CHIP / CHILE - THE SANTIAGO TIMES IN ENGLISH

CONGRESSMEN BACK COLONIA DIGNIDAD PROBE

(Dec. 3, 2004) Chilean politicians have pledged to support Olga Weisfeiler’s campaign to discover the fate of her brother, the only U.S. citizen among the 1,100 people who disappeared during Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

At a press conference Thursday in Santiago, Dept. María Antonieta Saa of the Party for Democracy (PPD) vowed to put pressure on the government to investigate allegations that Boris Weisfeiler was detained and possibly executed at Colonia Dignidad. She said she would work to pierce the “web of protection” around the German enclave in Region VII, 350 kilometers south of the capital.

Also present were Olga Weisfeiler, who has been searching for her brother since he disappeared during a walking holiday in 1985; Sergio Laurenti, the director of Amnesty International in Chile; and Pascale Bonnefoy, a journalist who has championed Weisfeiler’s cause.

Laurenti described Colonia Dignidad as “the phantom of Chilean democracy” and attacked the Chilean and German governments for doing nothing to stop “systematic abuses” perpetrated by colonists.

He said the high profiles of the Weisfeiler case and that of Maarten Visser, a young Dutchman also allegedly detained at the colony, helped to focus attention on the enigmatic 17,000-hectare community, now known as Villa Bavaria.

A coalition of human rights groups formed in July gathered 400 signatures in an open letter to President Ricardo Lagos calling on him to take “energetic and definitive action with regard to human rights violations in the former Colonia Dignidad.” The letter was delivered to La Moneda last week by Weisfeiler and Paulus and Loes Visser, Maarten’s parents (ST, Nov. 25).

Weisfeiler is making her fourth visit to Chile seeking information about her brother. On Saturday she traveled to Colonia Dignidad, accompanied by Adriana Heyder, the sister of Capt. Osvaldo Heyder of the Chilean Army, whose assassination in 1975 has also been linked to the colony.

“We were unable to speak to the residents of Colonia Dignidad,” Weisfeiler said.

Instead, she met Hernán Escobar, a 37-year-old Chilean adopted by the colonists when he was 9 and now one of their leading spokesmen, and Michael Mueller, 47, of the colony’s incipient reform committee.

“They didn’t deny that Boris was there. They just said, ‘We don’t know, we were young at the time. We don’t know what happened or when it happened,’” Weisfeiler told journalists Thursday. “I hope the U.S. Embassy and the Minister of the Interior (José Miguel Insulza) will do their job and help us to find new information.”

On four occasions, informants have claimed Boris Weisfeiler, a Russian-born mathematics professor, was detained at Colonia Dignidad after he was arrested by military police, though accounts differ as to whether he died there, was transferred elsewhere or remained incarcerated.

Olga Weisfeiler and the Vissers came to Chile to lobby for renewed investigations into their relatives’ disappearances. They met Socialist Party (PS) Sen. Jaime Naranjo, the president of the Senate’s Human Rights Commission, who has described Colonia Dignidad as a “state within a state,” and Dep. Guillermo Ceroni (PPD), who holds one of the Region VII seats in the lower house, both of whom said they will pursue the matter, perhaps with a view to restarting stalled legal proceedings.

Neither the president of the Senate, Hernán Larraín of the opposition Independent Democratic Union, nor the German Embassy responded to requests for meetings, though the U.S. Embassy has promised its backing.

Weisfeiler also approached Chile’s most senior soldier, Gen. Juan Emilio Cheyre, and Sen. Julio Canessa. Canessa, now an appointed senator, was in 1985 the deputy commander in chief of the Army who ordered the detention of any foreigner found in the vicinity of Colonia Dignidad. Both he and Cheyre declined to meet Weisfeiler.

Last month 22 senior colonists and nine Chileans were convicted as accomplices to 27 counts of child abuse committed by Paul Schaefer, their erstwhile leader, who founded the colony in 1961 and has been a fugitive since 1998 (ST, Nov. 18).

Colonia Dignidad was mentioned in the recently published Valech report as torture and detention center used by agents of the military government.

By Tom Burgis (editor@santiagotimes.cl)

(Ed. Note: In today’s Feature Story, Olga Weisfeiler talks to The Santiago Times about the 20 years she has spent searching for her brother.)