France to try 17 Pinochet associates linked to disappearances of French nationals (Jurist)

[struggle4progress]

Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Joshua Pantesco at 3:31 PM ET

A French judge on Wednesday signed a 191-page indictment against 17 former associates of former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, charging them with abduction and torture in connection with the disappearance of four French nationals in Chile during Pinochet's rule from 1973 to 1990. The 17 are thought to be living in Chile and Argentina, and will likely be tried in absentia, facing potential life sentences. AFP has more ...

http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2007/02/france-to-try-17-pinochet-associates.php

Additional links via main link

[Hieronymus]

1. Yesssssss ....

[Judi Lynn]

2. It will be very interesting if far more comes out about both of these men.

From what I've seen already, they are two of the worst characters you would ever imagine, EVER. As you can tell, they have had very powerful friends. Right-wing friends, of course.



Manuel Contreras, Secret Police

~snip~
Contreras, at forty-four one of the youngest colonels in the Chilean Army, would later become its youngest general. But he did not seek power through rank alone. Port San Antonio and the Tejas Verdes regiment provided a base to build upon until he would stand next to power itself.

The son of a middle-class, social-climbing military family, Contreras was in his final year at the Chilean military academy when one of his future victims, Orlando Letelier, entered as a lowly plebeian. Early in his career, Contreras attracted the attention of one of his former academy professors, Captain Augusto Pinochet. The two, young officer and his mentor, became close friends, and Pinochet crowned their friendship by standing as godfather<3> at the baptism of one of Contreras' children.

As a major, Contreras spent two years - 1967 through 1969 - at the Army Career Officers School in Fort Belvoir, Virginia. While in the United States he joined the Lions Club at Fort Hunt, Virginia, a membership he would proudly continue in Chile's chapter of Lions International. And he opened an account at Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., which proved convenient later on.
(snip)

San Antonio was Santiago's closest link to the Pacific. For weeks before the coup the sixty-five miles of highway between the city and its port were almost void of lorry traffic, the road being under siege by striking truckers. Ships loaded with hundreds of tons of wheat languished at anchor in the harbour, while in Santiago President Allende announced that the city of four million would run out of flour for bread in three days. An army convoy could have run the gauntlet of truckers and their bands of opposition - party toughs armed only with small - calibre rifles and pistols. But San Antonio had become enemy territory under Contreras. No ships were unloaded; no convoys organised to bring food to Santiago. Days before the coup Contreras ordered army squads to round up young leftists suspected of preparing armed resistance to the impending coup.

On September 11th 1973, the day of the coup d'état, few shots were fired; the rule of the UP government (Popular Unity<5>) had already ended in San Antonio. Trucks lined up once again at the docks to transport grain to Santiago, but on September 13th the radical dockworkers' union staged a sit-down strike to protest the abolition of job-protection rules by the new military authorities. Contreras invited four union leaders to his office to negotiate on the afternoon of the thirteenth. The next morning, four bullet-riddled bodies were delivered to the union leaders' families in sealed coffins. There were no more strikes in San Antonio.

Other bodies began to be washed up regularly on city beaches. Nurses at the city hospital recognised some of the bodies as persons who had been brought injured to the hospital after the coup, then dragged out at night by military patrols. During the first weeks after the coup, squads of soldiers and civilian collaborators rounded up dozens, then hundreds of UP militants and sympathisers. By the end of September the word had spread that Contreras had established a prison camp at a military storage dump by the Maipo River bridge near the Tejas Verdes regimental headquarters.
(snip/…)

http://www.remember-chile.org.uk/beginners/contdina.htm

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Paul Schaefer’s Colonia Dignidad



Paul Schaefer

July 30, 2005

Colonia Dignidad In Chile – Fall Of The “gods”

~snip~
In July 2005, Chilean officials finally discovered caches of machine guns and rocket-launchers, thousands of rusty rifles and endless boxes of ammunition. Interior Minister Jorge Correa declared: “We’re talking about a large arsenal and I must stress that it’s going to end up being the largest ever found in private hands in the life and history of Chile.”

More than 40 years of the outrageous history of Colonia Dignidad is over. What was known for decades to the victims as well as inhabitants of this humble part of the country is now in the open: 70 sq. miles of land owed and controlled by German religious fanatics, extreme right wingers and child molesters holds some of the most sinister secrets in the history of South America.

In the early 90’s, your correspondent spent several months investigating this institution, interviewing dozens of political prisoners from the area, farmers as well as defectors from the colony itself. He was amassing the evidence but there was absolutely no interest in the story: not in Chile, not in Germany, nor anywhere else. Colony had powerful allies including leading Chilean businessmen and lawyers and top ranking members of the military. Despite the collapse of dictatorship, the colony seemed to be untouchable.

Colonia Dignidad established itself in Chile in 1961. Ironically, its leaders bought the land from a Jewish owner, tricking him to believe that the sect’s members were all Second World War victims and refugees. The opposite was true: Paul Schaefer (also known as “Pius” and “Eternal Uncle”) – former Luftwaffe medic – was a Nazi who later became a preacher and was wanted by Interpol on the charges of sexual abuse of children in Germany.

Schaefer managed to indoctrinate his followers forcing them to transfer their savings and pension plans to the common financial pool of the sect. After moving to Chile, members were forced to give up all their rights; laboring on the fields, living in dormitories (men and women separately) and cut off all contacts with the surrounding world.

In a relatively short time, Colonia Dignidad became a powerful state inside the state. Surrounded by the high-voltage barbed wire and “protected” by the latest surveillance technology and specially trained German Shepard dogs, it became almost entirely self-sufficient. It managed to produce enough food to feed its members and to sell its excess production in the stores of Santiago and elsewhere. It had its own power-plant, airport (big enough to accommodate Hercules transport planes), fleet of cars, busses, trucks and agricultural vehicles; a school, hospital and recording/broadcasting studio.

Official status of the colony was that of social institution. Doctors were treating (free of charge) local children and adults; school was open to the outsiders from surrounding villages and towns. Only much later was it discovered that while under anesthesia, several patients had their organs removed from their bodies. In exchange for free education, children had to labor in the fields and undergo intensive indoctrination. Leaders of the colony were spreading the word among Chilean villagers that they were visited by the white Gods who arrived in order to save them from their misery.

Sexual abuse of children was widespread. Schaefer and other high ranking members of the colony were entering showers of young boys, selecting victims for sexual abuse. Children had to live separately from their parents. Marriages had to be arranged or at least approved by the leaders. Sexual contacts of unmarried couples were discouraged; those who disobeyed were severely punished. Women who became pregnant “without permission” had two choices: abortion or live in total isolation before the delivery.

Those few members who managed to escape spoke of torture and of chemicals as well as powerful drugs which were given to the members in order to keep them in a constant lethargic state. Letters between Germany and the colony had been censored; radio, newspapers and television sets banned, contact with the surrounding world reduced to a minimum.

Although there is no proof yet, it is widely believed that the colony had been hosting on several occasions top Nazi criminals, with the full knowledge of Chilean authorities.
(snip/...)

http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2005-07/30vltchek.cfm

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~snip~
Little is known about the real facts of Schaefer's biography. He was born in 1921 in the town of Siegburg near Bonn. He started to work in his teens assisting the circus vagrant actor. Later he served in the German medical battalion at the East front, where he was wounded and lost his left eye. That was his “specific feature”.

In the post war Germany Schaefer used to work as a teacher in the kindergarten attached to an evangelic cathedral. Lecherous activities towards children were the reasons for his disgraceful expulsion and later he was excommunicated. Schaefer decided to change his “behavior” and took a great interest in preaching. His religious radicalism attracted first adherents to him. Religious community, that was named "Private Social Mission", was established by joint efforts. It admitted miserable, injured by horrors of war people. However the name of Schaefer once again became in the center of a scandal, dealing with sexual abuse of minors. Paedophile charges threatened him with many years of imprisonment.
(snip)

In 1961 the sect moved to Latin America, Chile. By fraud they managed to take out the children, voluntarily given to the “mission” for education by their parents. The works on construction of buildings in the Colonia Dignidad commenced without any delay. Its boundaries were protected as thoroughly as any other strategic military bases: barbed wire, electronic observation hi-tech gadgets, radars that control air space above the colony! Security services acted resolutely and cruelly. To penetrate inside as well escape from the colony was next to impossible.

Schaefer & Co scrutinized in detail everything that was going on behind the barbed wire because their security depended on it. Information network in the colony was very efficient, as it possessed reliable sources in political, law-enforcement and military circles.

In publications about the Colonia Dignidad they often use the documentary films from the history of the Third Reich as proof of its Nazi origin, basis of fascist ideology. Definitely, the inner structure of the colony, cruelty of established orders, brushed up system of converting people into dumb and obedient robots – are the integral features of the totalitarian sect. Nevertheless, one should weightily treat those publications about the Colonia Dignidad, in which it is called the “hide-out” of Nazi criminals, who managed to get to Latin America through illegal channels of ODESSA organization, established by Himler security services prior to defeat of Hitler Germany. If we believe such articles, it appears that such “cursed personalities” like Walter Rauf – inventor of gas chamber, SS doctor-experimenter Josef Mengele and chief of fuhrer reichschancellor office Martin Borman had lived in the colony for many years. Ladislao Farago, famous investigator of the Nazi underground mysteries in Latin America even ranked the Colonia Dignidad among one of secret centers of the “Fourth Reich” in Latin America.

Another thing – cooperation of the colony with DINA (political guard of the Pinochet regime). In this case there were much more evidences, although they were actively destroyed by the “interested parties”. After the military coup on September 11, 1973, the colony provided its territory and buildings for the needs of DINA, i.e. for extension of underground center of tortures, in which the German colonists took part. Traces of many arrested activists and supporters of National Unity disappear in the colony, although the “Rettig committee report” mentions only one of them - Alvaro Vallejos Villagran – as a victim. Terrible discoveries are yet to come: exhumation of the bodies at the Dignidad cemetery was not yet done, the foothills nearby the colony were not yet investigated.

The boys taken for “education” to the colony called Schaefer “Omnipresent uncle”. He was always at hand. There was no escaping from him. He knew everything. The children from poor and incomplete families were selected to the colony. After signing the necessary papers the children used to disappear behind the unassailable fence, and mothers, sometimes for months or for years, had no access to them. Their attempts to return them ended in failure. Local authorities did not dare to come up against the colony.
(snip/…) http://www.tiwy.com/pais/chile/dignidad/eng.phtml

[Judi Lynn]

3. A quick overview of Chile after Pinochet (Nixon's choice) seized control:

Nunca Mas

Nunca Mas
By Ali Ansari

The birds were chirping outside. The sky was as blue as Chilean Lapis. The chime of children's laughter crept through the impenetrable walls. The church was busy as usual; the soothing sound of the church bell swarmed in, it was the beginning of another beautiful day. Who would have known, that just across the street, innocent people were being brutally tortured, beaten, murdered and raped, by Chile's secret police, under strict orders from Chile's military dictator, Augusto Pinochet.

Chile's military dictatorship lasted almost two decades and was one of the most brutal and oppressive regimes of the modern era. By the end of 1973, under the command of General Augusto Pinochet, two hundred and fifty thousand Chileans had been detained in camps for political reasons (Under the Dictatorship). The conditions in these camps were unbearable, and the repercussions of the camps and the regime are still felt today. Gabriela Salazar was one survivor of a camp whose story, like all the others, must be heard. Gabriela spent time in Villa Grimaldi, a detention camp in Santiago, Chile.

Ironically, before Villa Grimaldi was a detention camp, it used to be a park where families would come together and spend their free time. A place where many children grew up laughing and smiling, was rapidly transformed into a place of torture and repression. After the military coup, Villa Grimaldi was one of many places used for detention by Chile's secret police (called the DINA) under the watchful eye of the dictatorship. In particular, people affiliated with the communist party were arrested and brought to Villa Grimaldi. After 1976, almost every person brought to the camp had been murdered. Survivors such as Gabriela Salazar provided vivid descriptions of the atrocities that occurred in the camps, and the inhumane treatment of the prisoners. Torturers stuck prisoners' heads in plastic bags and the occasional beating was not uncommon. Many prisoners were stored like luggage in cramped water towers, where they were forced to live in appalling, unsanitary conditions. Children were also victims of this regime. In one instance, the military patrol went to pick up Jose Soto, the president of a local supply and price control junta. They found his fourteen year-old son alone in the house, and left his body pierced with bullets on the doorstep, to leave a message for Soto (The Tortures). Many of the murdered bodies were dumped in the Mapocho River that runs through Santiago. Loved ones lined up wondering if the next body to float down the river was that of their missing husband or child. Over three thousand people have gone missing (presumed dead) or died under Pinochet's regime.

What was very surprising was that the guards and the police did not think what they were doing was wrong. Luis Santibanez, the president of the Parque por la Paz Corporation wrote,""The truth is that Villa Grimaldi was not the result of a few excesses or madness. It was just a system."" Here Santibanez was implying that it was not just a random series of acts of torture, rather, it was a system, that these people believed in and thought was justified.
(snip/...)

http://cf1.cc.lehigh.edu/gc/journalentry.cfm?SID=38&JID=490&code=1





Mapocho River, Santiago, Chile