New role for Chile house of horrors

[Judi Lynn]

New role for Chile house of horrors
Eva Vergara
February 10, 2006

A CHILEAN mansion used as a spy centre by former dictator Augusto Pinochet's feared secret police will now house great works of art and be dedicated to the leader Pinochet overthrew in a bloody 1973 coup.

The Salvador Allende Solidarity Museum in Santiago, due to open in April, will exhibit work by Pablo Picasso, Roberto Matta and Joan Miro. "This is Salvador Allende's revenge," says Jose Balmes, the Spanish-born director of the museum.

The remodelling of the mansion was a journey through the inner workings of the shadowy agency responsible for many of the dictatorship's worst abuses. Workers found passports, instructions to agents and diagrams of places under surveillance or targeted for operations. "We found a communications centre used to tap telephones around the country," Balmes says.

Some of the rooms in the large, two-storey house, located in a middle-class neighbourhood, were used for interrogating detainees, Balmes says.
(snip/...)

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,18096675%255E16947,00.html