Once home to a cult, the Chilean tourist village haunted by torture and child abuse
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With sloping red-tiled roofs, trimmed lawns and a shop selling home-baked ginger biscuits, Villa Baviera looks like a quaint German-style village, nestled in the rolling hills of central Chile.
But it has a dark past.
Once known as Colonia Dignidad, it was home to a secretive religious sect founded by a manipulative and abusive leader who collaborated with the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Paul Schäfer, who established the colony in 1961, imposed a regime of harsh punishments and humiliation on the Germans living there.
They were separated from their parents and forced to work from a young age.
Schäfer also sexually abused many of the children.
After Gen Pinochet led a coup in 1973, opponents of his military regime were taken to Colonia Dignidad to be tortured in dark basements.
Many of these political prisoners were never seen again.
Schäfer died in prison in 2010, but some of the German residents remained and have turned the former colony into a tourist destination, with a restaurant, hotel, cabins to rent and even a boating pond.
Now, the Chilean government is going to expropriate some of its land to commemorate Pinochet’s victims there. But the plans have divided opinions.
Across Chile, more than 3,000 people were killed and more than 40,000 tortured during the Pinochet regime, which was in power until 1990.
Luis Evangelista Aguayo was one of those who was forcibly “disappeared”.
“My mother and father went to Colonia Dignidad but weren’t allowed in,” she said.
“They went everywhere looking for him, at police stations, at the courts, but could get no information. My father died of sorrow because he wasn’t able to help him. My 96-year-old mother thinks she can hear him calling ‘Mama, come and get me’.”
Mr Aguayo was one of 27 people from Parral believed to have been killed in Colonia Dignidad, according to an ongoing judicial investigation ordered by the Chilean government.
The total number of people murdered here is not known, but there is evidence that this was the final destination of many opponents of the Pinochet regime, including Chilean congressman Carlos Lorca and several other Socialist Party leaders.
The Chilean justice ministry says investigations suggest hundreds of political detainees were brought here.
Ana Aguayo supports the government’s plan to create a site of memory there.
“It was a place of horror and appalling crimes. It shouldn’t be a place for tourists to shop or dine at a restaurant. It ought to be a place for remembrance, reflection and for educating future generations, so that it never happens again.”
But the government’s expropriation plans have divided opinion in Villa Baviera, where fewer than 100 adults live.
Dorothee Munch was born in 1977 in Colonia Dignidad.
His sister, Ana Aguayo, sits by the fire in her house in Parral, the nearest town to Colonia Dignidad.
“Luis was quiet, he loved swimming. He wanted to create a fairer world,” she said.
Mr Aguayo worked as a school inspector, was a member of the teachers’ trade union and was active in the Socialist Party.
On 12 September 1973, one day after Pinochet overthrew Chile’s elected Socialist President, Salvador Allende, police came to Mr Aguayo’s house and arrested him.
Two days later, he was sent to the local prison, but on 26 September 1973, police arrived and dragged him into a van. His family never saw him again.
Ana Aguayo says a local farmer came to her house to say that he had seen her brother at the German colony.
Content retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93k3l373n5o.
