DR. OLGA WEISFEILER
The Honorable George W. Bush
The United States President
The White House
VIA FAX
Mr. President:
In the light of your upcoming
meeting with the President of Chile Ricardo Lagos, I am using the opportunity
to ask you, Mr. President, for your vital help.
I write to ask you to lend your personal voice, and the
weight of your prestigious office, to raise with President Lagos the issue of
the fate of my brother, Professor Boris Weisfeiler, a distinguished
After many years of
searching for him, I learned in June 2000 -- through declassified State
Department documents -- that Boris was apprehended by a Chilean military patrol
and taken to Colonia Dignidad, a 37,000 acre German pseudo-religious sect with
links to Nazism. Colonia Dignidad, during the military dictatorship of Gen.
Augusto Pinochet, was one of the most notorious and secretive detention and
torture center, from where dozens of political prisoners disappeared.
According to military
sources, Boris was accused of being a Russian spy, then a CIA, and
later a Jewish spy. His detention and delivery to Colonia Dignidad
was due to the outstanding order of the Chilean Army to arrest and bring all
strangers found in the area to Colonia for interrogations. Two and a half years
after his disappearance, my brother was reportedly seen alive inside the
settlement. Colonia Dignidad, now under the name of Villa Baviera, still exists
and is fully operational today, in spite of the approximately 70 criminal
lawsuits brought against its leaders, for charges ranging from tax evasion and
falsification of documents, to child abuse, kidnappings and torture.
In the past few months, the
investigators of my brother’s disappearance have received additional
information: Boris was detained in Colonia Dignidad for some period of time,
brutally tortured there and later on killed either by Colonia's leaders or by the
members of Chilean military. It has become obvious to me, now more
then ever, that the key answers to the mystery of Boris' disappearance are
hidden behind the barbed wires fences of Colonia Dignidad.
Nevertheless, in spite of
its long history of criminal activity and the virtual enslavement of 250
Colonia residents, who are to this day denied their fundamental human and civil
rights, the government of Ricardo Lagos is very reluctant to take any official
actions against the settlement.
During the
past four years, I have traveled to
At a time when our
government and the entire world are so concentrated on the war against
terrorism, I am sure you, Mr. President, will find it morally unacceptable that
the settlement which was and is still deeply involved in human rights abuses
and in dozens of civilian disappearances, still operates freely in Chile, and
that almost twenty years later, there is still no accounting on the fate of a
missing American citizen. I am asking
for your powerful help and support in the task of finding the only American
among the over one thousand civilian disappearances during Pinochet’s 17-year
rule: my brother Boris Weisfeiler.
I need to know what
happened to Boris. And if indeed my
brother is dead, he, like the any other human being, deserves a proper burial.
If you raise the name of my
brother with the President of Chile, it will no doubt focus the attention of
the
Mr. President, I appreciate your assistance.
Sincerely,
Olga Weisfeiler