Once a cult of cult, the Chilean tourist village is pursued by torture and violence against children

With sloping roofs with a red tile, trimmed lawns and a shop selling homemade biscuits baked from the home, Bavieri Villa looks like a bizarre village in German style nestled in the movable hills of central chili.

But there is a dark past.

Once known as the Diganed colony, he was home to a secret religious sect, founded by a manipulative and violent leader who cooperates with the dictatorship of August Pinochett.

Paul Schaefer, who created 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.

Schaefer also sexually abuses many children.

After Gen. Pinochet led a coup in 1973, the opponents of his military regime were taken to the Diganed colony to be tortured in dark basements.

Many of these political prisoners have never been seen again.

Shefer 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, a hotel, cabinets for renting and even a pond.

The Chilean government will now alienate part of its land to mark the victims of Pinochet there. But the plans divided the opinions.

More than 3,000 people were killed in Chile and over 40,000 tortured during the Pinochet regime, which was in power until 1990.

Luis the Gospelist Aguyo was one of those who had forcibly “disappeared”.

His sister Anna Aguyo is sitting by the fire in his house in Parlia, the closest city to the Dignedad colony.

“Louis was quiet, he liked to swim. He wanted to create a more righteous world,” she said.

G -n -Aguyo worked as a school inspector, was a member of the Union of Teachers and was active in the Socialist Party.

On September 12, 1973, one day after Pinochet removed the chosen president of the socialist socialists of Chile, Salvador Alende, the police came to the house of G -N -Aguyo and arrested him.

Two days later, he was sent to the local prison, but on September 26, 1973, police arrived and dragged him into a van. His family has never seen him again.

Anna Aguyo says a local farmer came to her house to say that he saw her brother in the German colony.

“My mother and my father went to a colony of Dignidad, but they were not allowed,” she said.

“They went everywhere, looking for him, to police departments, in the courts, but they couldn’t get information. My father died of sorrow because he could not help him. My 96-year-old mother thinks she can hear him call” Mom, come and take me. “

Aguyo was one of 27 people from a paraul that was believed to have been killed in a Digney colony, according to a continued court investigation ordered by the Chilean government.

The total number of people killed here is unknown, but there is evidence that it was the ultimate destination of many opponents of the Pinochet regime, including the Chilean Congressman Carlos Lorca and several other leaders of the socialist parties.

The Chilean Ministry of Justice says investigations suggest that hundreds of political detainees have been brought here.

Anna Aguyo supports the government’s plan to create a memory site there.

“It was a place of horror and horrific crimes. It should not be a place for tourists to shop or dinner at a restaurant. It should be a place for commemoration, reflection and training for future generations so that it never happens again.”

But government plans for alienation have divided the opinion in Villa Bavier, where less than 100 adults live.

Dorothee Munch was born in 1977 in the Dignidad colony.

“We lived in same -sex hostels like barracks,” she recalls.

“From a young age we had to work, cleaning the plates for the whole community and collecting firewood.”

The government plans to alienate 117 hectares of 4 829 hectares, including buildings where torture is carried out, and places where the bodies of the victims were exhumed, then burned and their ashes were deposited.

Munch Munch does not agree with the alienation plans, as they include the center of the village, covering the homes of residents and shared companies, including a restaurant, hotel, bakery, butchers and dairy products.

“We lived under a system of fear. We are also victims. We are restoring our lives and this will make us sacrifice once more. Maybe people my age could return, but for older residents it would be disastrous.”

Erika Timm arrived in the Dignidad colony of Germany in 1962, at the age of two.

Separated by her parents, she remembers she was crying for her mother at night.

Like several other people in the colony, she says they have received electric shocks as a child.

She also opposes the alienation plans and wants to stay in the same place. “I want to be with people who understand what I have experienced through.”

The Chilean Minister of Justice and Human Rights Heime Gajardo Falcon told the BBC that the government had decided to alienate the area where the main buildings of the former colony were concentrated.

“These were sites of political detention, torture, monitoring and training of state agents to commit crimes against humanity.”

The expropriation decree was published in July. Over the next few months, the state will determine the value of the alienated assets, he said.

Seventy -three inhabitants and former Villa Bavieri residents have written to the Chilean president, expressing their concern about alienation plans and wanting to participate in discussions about it.

They have hired a public relations company to deal with its relations with the media and a representative of that company accompanied the BBC when visiting the site.

Separately, the BBC talk to several other residents and ex -residents of the Diganed colony, who support the plan to create a memorial site.

Georg Claus has lived in a colony of Dignidad since 1962 – when he arrived from Germany with his parents at two years – until 2010.

Like many guys in the Dignidad colony, he says he was given a current blow, forced to take psychotropic drugs and was sexually abused by Schaefer.

“Every night I was taken to a building, I was stripped of a goal, they will put a black towel on my face and here, here, here, here, here,” he says, pointing to his genitals, throat, legs and under his hands.

“I think we have to have a memorial because so much cruelty happened here for both Germans and Chileans. I cannot believe that now at the place where so many baby tears, urine and blood flowed.”

G -N Claus is part of legal action – supported by the Association of Former and Current Residents of the Dignedad Colony – which claims that the leaders of Villa Bavierira do not share the income of the former colony fairly.

They want the government to ensure that when the alienation is made, the payment of compensation is distributed to all residents and former residents.

Other victims who support the alienation plans are former political prisoners who were tormented in the Dignedad colony, small farmers who were expelled from their land when the German colony and Chileans who lived locally and were sexually abused as Chief Children.

Schaefer was arrested in 2005 and in 2006 convicted of sexual abuse of 25 children, including five rapes of children. Several of his accomplices were also sentenced.

Justice Minister Gajardo says it is important to ensure that the horrors that have happened here are not forgotten.

“Bastry crimes have been committed here. So far, it has been privately owned. Once the state has been taken over, the Chileans will be able to enter freely and it will become a space for memory and reflection to ensure that such crimes have never been committed again.”