Camp Dignity

ROCCO

In 1961, the Chilean people and the world in general paid little attention as a small group of European immigrants quietly founded a religious community along the banks of the Perquilauquén River in an isolated area of central Chile. The group calling itself the Dignity Charitable and Educational Society (Sociedad Benefactora y Educacional Dignidad), Camp Dignity (Colonia Dignidad) for short, offered its members the promise a better life in this world and hope for eternal life in the next. Indeed, the time of the camp’s founding was a time of uncertainty for many; it had only been sixteen years since the end of World War II, in which the map of an exhausted Europe had been redrawn once again, leaving many people without a homeland. Refugees and displaced persons seeking the chance to start anew were still just reaching the shores of Latin America. Among those immigrants were the original members of the camp, the widows and children of German officers and soldiers, including some known former Nazis. (Simon Wiesenthal alleged that even Dr. Josef Mengele, the so called “Angel of Death” of the German concentration camps was present for a time at Camp Dignity.) These founding members had belonged to an evangelical sect in Germany, their leader, the charismatic former Nazi nurse Paul Schäfer, took the congregation with him to Chile while fleeing criminal charges in Germany. Upon his arrival, Schäfer restablished the group on the basis of secret religious tenets, a rigid moral code, strict discipline and hard work. 

The principal form of income for the camp was agriculture, and one of the leaders’ initial goals was to employ the latest European technology to make the enclave economically independent, an endeavor at which they were so successful that within a relatively short time the camp became almost completely self-sufficient, producing enough food not only to feed its own members but also to sell surpluses in the stores and markets of Santiago and elsewhere in Chile. And it quickly grew in size; at its height Camp Dignity covered 53 square miles and had approximately 300 German and Chilean members. Furthermore, by the time of the Pinochet dictatorship in the early seventies, the camp had become not only powerful economic unit in Chile but also a formidable political force. In fact, the camp’s political importance was so great that by 1974, when the first property leases were recorded, legal ties were established directly between camp authorities and the Chilean government. 

But, as hinted at above, there was a dark side to the camp. The first indication was the background of the leaders themselves; Schäfer and the camp elders, all former Gestapo or German military men, allegedly wished to establish a Fourth Reich in the new world. They took with them to the camp the fascist ideologies and totalitarian strategies of the recently defeated Axis Powers. The second indication of darkness was the treatment of members. Leaving the camp was not permitted. We know from the testimony of members who managed to escape that the camp leaders required complete submission and they maintained absolute control over members’ lives. Even the most personal decisions were made by or required the approval of the elders. When members attempted to escape, the leaders called on local and national officials, who helped to return them to certain deprivation of food, humiliation or torture. 

The Chilean government was well aware that the camp’s success was, in part, the result of the involuntary detention of disaffected members and forced labor. Furthermore, the dictatorship, which saw the need to persecute or eliminate those who opposed it, recognized that the camp’s impenetrable secrecy, its use of violence and threats of violence to keep its members in check, and its high technology installations made it the perfect venue for a state-of-the-art center for the torture of political enemies of the dictatorship and its allies. The camp, seeing economic and political gain, was more than happy to oblige. By the end of the dictatorship, the camp not only had produced an efficient, local space of terror and death but also was involved in importing technology of terror from Brazil and exporting it for sale on the international market. But it was not just the Chilean government that saw the usefulness of Camp Dignity; ultimately, in cooperation with the CIA and other secret international agencies, the camp became involved in political assassinations around the world, earning itself a place in the continuum of terror and violence present in Latin America from colonial institutions, such as the Spanish inquisition, through slavery, the military dictatorships in the 70s and 80s, to contemporary spaces of terror such as the Guantanamo Detention Center established in Cuba by the U.S. government. Although most of this information is a matter of public record, many people in Chile and elsewhere remain uninformed about the recent space of terror that was Camp Dignity.

This paper will intertwine descriptions of Camp Dignity’s ascent to power as it explores three important processes operational in that space. The first is the destruction of personal identities and the building and maintaining of community identity as a German-oriented, anticommunist, messianic sect with allegiance to a spiritual master who exercised absolute control through the use of secrecy, magic and violence. The second deals with the terror and spaces of torture and death (Taussig, 1989; Timerman, 1987) that existed for a time at Camp Dignity; a time when political prisoners, non-community members, were the victims of torture mandated by the dictatorship and administered by the camp authorities. Finally, we will trace the presence of some spaces of resistance among, both the camp members and the political prisoners, against the mechanisms of terror at Camp Dignity, illustrating how certain individuals employed narrative to reconstitute and reconfigure personal meaning, initiating the process of healing that is still taking place in Chile today. It should be noted that Camp Dignity still survives (in the last census, 2002, there were 198 members) although it has lost its tax-exempt status, is currently the target of on-going investigations by the Chilean judicial system, and recently has reinvented itself, changing its name to Villa Bavaria and opening its grounds and  facilities to tourism.

As stated above, one of the camp’s first objectives was economic self-sufficiency. In fact, it more than achieved that objective; it rapidly began to acquire great wealth and as a tax-exempt organization, it could continually reinvest its earnings. In a little less than a decade it had not only acquired a fleet of cars, busses, trucks, agricultural vehicles (and allegedly a tank), but also built forty different facilities, including a school, a recording/broadcasting studio, a hospital, a cemetery, a restaurant in the nearby town of Bulnes and a casino. If this does not all seem necessary for the survival of a small religious community, it should be pointed out that by this time the camp had also constructed its own power plant, acquired gold and uranium mines and built an airport big enough to accommodate Hercules transport planes, which were originally designed for cargo transport and troop evacuation but were also used for reconnaissance, search and rescue, and even airborne assault. It was clear that this enclave was creating itself into a state-within-a-state.

Furthermore, insistence on self-sufficiency and refusal to fully participate in the larger market economy is a marker of the difference between globalization and colonialism. Camp Dignity, as its Spanish name, Colonia Dignidad, implies, was really a small colony with an allegiance to German tradition, which strove to claim and canonize a particular space through sect-like adherence to religious tenets and moral codes that they proclaimed to be superior to those of the surrounding society. The borders they were establishing were employed both to define and to enclose. In the beginning, the camp offered refuge from the disastrous past and frightening present by appealing to fear and by making members believe that they could create their own utopia through faith and hard work. Self-sufficiency was for Camp Dignity an important mechanism for creating the borders necessary to keep at bay the outside world and to ensure the dependency of the members on each other and the elders. Once the borders were established, the leaders took total control over the members, whose value they reckoned as a function of productivity. In fact, the leaders controlled both the members’ production and consumption. Members were taught to rely only on what was available within the camp, items which the leaders could easily make scarce or completely unavailable. Censorship, in the form of the control of consumption, could be used as an incentive or a punishment, and was another mechanism for promoting productivity and maintaining closed community ties. 

By isolating and differentiating their members from the surrounding society the elders continued to create a strong group identity. German, not Spanish, was the language of the camp elders and members were to wear Bavarian traditional clothing and the sing traditional German folk songs, etc. Group identity, however, was accompanied at a high cost to the members. Through controls, incentives, deprivations and punishments, the leaders gradually created group identity at the expense of individuality. Eventually, the camp leaders required that members relinquish to them the right to make even the most intimate personal decisions. One strategy utilized by Schäfer, who cultivated a godlike image, was the destruction of traditional family ties. He encouraged his now child-like followers, who knew him as “Omnipresent Uncle,” to look only to him for moral and spiritual leadership and to shun contact with family members corrupted by the secular society beyond the camp’s borders.  The few letters that were permitted between colony members and their families in Germany were highly censored. In addition, radio, newspapers, and television sets were banned to fortify the camp’s borders with the outside world.

 There were also borders within the borders of the camp. Members were separated by gender, and the sexes were not allowed to associate freely. In the name of morality, as defined by the elders, romantic relationships were forbidden because they produced an environment in which it was possible for the development of loyalty other than loyalty to the leaders. For that reason sexual activity also was highly restricted; the leaders decided which members could have sexual relations and when and with whom they could do so. Furthermore, only a select few were permitted to reproduce; their offspring were separated from them at birth and raised by the community to facilitate indoctrination and to avoid the development family ties. Since all children were raised communally, there were no real mothers or fathers, sisters or brothers, only “Omnipresent Uncle” who approved all marriages and even arranged some. For unmarried members sexual contact was absolutely prohibited; those who disobeyed were punished. For example, a woman who became pregnant “without permission” had two choices: to undergo an abortion or to live in total isolation before the delivery, at which point the child was taken from her.  In some cases offenders were permanently sterilized. Essentially, the camp leaders divided and conquered their adult members. It can be argued that those adult members joined Camp Dignity of their own free will because they believed in the promise of salvation held out by Schäfer. Nevertheless, adult recruits, once they relinquished free choice, found themselves a part of the colony’s well-organized force of hard labor and in a situation somewhat analogous to that of African slaves on plantations or internees of Nazi concentration camps in previous times. As with those nearly inescapable institutions, Camp Dignity elders held absolute power because they maintained impenetrable borders. 

Camp Dignity defended its borders as thoroughly as any strategic military base. Trained German shepherds patrolled the yards and the camp itself was surrounded by high-voltage barbed wire fences and monitored by high-tech electronic surveillance equipment, including radar to control its air space. Unwanted entry and exit from the camp were nearly impossible because its security services acted with determination and brutality, torturing offenders until their spirits were broken. Many members were involuntarily administered drugs as punishment or to keep them pacified. The result was a listless, distant demeanor on the part of the members. Observations from outsiders who encountered camp members, such as the few media reporters who wrote about them, described camp members as resembling zombies. With some reservations, we can make a connection with the concepts of the consumption of the body and the creation of zombies in the historical Caribbean. Mimi Sheller in her book “Consuming the Caribbean: from Arawaks to Zombies,” which deals with slavery and cannibalism in the Caribbean during the colonial period, relates some concepts that can be applied to Camp Dignity. Sheller says that: “If the figure of the cannibal represents European anxieties around the boundaries of consumption, then the Haitian ‘zombie’- a ‘living-dead’ slave deprived of will and physically controlled by a sorcerer – is the ultimate representation of the psychic state of whose body/spirit is consumed.” (145).

However, if the adult members of the camp suffered, it is the treatment of the children, especially the treatment of small boys that reveals the hypocrisy and maliciousness of the camp elders and the depravity made possible through the exercise of absolute power. Despite the rigid moral standards it proclaimed, the camp kept a very dark secret, a secret that Schäfer had brought with him from Germany. It was pointed out above that Schäfer had fled Europe to avoid prosecution for certain crimes; those crimes were related to the sexual abuse of children, in particular of small boys, on more than one occasion and in more than one place. Some of the abuses even took place in his evangelical religious community, from which he was eventually excommunicated. Furthermore, Schäfer was not the only elder with a predilection for sex with children; eventually nearly two dozen other camp leaders would be tried for such crimes. It came to light in the trials that Schäfer and certain other leaders reserved for themselves the right to enter the boys’ collective showers and bathe them personally; then some were selected to satisfy their sexual desire. So fanatic were the pedophile elders that they conducted biological experiments focused on keeping young boys from showing the signs of aging. Many children were raped repeatedly and both girls and boys were sterilized to keep them from reproducing. (During the time of its partnership with the Chilean government, sexual privileges were at times extended to government officials, but Omnipresent Uncle had those sessions filmed and used the evidence later for the purposes of bribery and extortion and to keep the camp leaders free from investigation and prosecution.) Through such abuse, the colony consumed its own children. Because of the abuse and sterilization of members and the restrictions placed on reproduction, the camp needed to look to the surrounding communities to augment its membership.

Almost from the beginning, Camp Dignity leaders initiated interactions with the surrounding communities for the purpose of recruiting new members, especially boys who easily could be indoctrinated and abused. Like many religious groups, the leaders proselytized, spreading the word among adjacent villages that white benefactors had arrived from abroad to save them and their children from their poverty, infirmity and ignorance. As a token, the camp school was opened without fees to local children; however, in exchange for their education, the children had to labor in the camp’s fields as well as undergo intensive indoctrination aimed at bringing them into the fold. In addition, the new recruits were sometimes “kidnapped” from their biological parents and were held on the compound, inaccessible to their families. Once in the thrall of the camp, it was nearly impossible to gain release. In this way, the colony created a strategy for growth that was ideological rather than biological.

One might ask how such abuse could continue for so many years undetected. Again, violence or the threat of violence comes into play. In response to parents who wanted to go to the authorities, Schäfer threatened to shame and humiliate the entire family by exposing to the community the perverse nature of their son. Furthermore, it was well known that the camp had special protection from the government and those complaints that were made fell on deaf ears. Finally, the perception of the camp by outsiders, and perception can be everything, was one of pious people living in a well-organized, advanced community that, in contrast to the poor adjacent villages, represented modernity and scientific advancement. It might have seemed inconceivable that such a place could hold such dark secrets.

Those outside observers might have been very surprised to know that the camp, respected and held in awe for its advanced technology, had another mechanism for the maintenance of control over its members, an ancient mechanism that had little to do with science and much to do with fear. Within the camp there was operational a strong sense of popular magic. It is hard to separate this sense of magic from the secret religious tenets and practices of the sect but it probably began with the founding of the camp and the concurrent demonization of the outside world. The camp’s Christian values were depicted as being at war with the communist and socialist beliefs espoused by the godless enemies of the church and the state, such as the USSR; and the threat was growing closer to home as Cuba fell further under the Soviets’ evil spell. Just as camp members were stripped of their individuality, supposed enemies were stripped of their humanity through the use of fear tactics. In this sense, offending members and, later, political prisoners interned at the camp were seen as subversives to the good order and subjected to torture, including electroshock. Their fate was much like that of witches of earlier times who had to be burned for their assumed transgressions; both were seen as being by nature the embodiment of evil, and their isolation and exterminated was deemed to be not only justified but also imperative.

It can be speculated that this sense of popular magic, woven into the daily fabric of the community, may have been brought to Chile by the founders as part of the legacy of the Nazis who used it so well during the Third Reich. On the other hand, the sense of magic was indigenous to the New World and a dark version was also brought with the Spanish colonists from Europe. The practices of projection, negation and persecution have been part of the mechanisms of control employed from the Spanish Inquisition to the present in Latin America. Modernity likes to disavow magic but it reserves the right to use when convenient. What is more, this blurring of reality and fantasy has been common to dictatorial practices throughout Latin America. If we apply Richard Kieckhefer’s argument about magic as practiced in the Middle Ages, we can consider Camp Dignity “as a kind of crossroads” between religion and science (1). But that may also be said of the world outside of Camp Dignity as well.

So far we have spent some time talking about some of the internal conditions of Camp Dignity: the use of technology and hard labor to attain not only self-sufficiency but enormous wealth; the distancing of the camp from the surrounding society and the building of group identity; the destruction private identity, the abuse of members, especially children, and the forced submission of all members to leaders who, to control the population, used violence, the threat of violence and magic. Perhaps this is a good time to step back and consider the effect of some external conditions on the camp.   

        As indicated above, the external context for the period in which Camp Dignity was formed and flourished was the nineteen sixties and seventies. Just prior to this, the immediate post-war period had left a pervasive anxiety based on the knowledge that the atomic explosions in Nagasaki and Hiroshima had not only ended the war but had made possible the complete destruction of civilization, if not humankind all together. While brushfire wars were still burning in various places, physical warfare had given way to ideological warfare between the advocates of capitalism and those of communism, between the religious and the secular. Proponents on both sides feared the other; myths, misunderstanding and misinformation fueled the fires of fear and hatred. The possibility of another world war loomed menacingly. It was a time of partitions and walls and the Iron Curtain. It was a time when one had to publicly choose an allegiance.  This period of regional and international tensions, saw the rise of military governments across Latin America and the initiation of the world-wide arms race, which in turn created a need for and facilitated the construction of spaces of terror and the development and exportation of the mechanisms of terror.

Whether we consider the external context of the camp or its internal workings, it is clear that Camp Dignity came along at the right time to find its niche in the world of torture and terror. It had created the perfect isolated venue and possessed the most up-to-date technology. Survivor testimonies have verified that the German colony was used not only to torture its own errant members but also to detain and torture non-member political prisoners. As mentioned above, terror at the camp took many forms: human rights violations such as child abuse, electroshock, involuntary administration of drugs, non-consensual biological experiments and subsequent organ-trafficking on the black market, etc. In addition, it might be asserted that in the camp the practice of terror was both physical and metaphorical. For the victims of torture at Camp Dignity, the ambivalent German identity of the camp probably lent itself to the creation of fear. In the popular mind, images of German culture in the form of literature and music and esteem for the Germans as a rational people of advanced science and technology was counter-balanced by horrific and images of war and destruction. The Nazi experience of World War II was still fresh in the minds of all adult Chileans: the testimonies of concentration camp survivors that German officials carried out torture while listening to Mozart and Wagner were reiterated, on a smaller scale, by the leaders of Camp Dignity who, according to the testimony of survivors at end of the dictatorship, also listened to classical music to drown out the screams of their victims. Furthermore, it was not only the victims of torture who reacted to the German identity of group. The camp not only administered torture but also trained the Chilean secret police (DINA) in the use of their methods. The secret police, like the victims of torture, also thought that the German identity of the camp leaders was important in the development of an environment of fear and the conditions for efficient torturing: “Los inmigrantes alemanes sabían torturar…la tortura era más ‘científica’…igualmente dolorosa que en otros lugares, pero más planificada y estudiada, sin torturadores que gritaban en forma histérica como en otros campos de prisioneros.” (Délano 72)

As an aside, it might be interesting to note that despite the perception of many that torture was a very modern science at Camp dignity, new methods existed along side very old ones. A closer look reveals that in some instance the camp employed methods used by the Inquisition in Spain and the New World (reports from Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib confirm that such practices are still in use today.)  Among the methods of torture inherited from the Inquisition are the garrucha and the toca. The application of the garrucha consisted of suspending a criminal from the ceiling by a pulley with weights tied to his ankles; the torturer effected a series of lifts and drops, during which arms and legs of the victim suffered violent pulls and were sometimes dislocated (a common practice in Abu Ghraib Prison). The toca, also called “tortura del agua”, consisted of introducing a cloth into the mouth of the victim, and forcing them to ingest water spilled from a jar so that they had impression of drowning -- today it is called “water boarding” when used by the United States military. This technique is not only practiced today but also was recently justified by the highest U.S. authorities. For example, in 2007, water boarding led to a political scandal when the press reported that the CIA had water boarded extrajudicial prisoners and that the U.S. Department of Justice had authorized and defended this procedure. So it was a combination of the very new and the very old that Camp Dignity used to torture the enemies of the Chilean government. 

The camp made a good partner for the government; it not only administered torture at the request of the government but also trained its secret police to do the same. Nevertheless, in reality, the power of Camp Dignity reached far beyond its partnership with the dictator. As seen above, even before the coup, the camp had become a small state-within-a state, one that had secret connections not only with high military and political authorities in Chile but also abroad. In fact, it might be said that the camp helped usher in the dictatorship; it is alleged that in the early 1970’s the camp had already become a training ground for the very CIA operatives who later, on September 11, 1973, assisted in the overthrow the Marxist government of Salvador Allende and installed the military regime of Augusto Pinochet. Under the dictatorship, Schäfer, as the absolute leader of Camp Dignity, enjoyed the protection of a powerful network of judges, parliamentarians from rightwing parties, officials of the Pinochet regime, police and military commanders, and members of the business community who benefited from the camp’s services. It is documented that in 1976, Schäfer was still working with the CIA; in fact, it was CIA officer Michael Townley Welch, a name we will hear later, who designed the remote control torture chambers and state-of-the-art surveillance system that the Colony employed. 

As time went by, the camp established even more connections at the local and international levels. Locally, the camp maintained clandestine houses in the capital. Furthermore, Camp Dignity leaders, in secret installations, trained DINA officials who then began to kidnap alleged subversives and to carry out assassination attempts on opponents, both violent and non violent, of the Chilean dictatorship. Although there is still no proof, it is widely believed that the colony hosted, on several occasions and with the full knowledge of Chilean authorities, conferences for indoctrination of police and military personnel by top Nazi criminals. 

 At the international level, Camp Dignity became an importer and exporter of the techniques of torture, thus making a fortune on the global market. It imported techniques of torture from Brazil for re-sale on the international market. It acted on behalf of the Chilean government and on its own behalf. Arms could not be bought directly from the source, the U.S., because as a reaction to the abuses that occurred during the overthrow of Allende, the U.S. congress had turned into law the Kennedy Amendment, prohibiting the sale of weapons to states with extreme human rights violations. Also at the international level, through its association with the secret collusion of military dictatorships throughout Latin America called Operation Condor, the camp soon became a full-fledged participant in international terror. Operation Condor, which functioned with the full knowledge and approval of the U.S. government, was a criminal organization that crossed international borders in pursuit of the alleged enemies of the military dictatorships and their allies. Members of DINA, Chilean army personnel and specialists in repression, trained by Camp Dignity and by institutes such as the School of the Americas, successfully committed terrorist acts in several foreign countries, demonstrating the interface of local and global spheres. For example, the following terrorist acts, facilitated by the leaders of Camp Dignity, took place within a three-year period and on three different continents: in 1974, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a car bomb exploded killing the former Vice President of the Republic (under Allende) and Pinochet’s immediate predecessor as Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, General Carlos Prats Gonzalez and his wife Sofia Cuthbertin; in 1975, while in exile in Rome, Italy, the former Christian Democratic senator from Chile, Bernardo Leighton, and his wife were severely maimed by shots fired by an Italian terrorist who was working with DINA, the ubiquitious CIA agent Michael Townley and the Spanish secret police under Francisco Franco; finally, in 1976, another car bomb exploded in Washington, D.C. killing Orlando Letelier, former Foreign Minister (also under Allende), and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt.

Those outside of Chile whom the leaders of Camp Dignity selected as targets for assassination, were the victims of swift, seemingly random acts of violence. Operatives struck in the places and times that were least suspected; their victims rarely had the opportunity to defend themselves. However, members of the Camp who grew disillusioned by manipulation and abuse at the hands of their leaders and were detained against their will were able to create a few spaces of resistance. We will mention the three most common actions taken. 

The most common practice of resistance among the colony members was attempted escape; this began as early as the second year of the camp’s existence. If a colony member “escaped,” he was immediately denounced to the state authorities for crimes of sodomy, madness or being a communist or socialist. The state search for the escapee and send him back the camp authorities for appropriate “discipline” in bunkers especially designed for torture and violence and where they were forced to confess and to denounce others.  It is interesting to note that while torture is still justified as being in the service of the highest causes, the spaces of torture have become more secret, perhaps to assuage a sense of guilt. While witches were burned in public squares, victims of the Nazis, Camp Dignity and the U.S. military, although sometimes humiliated in public, were/are tortured out of sight.

At any rate, as pointed out above, escape was extremely difficult because the well-developed security system and because of the measures taken to hunt down and return runaways, methods reminiscent of those used by slave owners in the ante bellum American South. Former camp members have explained how many media were used efficiently to alert governments and to offer financial rewards to those willing to return escapees to the camp. “[Wolfgang Müller]…trabajaba como esclavo en un grupo en que lo habían colocado, ya que el año 1962 había intentado fugarse por primera vez…La Colonia ‘Dignidad’ buscaba al fugitivo por radio y prensa escrita. En todas partes fue expuesta su foto en los periódicos. Los colonos ofrecieron una recompensa” (Gemballa 110).  It is not surprising that escape attempts were not successful in the majority of cases; if escapees managed to make it past the barb wire, search lights, prowling dogs, and armed sentries, either they would be captured by Chilean police or turned in by local inhabitants for the bounty paid by the colony leaders. 

The second most common type of resistance among the members of the community was related to the practice of involuntary medication. Those few members who managed to escape from Camp Dignity spoke afterward of torture and chemical treatments as well as powerful sedatives, which when administered to members, kept them in a constant lethargic state. In this way the camp leaders used pharmaceuticals to keep unruly members in check. It has been reported that many of the colony members were hospitalized under heavy sedation for years. In some cases, this treatment irrevocably destroyed their mental and physical health. Nevertheless, some members attempted to protect themselves by only pretending to ingest of the pills: “Tres veces al día lo obligaban [Müller] a tragar una píldora especial. Después se sentía cansado, deprimido y sin voluntad. Al fin solamente simulaba. No se tragaba la píldora, la escondía entre la mandíbula superior y la cavidad bucal.” (111).

A third regular form of resistance among group members was to write personal letters to family members in Germany. Unfortunately, these written communications were under surveillance and frequently censored by the superiors. Nevertheless, a few uncensored correspondences did manage to get through; the following letter was from Nathaniel Bohnau, who sent desperate messages to his son in Bonn, begging him to ask relatives in Germany to help rescue him and other family members who were suffering from the effects of solitary confinement and malnutrition at Camp Dignity and were being held against their will: “Hay tantos parientes en Alemania, por favor sáquennos de aquí…nos va muy mal, nos tratan muy mal. A los niños le pegan terriblemente, y vigilan al que no está conforme con todo esto y no quiere quedarse. A la mamá también la encerraron por un año y diez meses. Me permitieron hablar con ella algunas veces bajo vigilancia. Ella es solamente piel y huesos, por favor ayúdennos a salir de aquí.” (123).

Some political prisoners who were sent to Camp Dignity found a third way of resisting in order to be able to endure the pain. They did so by expanding the concept of written communication. For example, Luis Peebles, a political figure of the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario), was captured and sent to Camp Dignity to be subjected to torture. In his testimony Luis explains that he used the narrative mechanism of imagination and fiction as a way of surviving the extreme circumstances of the long periods of interrogation: “…para sobrevivir, como no podía no responder, respondía cualquier cosa en el interrogatorio, ‘inventaba lo más fantástico e inverosímil, lo que fuese necesario’, recuerda. A cualquier persona que supiera que estaba en el extranjero, le inventaba que tenía un arma. ‘Hasta una punto 30 y una bazuca llegue a inventar.’ Todo para aplacar a sus torturadores.” (Délano 71). This testimony is good example of how individuals under extreme circumstances can reconstitute and reconfigure the meaning of a brutal, unbearable reality through fantasy.

Furthermore, the act of relating the experience of torture and its commemoration by victims, whether during the dictatorship in Chile or in another place and another time, is more than just a strategy for survival; it can be seen as an effective measure in the process of self-healing. In order to achieve healing, however, victims must take some specific steps. The first step is to objectify the pain, moving it from inside the individual to the outside, where it can be seen symbolically as an image or a place, etc. The next step is to ritualize the viewing or experiencing of the symbol so that the intense pain of the experience can be managed at appropriate times and at an appropriate distance. A word of caution, however, is in order; this is a strategy for victims. It has been documented that for non-victims such rituals can inadvertently lead to desensitization.

This provides a dilemma. For example, that pieces of the Berlin wall are installed throughout the world, much like the relics of saints, may provide a way, for those who are close to the experience, of coping with the pain; however, it cannot ensure that non-victims will understand or remember what that symbol stands for. Furthermore, at some point, repetition of the ritual could render both the ritual and the symbol meaningless; in fact it could reduce the experience to entertainment, as has been witnessed among the throngs of tourists who are shepherded through former concentration camps as part of their summer vacation. In other words, at best the healing process through memorial and commemoration of special days and places of torture could be seen as part of the healing process or, at worst, an act of voyeurism. So, how can the suffering generation pass on the experience to the next generation without overwhelming it? What is the obligation of the second generation to remember or try to understand? What we do know is that victims realize that the experience should not be forgotten. As Matta, one of the victims of Chilean torture, who is now involved as a guide in the place of torture, says: “We cannot just go further as if nothing happened” (5).

The question of how to avoid a repetition of the experience of terror and if and how one can heal from such an experience is of singular importance. First, we must come to terms with what has happened.   In the case of Camp Dignity we have ample documentation of the spaces of terror that were created there. Just after Pinochet left power, investigations into the activities of the camp during the dictatorship began in earnest and Schäfer found it necessary to flee once again, this time to Argentina. The new government in Chile began to search for him immediately but despite intense effort, it took a few years to capture him. In his absence he, along with other members of the dictatorship, was tried in absentia and convicted of various crimes. Schäfer’s capture in Argentina was the first and most important symbol of the end of this nightmare. 

Schäfer’s subsequent detention in Argentina, extradition and incarceration in Chile opened hundreds of judicial cases, and led to and will continue to lead to the arrest of other former authorities of Camp Dignity. The opening of investigations and judicial rulings constitute another step in the long process of healing along with the personal testimonials of the victims. The series of personal testimonies by the victims to Chilean and German authorities concerning their painful experiences, and their interviews with media reporters, and the publication of many journal articles and books dedicated to this community, continue to open up the path of the healing process. 

The process of healing from the horrific events perpetrated by the leaders of Camp Dignity, both inside the camp and outside, will be a long and difficult one and will require continual social and psychological support so that with healthy body and mind former camp members can fully integrate into Chilean society. Finally we must remember that it is not just the individual victims of torture who must undergo the process if healing is to be successful; in the case of Camp Dignity, it is all of Chile.

Bibliografía

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