Washington Post - Dec. 25, 1987, p. A29
German Settlement Stirs Controversy in Chile
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Foreign Service
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BY BRADLEY GRAHAM—THE WASHINGTON POST |
| Stylized picture of a nurse with two children is the logo used by Colonia Dignidad, an agricultural community founded by a German minister in southern Chile. |
PARRAL, 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 by 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.
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BY BRADLEY GRAHAM—THE WASHINGTON POST |
| 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.
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