Word: colonias
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first sign that something was seriously amiss came in 1966 when Wolfgang Muller, then 20, escaped from Colonia Dignidad for the third time and begged the West German embassy in Santiago not to send him back for fear he would be killed. Muller, who now lives in West Germany under a different name, claimed that Schafer had molested him when he was twelve. He told of regular beatings and the use of electroshock and narcotics by camp doctors, and described Schafer as a dictator who condones drug experiments and torture and enforces hard labor from sunup to sundown...
...colony again became the object of international attention in 1976, when a United Nations human rights commission report identified the camp as one of Chile's detention centers. The next year the West German branch of Amnesty International denounced Colonia Dignidad as a DINA torture center. The colony responded by launching a defamation suit in West Germany against Amnesty International, a legal dispute that continues today...
Last February four former Colonia Dignidad members went before a Bonn parliamentary subcommittee and described their lives as regimes of terror. Lotti Packmor, 55, who left the colony with her husband in 1985 and now lives in Canada, said she had seen young boys given injections in their testicles and described Schafer as having beaten a young girl until "blood spurted from her nose." Added Georg Packmor: "No one dares even to think of escaping." A colony spokesman denied the charges and said that such alleged witnesses were mentally ill, alcoholics, adulterers and drug addicts...
...government investigation has concluded that Weisfeiler drowned in a nearby river. U.S. officials consider the case still open. The Pinochet government has given the colony its tacit support. West Germany, for its part, has been reluctant to speak out against Schafer in the past because of close ties between Colonia Dignidad and officials at the West German embassy in Santiago...
...judge asked the Chilean courts to arrange an inspection tour of the colony. Last week the managing director of Amnesty International's West German section announced in Parral that inspections of the surrounding terrain have so far supported testimony by former DINA prisoners who claim they were taken to Colonia Dignidad to be tortured. During the next two days a group that included a Chilean judge, Amnesty Attorney Maximo Pacheco, colony lawyers and representatives of the West German government was allowed inside the colony. According to Pacheco, the group identified four underground rooms that matched descriptions by DINA torture victims...