To the impoverished peasants of Chile's rural Seventh Region, the arrival in 1961 of los alemanes (the Germans) seemed at first like a godsend. The 60 or so blond, blue-eyed settlers of Colonia Dignidad (Dignity Colony) quickly set to work constructing what they called an "educational and benefactory society" on the site of an old ranch near Parral, 250 miles south of Santiago. Before long the newcomers had built a model community that offered many of the area's 20,000 residents access to employment, trade, free hospital services, an elementary school and, eventually, even a European-style restaurant on the nearby highway.
In recent years that utopian vision has gradually given way to a darker, more sinister image. According to accounts provided by former Colonia Dignidad residents, the colony, which now numbers about 350, has become a virtual prison camp under the control of its founder and leader, Paul Schafer, 66. A self-proclaimed psychologist, Schafer fled Germany in 1961 with his small flock after police launched an investigation into charges that he had sexually abused two boys.
Schafer has also been accused by former colony residents of engaging in the illegal importation and manufacture of light arms. Most chilling, perhaps, are accusations by victims and ex-agents of Chile's dreaded intelligence service, DINA (renamed CNI in 1977), that Colonia Dignidad has been involved in the torture of leftist opponents of the military regime of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. "These are gruesome matters," says Hugo Baar, a colony co- founder and a former associate of Schafer's, who calls the colony a "group that has become poisoned with lies."
The 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.
The 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.