VILLA BAVIERA (Reuters) -Chile plans to expropriate a settlement founded by a German cult leader where torture took place during former dictator Augusto Pinochet’s military regime as the government takes another step to shine a light on a dark period of the past.
The enclave, originally called Colonia Dignidad and renamed Villa Baviera, was founded in 1961 by Paul Schafer, a former Nazi medic turned evangelical preacher who kept the isolated community under tight control and was later jailed for sexually abusing children.
During Pinochet’s 1973-1990 dictatorship, Colonia Dignidad also bore witness to another kind of abuse: the torture of political prisoners by military forces in a secret prison at the site.
Schafer collaborated with Pinochet’s secret police and in exchange was shielded for years from prosecution for his own crimes. The dictatorship viewed the secretive, fortified and remote community as an ideal site to detain and torture dissidents away from public view.
The government now wants to turn the 290-acre (117-hectare) community into a memorial, Justice Minister Jaime Gajardo said at an event this month.
The aim is to make it “a place that allows all Chileans to enter freely to learn about what happened there,” Gajardo said.
“Nothing justifies violating human rights as they were violated during the military dictatorship.”
Schafer died in prison in 2010.
Several hundred families once lived at the settlement about 350 kilometers (217 mi) south of Santiago. Today the population numbers closer to 100, many of whom are descendants of the original German settlers.
Businesses at Villa Baviera, or Bavarian Village, have tried in recent years to attract visitors to the area’s picturesque green fields and views of snow-capped mountains.
In the expropriation, property owners will be compensated under terms still to be determined by experts, Gajardo said. The government aims to complete the expropriation before President Gabriel Boric leaves office in March.
The justice minister said the community consists of about 90 land parcels but did not specify the number of businesses or residents.
PAINFUL PAST
Dozens of physically and mentally traumatized members of Colonia Dignidad eventually relocated to Germany, and the site’s history drew international attention in the 2015 film “Colonia.”
Plans for the expropriation underscore the challenges for governments in coming to terms with complicated histories in places that have overlapping layers of rights abuses.
Chile’s National Institute of Human Rights in a recent report said those who were tortured by Pinochet’s forces as well as the people who suffered under Schaefer’s control were equally victims of Colonia Dignidad.
Jose Patricio Schmidt, who grew up in Colonia Dignidad and still lives there, said residents had existed in a bubble, unaware of the dictatorship’s abuses.
“Schaefer would gather us together to read the Bible in a place about a kilometer from where people were tortured, and we knew nothing,” he said in an interview at a memorial site in the community that pays tribute to the torture victims.
Tens of thousands of people were arrested and tortured throughout Chile during Pinochet’s rule, and 1,469 people were victims of forced disappearance.
Some have criticized the government’s move to take away property from current Villa Baviera community members, especially those who were themselves victims of abuse.
Juergen Szurgeleis in an interview said he tried as a boy to escape forced labor and abuse at Colonia Dignidad.
“Is it my fault for being born here?” he said. “And now they want to take away my land and leave me in the street?”
Yet a former political prisoner at Colonia Dignidad, Luis Jaque, said he struggles to see how the community, which includes a German restaurant and a hotel catering to tourists, can carry on without recognizing the horrors of the past.
“It’s not reconcilable, at least not for me,” he said.
(Reporting by Nicolás Cortés in Villa Baviera and Santiago; Writing by Leila Miller and Fabián Cambero; Editing by Daina Beth Solomon and Cynthia Osterman)
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