Everything that remains of the former Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (DINA) agent, Osvaldo Romo, is in a cardboard box that has sat for years in the office of Judge Alejandro Solís. Court clerks call it "Guatón Romo’s junk." Inside are hundreds of loose, handwritten sheets, riddled with spelling errors, and about twenty colored-cover notebooks—children’s notebooks—filled with the same cramped handwriting.

Romo wrote them during the seven years he was imprisoned at Punta Peuco. All the writings are about the same thing: scattered memories of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario (MIR) and the militants he pursued and helped massacre.

The reflections are sometimes delirious and other times savage, mixed with bouts of guilt. Between the lines, one can sense the panic he felt about dying in prison.

Regarding Agustín Reyes, a 23-year-old MIR militant detained on May 27, 1974, whom Romo took to the Londres 38 torture center, the former agent wrote: "I cannot forget him." He says he was a man with "grit as a mirista," who had "the posture of a good, hardened, and brave soldier." To Ramón Martínez, a member of the MIR Central Committee, whom Romo detained and transported, wounded by gunfire, to the Villa Grimaldi torture center, he asks him to save him "a spot in your army in the afterlife, you designate which one."

When he died in 2007, Romo was serving a sentence for the aggravated kidnapping of seven MIR members who remain forcibly disappeared today (Jorge Espinosa, Ricardo Troncoso, Diana Arón, Manuel Cortes Joo, Hernán González, María Elena González, and Elsa Leuthner).

According to data from the Ministry of the Interior’s Human Rights Program, since 1992—when Romo was arrested in Brazil and deported to Chile—the former agent had been facing proceedings as the perpetrator of 34 aggravated kidnappings, co-perpetrator of 22 aggravated kidnappings, and perpetrator of 14 cases of torture.

Heart failure ended Romo’s life. His body occupied niche 32 of the General Cemetery, and his texts ended up in the box of "junk." No one went to see him off at the cemetery, and the photograph of his coffin on a cart, pulled by a single gravedigger, without a procession, without family or comrades, without the tributes of those who benefited from his work, is a portrait of the most complete solitude and the comfortable way in which a part of Chilean society hopes that this terrifying part of our history will disappear.

The box with Romo’s writings was inherited by Basclay Zapata, "El Troglo," another fierce DINA agent who was serving a sentence at Punta Peuco and with whom Guatón Romo worked in three torture centers: Londres 38, Villa Grimaldi, and José Domingo Cañas.

Zapata has a criminal record as vast as Romo’s: three sentences as an accomplice to four aggravated kidnappings, seven sentences as the perpetrator of 12 aggravated kidnappings, and one sentence as an accomplice to an aggravated homicide. Among his pending cases is one as a co-perpetrator of 46 aggravated kidnappings and another 12 cases of torture at Villa Grimaldi.

Judge Alejandro Solís seized the box from "El Troglo" while investigating "Villa Grimaldi," thinking there might be something in it to help clarify the disappearances that occurred in that feared facility. But no. What remained there was Romo’s conversation with his ghosts.

Inside that box is a 2003 planner with the face of Mickey Mouse on the cover. Romo used it as a diary. Every day, he would copy the saint’s day and the maximum and minimum temperatures. When they brought him butter and tea, he never forgot to note that event.

He also noted the days he had to go testify for one of his crimes. And there are his notes from the weekends, when he hoped for a visit and no one arrived. The rest are blank pages. Only the temperatures and the saints allow one to notice that a day has passed. He likely spent the blank days writing in the notebooks where he speaks to his ghosts.

January 19

No one came. Mrs. Paty told me she was coming. No-no-no.

March 21

Beginning of autumn. Saint Eugenia and Clementina.

May 2

I went to the 8th court. Confrontation with the journalist Mrs. (MIR) Gladys Armijo (Gladis Díaz) who made strong accusations against me. Saint Athanasius.

June 29

No one came. Colo-Colo 3 / U. de Concepción 2. River Plate Champion of Argentina. 5°C – 18°C. Saint Peter- Saint Paul.

July 16

Today Celia Cruz of Cuba passed away at 78 years old. 3°C- 17°C. Our Lady of Carmen.

"Don Osvaldo felt betrayed by the military. He said he was in prison because of them, that he shouldn't be in prison. One person he always had a lot of rage toward was Colonel Marcelo Moren Brito. He knew he wouldn't last long in Punta Peuco and he didn't want to die there," says Víctor Varas, a former soldier and nurse for the Gendarmería.

September 18

Good food- good lunch. Meat and Salad. Te Deum- Never again, the Cardinal. He repeated Cheyre's words. 9°C-17°C. National Holidays.

September 19

Army Day. 8°C-19°C

September 30

I went to the 9th court Mrs. Raquel Lermanda regarding two miristas. One who is alive came to accuse me of torturing him- the fat boss. I think it was the fat team, not me. 10°-24°C. Saint Jerome.

December 11

They empty three rooms, people arrive. I was informed that the permit for the phone from Brazil is granted. 11°-29°C. Saint Damasus.

December 13

Saddam Hussein was detained 12°C-29°C St. Lucia- Aurora.

December 24

43 years married. 12°C- 31°C. St. Adela.

That year, 2003, marked 30 years since the Coup d'État, the moment when Osvaldo Romo began to transform into the fierce criminal he ended up being. In his planner, for September 11, he only noted: "I didn't go out.

Doctor Cosme: weight 86.400. Glycemia 138. 4C 22C. Orlando – Rolando." At the end, he added three places in Santiago, which perhaps have something to do with what he did that day: "In Lo Hermida. La Pincoya. Víctor Jara Stadium." Nothing more.

The words of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, written regarding the Nazi criminal Otto Adolf Eichmann, can be felt in every line of Romo’s daily life: "The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal."

Although we hope that in criminals, evil leaves an easily recognizable trail, the truth is that the capacity to do great harm to others can be something that ordinary, everyday people do only during their eight hours of work, thinking that it is merely their professional obligation. Evil, Arendt suggests, has a great capacity to embody itself in banal lives.

"I CANNOT FORGET THESE BRAVE PEOPLE"

Most of the pages written by Romo in prison talk about the MIR, the movement founded in 1965 and which Pinochet ordered to be eliminated. Its members—students and workers aged 20 to 30—communed with the "overthrow of the capitalist system," according to their declaration of principles.

They wanted to replace the system with a government of workers and peasants, whose task would be to rebuild socialism "and gradually extinguish the State until reaching a classless society." To achieve this, the MIR declares in its principles that "a revolutionary confrontation of antagonistic classes" is necessary.

Hence, the DINA would concern itself during the first years of the coup with making its members disappear, whom Romo knew well.

Before being a DINA agent, Romo was a militant in the Unión Socialista Popular (USOPO), led by Raúl Ampuero, and became a revolutionary leader of the legendary Lo Hermida shantytown, where he even confronted Salvador Allende himself.

From there, he established close ties of trust with the MIR leaders who were doing political work in the shantytowns. At the time, no one would have imagined that "Commander Raúl," as they called Romo, would be capable of jumping from one side to the other at 36 years old after the Coup and transforming into the executioner of his friends.

Many of the young people who are now forcibly disappeared were betrayed, detained, and tortured by him. The betrayal was, without a doubt, a chapter of the dictatorship that Romo wrote in the first person. It is still not clear why he did it.

In a 2001 statement he gave in court regarding his role in the disappearance of the journalist and MIR militant Diana Arón, Romo referred to her as a "charming" woman whom he had met in 1969 at "a land seizure in La Bandera." Years later, Romo detained this same woman, who was pregnant at the time, to take her to the Villa Grimaldi torture center.

But before that, according to witnesses in the case, he fired shots at her while she was escaping from DINA agents; perhaps thinking of that cursed day when he met in La Bandera the comrade who made her disappear.

Romo’s betrayal—if betrayal can be understood—is one of the least digestible. It has a different flavor than that of Marcia Merino, a former MIR militant who, after being brutally tortured by the DINA, ended up collaborating with them.

Romo, on the other hand, was not forced to enter hell. He saw the door open and wanted to cross it. In the book "Confesiones de un Torturador" (Confessions of a Torturer) by journalist Nancy Guzmán, it is recounted that days after the Coup, Romo was detained and taken to the Military School where he was going to be executed by firing squad.

Julio Rada, an investigative official, recognized him because he had interrogated him years earlier for car theft. Rada realized he could use him. He took him to a police station. "If you want to save yourself, you must collaborate," he told him. He put him in a cell where there were detectives suspected of being on the left, and Romo betrayed the police officers.

Shortly after, surely recommended by Rada, the military comptroller of Madeco, Jaime Deichler, a member of the DINA network in Buenos Aires, hired him to do the same at that company, which financed part of the DINA’s payroll of collaborators.

His trail of blood became known. And in 1974, officer Miguel Krasnoff recruited Romo to join the "Halcón I" group of the DINA, whose objective was to annihilate the MIR. It was a bloody year and a half; he accumulated all the criminal charges he is accused of between 1974 and 1975, the year the military regime’s security services finally decided to send him to Brazil with a lifetime scholarship.

"Heart failure ended Romo’s life. His body occupied niche 32 of the General Cemetery, and his texts ended up in the box of 'junk.' No one went to see him off at the cemetery, and the photograph of his coffin on a cart, pulled by a single gravedigger, without a procession, without family or comrades, without the tributes of those who benefited from his work, is a portrait of the most complete solitude."

Detective Luís Henríquez, who captured him in Brazil in 1992, remembers that the DINA was forced to send the former agent abroad. "Romo made mistakes and left several traces," he explains. After the detentions, Romo returned several times to the homes of the families of the kidnapped MIR militants to ask them for food and money for the prisoners.

In those visits, Romo omitted an essential fact: they were already forcibly disappeared.

-Romo was a criminal -Henríquez emphasizes.

Since some family members knew him from his days as a leftist militant, they wrote his name when they filed the complaints for the disappearances in court. "Only one judge dared in 1975 to issue an arrest warrant against Osvaldo Romo, which was never carried out.

That was what alerted the DINA and what finally motivated them to send him to Brazil, one of the countries that at that time belonged to the Triple A, the Anti-Communist League," says Henríquez.

In a 2003 psychiatric evaluation, Romo spoke about his mission in the DINA. The medical report is attached to the file for the homicide of Lumi Videla, an important MIR leader murdered by the DINA in 1974 during a torture session while she was detained at the Cuartel Ollagüe, whose body was later thrown into the Italian embassy.

Romo told psychiatrist Roberto Araya that he agreed to collaborate with the dictatorship on the condition that "no innocent people would fall" and to "minimize casualties." According to the psychiatrist’s transcription, "his job was to create a 'map' and betray every member of the MIR and clarify the organizational chart of this group.

He excuses himself by saying that he did not kill anyone and that the MIR had sought that fate beforehand."

The description of his entry into the DINA as a heroic feat contrasts with the account he gave in 1995 in front of the cameras of the Univisión network of the way—in great detail—he applied electricity to detainees to make them talk.

In a country where some do not know what to call the period when Romo was one of the thousands of operational agents, his phrases can clarify the point: "They are tied up and metallic clips are put on their vaginas, nipples, mouths, and ears, and the machine is turned on. They are wetted a little so that the first shock is stronger and they talk quickly..."

The Romo of the statements is described in the medical file as morbidly obese, suffering from diabetes. An ordinary 64-year-old man who "walks clumsily, dragging his feet." The psychiatrist does not observe signs of dementia: "He speaks of himself with delight, knowing he has become a historical (mythological?) character.

His attitude also demonstrates a conviction of privilege before the law and an excessive security in his impunity."

In 1992, Judge Dobra Lusic, who was investigating the disappearance of MIR militant Alfonso Chanfreau Oyarce, detained on July 30, 1974, managed to locate Romo in Brazil and succeeded in having him deported.

It was one of the first human rights violation cases investigated in democracy. And Romo was one of the first agents to be detained. His family stayed there. Romo believed that in Chile he would have the support of the Army.

But he was not a soldier. And he soon began serving his sentence at the Colina public prison as a special prisoner, but a prisoner nonetheless. Only his lawyer Enrique Ibarra—a retired Army colonel and member of that institution’s legal team—visited him. That was when he became friends with Víctor Varas, a former soldier and nurse for the Gendarmería.

Varas refers to Romo as "Don Osvaldo."

-Don Osvaldo felt betrayed by the military. He said he was in prison because of them, that he shouldn't be in prison. One person he always had a lot of rage toward was Colonel Marcelo Moren Brito, his boss in the DINA.

He treated Don Osvaldo very badly, he never lent him a hand. And he would tell me: "Locate Colonel Moren Brito." I called him many times on the phone and in the end, he never did anything. Don Osvaldo wanted him to come see him and help him get out of prison because of his illness, because he knew he wouldn't last long and he didn't want to die there.

He wanted to go to Brazil with his family -Víctor Varas told CIPER.

Until the moment arrived when Romo decided to provide the names of DINA members to the courts. Just as he did in the 70s, he betrayed them again. The judges and police officers consulted by CIPER agree that Osvaldo Romo became a key piece in solving many cases of forcibly disappeared and executed persons.

On January 21, 1999, he testified in the case of the disappearance of Luis Dagoberto San Martín and identified Ciro Torré, a former DINA operational agent: "He was at Venda Sexy, he was an officer and took detainees to Villa Grimaldi."

He also contributed to the investigation of Operation Colombo, as the detention, torture, and disappearance of 119 people, mostly from the MIR, was called, which the DINA (using foreign media) made appear as if they had been murdered by their own comrades.

Romo testified before Judge Juan Guzmán that one of the 119, Teobaldo Tello Garrido, was detained and killed at Villa Grimaldi by Marcelo Moren, the boss who forgot him. (Moren is currently incarcerated at the Penal Cordillera serving 21 sentences for aggravated kidnapping and homicide, totaling 103 years in prison).

Romo also accused Manuel Contreras, the head of the repressive apparatus who obeyed and reported to Augusto Pinochet, of the disappearances of: Luis Gajardo Zamorano, Sergio Tormen, Manuel Ramírez Rosales, Jorge Elías Andrónico Antequera, Jacqueline Binfa, Carlos Cubillos Gálvez, and Luis Fernando Fuentes, among others.

"Most of these detentions were programmed by an organization called the Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia with the acronym DINA, which was in charge of the then-colonel Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, and as deputy chief was Pedro Espinoza Bravo, who was replaced in October 1975 by Raúl Iturriaga Neunmann.

The DINA had operational centers called José Domingo Cañas or Ollagüe in charge of Marcelo Moren Brito and Maximiliano Ferrer Lima; Londres 38 or Yucatán in charge of Eduardo Nekelmann and Gerardo Urich; and Villa Grimaldi or Terranova, in charge of Cesar Manríquez Moyano, Benyerot, and Patricia Almuna.

The DINA operated with two large groups, the Caupolicán group in charge of Marcelo Moren Brito and the Tucapel group, whose chief's name I do not remember."

Just as he had previously made a map of the MIR, Romo provided the justice system with a map of the DINA.

From then on, some former agents approached Osvaldo Romo, who had been transferred to Punta Peuco in 2000. In the box of "junk" there is a list of the visits Romo received on February 24, 2007: Ricardo Lawrence Mires and Eduardo Neckelmann Schultz, both former DINA members.

Lawrence belonged to the Lautaro Brigade and Neckelmann, according to what Romo stated, was in charge of Londres 38. That meeting did little for Lawrence. In 2008, he was sentenced as a co-perpetrator of the aggravated kidnapping of Ariel Santibáñez, a MIR militant.

To date, he is being prosecuted as the perpetrator of two aggravated homicides, co-perpetrator of 46 aggravated kidnappings corresponding to Operation Colombo, in addition to the case where survivor Félix Lebrecht identifies him as the perpetrator of his illegal detention.

In his final years of confinement, Romo was alone almost all the time. Sometimes a nun would go to see him, as well as Patricia Obando, the wife of Víctor Varas. At odds with the other prisoners and transformed into the worst monster of the dictatorship, the former resident of a precarious little house in Lo Hermida described those MIR militants he massacred:

"I want to ask today, why they killed them. These young people who were professionals, who were idealists, I could even say that they could be fanatical about the poor in the countryside and the city, in all the workplaces of the country.

They are all dead today, this is because they had links with uniformed personnel throughout Chile, this was dirty work, by elements who thought with a clumsy head that only had muscle, they had no Posture or Conduct, they don't know what art is and what science is, and in the end what professional ethics, I cannot forget these brave people, none of them who had great talent and had virtue in their blood" (The capital letters correspond to Romo's text).

These are delirious pages, in which fear, loneliness, guilt, and ghosts seem to merge.

by Verónica Torres

Source: ciper.cl, April 19, 2012

Schäfer, for whom the files were prepared, wanted to have information on everyone, and that is how the vast majority of the files are related to people without any political or military connotation. There are files on dockworkers from the port of Lirquén, on taxi drivers, on teachers (many) from high schools and universities, on workers at service stations, in industries, in supermarkets, and even on prostitutes.

In the 45,000 files declassified this year, there is everything: espionage on the “friends” and “enemies” of the colony, wild rumors, obsessions with the Rosicrucians, the Masons, and the Church, evidence of cronyism with the DINA, and even files on port workers, teachers, service station attendants, and even prostitutes, showing a Manichean world full of prejudices.

I would lack adjectives to describe what I have read in the last five months, during which I have been immersed in reviewing the 45,000 intelligence files of Colonia Dignidad that were declassified this year by Judge Jorge Zepeda, after he kept them secret for nine years following the discovery of the archive in 2005.

The first thing that must be said in this regard is, just as the lawyer Hernán Fernández explained to me in an article I wrote some time ago regarding a particular episode contained in the files (the siege by Paul Schäfer of the nuns of San Manuel), the colony was three things at the same time: a sect erected based on the pedophilic desires of its supreme leader, an illicit association dedicated to torture, the forcibly disappeared, and arms trafficking (as established by the courts), and, furthermore, an intelligence agency.

It is not that the colony possessed an intelligence team, but rather that it was itself an intelligence agency, parallel to the DINA and the CNI, with which it cooperated closely, to such an extent that they shared the same phobias and rivalries, for example, toward the Military Intelligence Service (SIM); that is, the formal intelligence apparatus of the Army, which was never viewed favorably by the DINA.

Like this organization, the colony had a good number of informants, operational agents (mostly Germans) who carried out surveillance and photographed people, and kept an enormous Kardex with information, which contained—among many other things—the almost complete list of those who were part of the SIM in different eras, with greater emphasis on the military personnel who performed such functions in regiments in Concepción, Chillán, Talca, Los Ángeles, and other cities located within the colony's zone of influence.

However, they also spied on their friends, as there are many files relating to DINA and CNI agents. The two most particular ones are those referring to the men that the DINA installed next to the Germans in Parral: Fernando Gómez Segovia and his successor, Eduardo Guy Neckelmann Schütz.

The files of both are the only ones that show sequences of some type of code. Gómez Segovia’s contains an alphanumeric code, while Neckelmann’s, incredible as it may seem, possesses handwriting (the only file that has something written in that way, as everything else was typed), with inscriptions that appear to be runic alphabet, like that used by the ancient Germanic peoples, just as can be seen in the main photo.

“Don Mamo”

The symbiosis between the DINA and the colony, which in the eyes of the justice system formed a single illicit association, is illustrated very well in the two files dedicated to Eduardo Soto Henríquez, an Army corporal belonging to the ranks of Manuel Contreras and stationed inside the enclave, in whose file number 1 it is noted that “this official has shown to date an excessive interest in finding out or inquiring about activities that are purely private in the Colony, with which he has caused distrust and fear on the part of its inhabitants.”

[citation]Certainly, the most relevant of all the information contained in the files is that which relates to the forcibly disappeared and those people who were tortured and interrogated inside the colony.

In addition to maintaining files on everyone who was made to disappear in the midst of “Operation Colombo,” the Dignidad archives contain transcripts of numerous interrogations carried out inside the enclave and confirm facts that, until before the 2005 discovery, were not fully confirmed.[/citation]

Among those activities was having shown himself “vively interested in knowing the corresponding code” after passing through a door that obviously had a security system. In addition to that, he “asked two different people what the origin of the rifles was.”

But that was not his only sin. Point 4 of the report notes that he “began to open drawers, of an emergency kit, looking at their contents” and that (point 5) “despite the fact that his companion told him that they were going to continue the trip immediately, he got out of the vehicle in which they were traveling and lifted the tent at an entrance door to look inside.”

“Luckily, the things that Don Mamo already knows were not there at that moment,” the document says intriguingly, without explaining what it was that the all-powerful head of the DINA, Manuel Contreras, better known as “El Mamo,” already knew.

The text continues with several other “faults” committed by the indiscreet visitor, and then notes that “it is left to Don Mamo’s discretion whether he should continue working with the colony or be changed.”

Fortunately for Soto, as the same file points out, he was only sanctioned “for his behavior on the estate.” Neither he nor his girlfriend, whose address appeared in the file, suffered harm (as far as is known), unlike other wayward agents, such as Miguel Angel Becerra, murdered inside the property with toxic elements compatible with sarin gas, or like Juan René Muñoz Alarcón, the “hooded man of the National Stadium,” who spent long periods in the colony, only to end up stabbed to death in Santiago after he decided to tell the Vicaría de la Solidaridad what he had seen in Paul Schäfer’s empire and in the DINA barracks.

A Right-Wing Stasi

And this is the second thing that must be understood: they filed anyone, and any information was useful to them. In the files relating to Carabineros Major Carlos Dondero, who was a commissioner in Parral, he is highlighted as “an upright man,” who had been Allende’s bodyguard in the UP and who from there “reported on the GAP.” Furthermore, it was recounted that he had spent a year in Iran and that he had brought a Volkswagen car back from there.

Likewise, the file describes him as “tall and thin” and also notes something even more irrelevant and which even sounds somewhat fanciful: “...the informant has never seen someone who enjoys eating so much. Once he ate 24 empanadas, on another occasion 8 to 10 hot dogs.”

Schäfer, for whom the files were prepared, wanted to have information on everyone, and that is how the vast majority of the files are related to people without any political or military connotation. There are files on dockworkers from the port of Lirquén, on taxi drivers, on teachers (many) from high schools and universities, on workers at service stations, in industries, in supermarkets, and even on prostitutes.

Likewise, anyone who had any contact with the colony, or who was of interest to it, was filed, spied on closely (in cities like Concepción or Chillán), and/or photographed by the Germans, the same thing that happened with almost all visitors to the “family casino” in the commune of Bulnes, where they also photocopied the identity documents of many of those who arrived there.

Most of the information comes from a hundred sources that were defined by acronyms. The one that is repeated the most is the one that—with different variants—referred to the then-Army Major Fernando Gómez Segovia, the first head the DINA had in Parral, and which operated in a house that was owned by the colony.

Such data shows that the DINA and the colony functioned as a sort of Chilean Stasi, controlling everyone’s movements, making lists of suspects for anything, and, above all, collecting any rumor that was heard and incorporating it into their databases.

Certainly, most of the rumors portray a bipolar world, in which all opponents (supposed or real) of Pinochet were immoral, dirty, thieving people, dedicated to shady businesses, who hid weapons in their houses and who did not hesitate to deceive anyone to achieve their perverse objectives, disqualifications that are repeated regarding a series of Catholic priests and Army and Carabineros officers who, in one way or another, were not addicted to the colony, who, if they did not show themselves submissive to Schäfer’s dictates, it was not because they were doing their job, but because they were leftists (or so the Germans believed).

An example of this is the file relating to Carabineros Major Manuel Valdebenito Remsses, one of whose officials inspected (in 1974) a truck loaded with weapons that was destined for Colonia Dignidad. The card says (in which, of course, there is no mention of the weapons) that “before 9-11-73, Valdebenito bought the Clarín and in his language used terms from the UP.”

The “nationalists,” on the other hand, were good people, upright and honest, examples of virtue and rectitude. This is evident, for example, in the case of former Army generals Bruno Siebert and Julio Canessa, both qualified as an “excellent person” in their respective files.

As in every sect, in this paranoid and Manichean world, the “good” was the leader and his acolytes, or those he sanctioned as positive elements for the community, while the “bad” was related to whatever represented a thought different from theirs, starting with the Catholic Church, following with Silo, and even the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC), which seemed to have many members in the city of San Carlos, and which earned the fact that one of the most famous Chilean informants of the colony, Óscar Muñoz Hildebrandt, better known in the files by his initials (“OMH”), “infiltrated” that group in order to obtain details of those who formed it.

The same thing happened with Freemasonry. There are many people pointed out as such, and in the file of a teacher with the surname Godoy, from San Carlos, it is noted that he is “the only Godoy on the list of Masons.”

In addition, they did not miss the opportunity to write “Jew” in the file of every person they believed was of that ancestry.

And a not insignificant fact is that in the various files, all types of crimes are attributed to different people: drug trafficking, homicides, robberies, thefts, misappropriations, driving under the influence, etc., but there is not a single file that talks about sexual abuse, the favorite sin of the pedophile Schäfer.

The Disappeared

Certainly, the most relevant of all the information contained in the files is that which relates to the forcibly disappeared and those people who were tortured and interrogated inside the colony. In addition to maintaining files on everyone who was made to disappear in the midst of “Operation Colombo,” the Dignidad archives contain transcripts of numerous interrogations carried out inside the enclave and confirm facts that, until before the 2005 discovery, were not fully confirmed.

A sample of this is what happened with Mile Mavrosky, a funeral home businessman from San Carlos who was detained in December 1973, accused of heading a plan called “Black Easter,” through which the MIR was supposedly going to assassinate all the prominent figures of that commune; that is, a sort of localized “Plan Z,” as unreal and absurd as the original.

Accused of this, Mavrosky was a prisoner for 11 months in a place he always believed was the colony. He never knew it in detail, as he remained all that time alone in a kind of dungeon, subjected to almost daily torture, deprived of food and water, lying on a kind of bed, shackled by his feet and hands, and blindfolded.

He was interrogated daily by men who spoke Spanish, but in the background, he heard the constant murmur of people talking in German.

I interviewed him recently. Very careful, he told me that he believed he had been in the colony, but he was not sure of it, as he did not see anyone. He only heard those voices. However, in the files, there is the detail of the interrogations to which he was subjected, the suspicions they had regarding him being a dangerous Marxist, and several other things, all of which was finally debunked, to the point that he was released after being returned to the Chillán regiment, “only” with a fracture in his left wrist, visible to this day.

Great luck for Don Mile, the same that was so scarce for so many others, like the more than 100 disappeared who the same “hooded man of the National Stadium” said were alive inside the Parral property around 1977, the same ones who today continue to swell the lists of the forcibly disappeared and whose trail was lost in the foothills of the Seventh Region.

by Carlos Basso

Source: elmostrador.cl, December 12, 2014

Investigation into building where DINA barracks operated in Colonia Dignidad

Erick Zott, who spent a week held in the sect’s facilities 50 years ago, was interrogated by a subject with a Portuguese accent, subjected to very peculiar torture, and, furthermore, used in the midst of an intelligence training session intended for members of the dictatorship’s secret police.

For many years, the former Army officer and agent of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), Fernando Gómez Segovia (now deceased), denied that the office of said organization that he directed in Parral had any working relationship with the Colonia Dignidad sect, which, in turn, also carried out intelligence work during the time of the military dictatorship, maintaining an immense Kardex with files on “enemies” of the colony, but also on those they considered their friends, while carrying out surveillance, monitoring, and harassment in the same sector, but also in cities like Chillán, Concepción, and Los Ángeles, as has become evident thanks to the 46,000 files that were found by the PDI in 2005.

However, Gómez Segovia, better known as “GURMIR” within the colony, gradually let slip some pieces of information in several of the judicial processes in which he was charged. In several of them, he recounted that in 1974 he was assigned as head of the DINA’s Southern Regional Brigade (BIRS), based in Parral, and that it was installed in a house located in the center of that commune that Paul Schäfer, the leader of the sect, offered them for free.

Also, in statements made within the framework of the investigation into the death of former President Eduardo Frei Montalva, he said that his second-in-command in that unit was former Army officer Gerardo Huber (murdered in Cajón del Maipo in 1991) and that other officers who served as heads of the BIRS, which had jurisdiction over the entire south-central zone of Chile, were Eduardo Neckelmann and Maximiliano Peppi.

Perhaps the most surprising thing of all that he ever said was—within the framework of the investigation into the kidnapping of Alvaro Vallejos Villagrán, a case for which Gómez Segovia was sentenced to 10 years—that one day Schäfer asked him to accompany him to a property located inside the villa, near the entrance to the estate, “and there he showed me a construction that from the outside looked like a stable, but upon entering it was impressive, as they had practically reproduced the office I used in Parral, with all the comforts, telling me that that was my office, which I reproached, since our work was reserved. Schäfer got annoyed and then offered it to Guy Neckelmann, who succeeded me in the position,” but “El Mamo” did not want it,” he asserted.

The mention of that Kafkaesque replica of the city DINA office inside the enclave was the only statement that existed for many years regarding what was always an open secret: that the DINA had its own facilities inside the colony, in which highly relevant agents operated, such as Pedro Espinoza, Marcelo Morén Brito, Fernando Laureani, and others.

In fact, several people who were apprehended in the 70s by the DINA were convinced that upon being taken to the colony, they had been inside that office, but it could never be located.

However, a couple of weeks ago, one of the survivors of the colony, Erick Zott, who today resides in Austria, participated in a key diligence within the village, which was led by the minister visiting for human rights cases of the Santiago Court of Appeals, Paola Plaza, as well as PDI personnel, in the midst of which the political prisoner was able to recognize the place, a diligence that today takes on a new relevance, given the actions that the judge has carried out during the last year in search of clues that allow finding the whereabouts of at least 30 people who were made to disappear inside the sect between 1974 and 1975.

The Return

Towards the beginning of 1975, Erick Zott was the head of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) in Concepción and, together with several other MIR members, was in Valparaíso, an occasion that the DINA—supported by members of the Military Intelligence Service of the Maipo Regiment—took advantage of to arrest them.

They were held in the Maipo Regiment, where an episode that was never clarified took place, which culminated in the death of Captain Osvaldo Heyder, and after that, Zott was taken to Villa Grimaldi, but towards the second or third week of February, they transferred him to the Talcahuano Naval Base, where the SIRE (Regional Intelligence Service) operated, which had another member of the Concepción MIR, Luis Peebles (who passed away at the end of January of this year), detained.

From there, both were mobilized to an unknown destination by the DINA. Shortly after arriving at that place, however, they began to notice that they were in a detention center different from all those they had known up to that moment, as the vehicle in which they were traveling entered a gravel road and then they were given cotton with water in their ears.

After that, when the van stopped, they were made to climb onto a kind of cement ramp, and after that, they were locked in an office. Although they had been blindfolded for weeks, the non-commissioned officer who was driving the van allowed Zott to take it off for a few minutes so that he could clean his eyes.

That was how the prisoner managed to see that he was in an office that had a window that looked out to the exterior.

After that, they covered his eyes again and the interrogations began, very different from those they already knew by that point.

Zott recounts that they spent almost the entire day tied—with leather straps—to metal cots, completely unable to move, and with the light on day and night, which caused them to lose their sense of time.

From time to time, moreover, they were subjected to a torture they had never heard of: they were put in a very small wooden box, standing up, where a person barely fit, and they were left there for hours. To that technique, of course, were added the classic beatings and the administration of electricity.

However, the interrogations were very different from those they had known up to that moment. In Zott’s case, the one doing it was a subject with a Portuguese accent, and unlike the modus operandi of the DINA, which only wanted names, this subject first asked them for all their personal data, as if he wanted to know about them, understand them, know about their lives, their fears, etc.

In addition, the subject with the Portuguese accent and others interrogated them simultaneously with other DINA members who were in Villa Grimaldi, by means of a high-power radio. The place was also disconcerting because when they were not being interrogated, the only sound that reached them, like a dull rumor, was the crackling of the radio the DINA used, but nothing else.

Even both prisoners constantly had a guard who stood behind their heads, but they never heard them utter a single word.

He remained there for about a week, and when he was being taken back to another detention center in Santiago, the same Army non-commissioned officer, the only person who treated him humanely, told him that he had been in Colonia Dignidad and not only that, but he also explained that they had been there in the midst of an instruction “of an instruction for officers in the field of interrogations” (to this day Zott has tried to find him, which has been in vain).

The above made sense almost 40 years later, when the PDI found a booklet in the colony that evidenced that in November 1974 the DINA had carried out intelligence training for non-commissioned officers inside the colony.

Today, Zott understands that both he and Peebles were basically used as the subjects to be interrogated in said training, in which everything indicates that the foreign subject was Carlos Camacho Matos, an official of the Brazilian Army who in the early 70s infiltrated the MIR in Concepción and was subsequently placed in the colony along with other Brazilians.

The Office

Zott is sure that the site where he and Peebles remained inside the colony was not the famous “Potato Warehouse,” where many other prisoners detained by the DINA in Santiago, Talca, Parral, or Coronel were held, and for a long time, the doubt of where he had exactly been gnawed at him.

In 2007, he was inside the colony, trying—among other things—to locate the place, but he was unsuccessful. However, something peculiar happened during that visit, which was authorized by the delegate that the government of the time appointed for the sect, Hermán Schwember, and which was guided by Udo Hopp, the older brother of the doctor Hartmutt Hopp.

In the midst of it, Zott told me who he was:

-I am a survivor from here, I was a prisoner here. My name is such and such -he explained to him. To his surprise, Hopp was moved.

-He stared at me like in shock. And he looks at me again, approaches me, and gives me a hug, a thousand percent emotional. Tears fall from his eyes and he looked at my face again as if saying “I know him, I don’t know him, I recognize him.”

After that, the guide told him he was going to show him something.

-He took me to a place that I now, unfortunately, cannot recognize. I know what it looks like inside, but I don’t remember from which part we arrived at that place, and he tells me, this is the laboratory where my brother worked with the DINA people and he tells me, you know, it’s all those chemicals that were developed, etc. -in reference to the chemical and probably bacteriological weapons that were produced inside the DINA.

However, the tour was interrupted due to the opposition of other colonists and Hopp’s own wife.

Fifty years after his confinement in the sect, Zott was finally able to identify the place. It was a construction that today is almost in ruins, as it is full of waste materials, and which was previously known as the Hildegard Halle (Hildegard’s shed), which possesses in its rear part (where one enters) the cement ramp that Zott mentions, “the typical ramp of a warehouse in which trucks unload,” he explains.

It is a one-story, wooden building of large size, divided into three naves, and after it was identified as the place where Zott was, it is currently being studied by the PDI, especially given the suspicion that it possesses a hidden basement, as it is worth remembering that only in the last two months has Minister Plaza, together with the detectives with whom she works, managed to find two underground bunkers and interrogate a series of witnesses who would be providing information of utility for the reconstruction of the joint repressive activity of the DINA and Colonia Dignidad, with the aim of finding the victims who were executed there.

by Carlos Basso Prieto

Source: elmostrador.cl, February 23, 2025