäfer’s approval. If residents committed sins in thought or deed, they were required to confess them directly to Schäfer, who sometimes punished them with electric shocks.
In the 1970s, General Augusto Pinochet’s military regime found Colonia Dignidad to be friendly territory, and Schäfer allowed the dictator’s secret police to detain political dissidents on the property. Chile’s National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, which investigated the human-rights violations of Pinochet’s government after he ceded power in 1990, concluded that an unknown number of political prisoners were tortured within the enclave and that some of the colony’s residents participated in the abuses. Several witnesses, including a former military security agent, have testified that political executions were also carried out on the premises. Famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal was convinced that Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” who oversaw deranged medical experiments at Auschwitz, enjoyed temporary refuge in Colonia Dignidad before fleeing to Brazil, where he died under an assumed name in 1979.
In 1997 more than 300 Chilean police descended on Colonia Dignidad to apprehend Schäfer, who’d been accused of rampant child molestation by several former residents who had escaped. With the aid of the remaining colonists, Schäfer fled to Argentina. In 2005 he was caught and convicted of sexual abuse charges; he died in prison in 2010. Since then, more than 20 other colony elders have been convicted of aiding him in his abuses.
More:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-27/villa-baviera-chiles-torture-colony-tourist-trap
It got a lot more serious than this. It was goddawful. There are many psychologically badly damaged survivors, who might or might not be all that better off than the ones who were murdered there.
More information, posted in 2010:
Paul Schaefer, German Guilty of Chile Child Abuse, Dies at 89
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x35096