Colonia Dignidad Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.Anti-spam check. Do not fill this in! ===Torture and murder=== [[File:Familiares de detenidos desaparecidos en Chile.jpg|thumb|Families of disappeared people]] [[File:Fosa en Colonia Dignidad detenidos desaparecidos.jpg|thumb|The grave where the bodies of murdered detainees were buried and later exhumed from]] During the military dictatorship of [[Augusto Pinochet]], from 1973 to 1990, Colonia Dignidad served as a special [[torture]] center. In 1991, Chile's [[National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation]] concluded that a number of people apprehended by the [[Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional|DINA]] were held at Colonia Dignidad, and that some of the colony's residents actively helped the DINA torture some of the captives.<ref name=":4"/> Colonia Dignidad's involvement came to light as early as an October 1976 report from the [[United Nations]] Ad Hoc Working Group on Chile, as referenced in a March 1977 [[Amnesty International]] report, "Disappeared Prisoners in Chile", with the latter report describing the evidence in this way: {{quote| Another DINA detention center described in the [U.N.] document, in which it is alleged that experiments in torture are carried out, is Colonia Dignidad, near the town of Parral…<ref name = Amnesty77>{{cite web |author=Amnesty Staff |date=1977-03-01 |title=Disappeared Prisoners in Chile |publisher=[[Amnesty International|Amnesty International Publications]] |ref=AMR 22/034/1977 |url=https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr22/034/1977/en/ |access-date=2016-04-21 |quote = Another DINA detention center described in the same document, ... }}</ref>}} Prisoners being tortured in the tunnels under Colonia Dignidad were each interrogated to gain an understanding of their personality in order to gauge the appropriate torture technique. These techniques led to a number of afflictions lasting indeterminate periods of time.<ref name=":2" /> As many as 100 of the citizens taken to Colonia Dignidad by the DINA were murdered at the colony.<ref name=Hopp/> There are more than 1,100 desaparecidos (disappeared people) in Chile, some taken to the Colony where they were tortured and killed.{{Citation needed|date=November 2019}} One of them is a U.S. citizen, [[Boris Weisfeiler]], a Soviet-born mathematics professor at [[Pennsylvania State University]]. Weisfeiler, then 43 years old, vanished while on a hiking trip near the border between Chile and Argentina in the early part of January 1985. It is presumed that Weisfeiler had been kidnapped and taken to the Colony where he was tortured and killed.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://weisfeiler.com/boris/ |title=Professor Boris Weisfeiler Has Been Missing in Chile since 1985 |first1=Olga |last1=Weisfeiler |first2=Lev |last2=Weisfeiler |website=weisfeiler.com |access-date=2016-04-21}}</ref> In 2012, a judge in Chile ordered the arrest of eight former police and army officials over the kidnapping of Weisfeiler during the [[Pinochet]] years, citing evidence from declassified US files.<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-19340756 |title=Judge in Chile orders arrests over missing US hiker |author=Staff writers |work=[[BBC News]] |date=2012-08-22 |access-date=21 April 2016}}</ref> In 2016, the case was closed and the men were freed when a judge ruled that Weisfeiler had indeed been abducted, but that it was only a common crime, long past the [[statute of limitations]], instead of a human rights violation.<ref>{{cite news |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-35980852 |title=Missing in Chile: What happened to Boris Weisfeiler? |first=Gideon |last=Long |work=[[BBC News]] |date= 2016-04-10 |access-date=2019-07-31}}</ref> Summary: Please note that all contributions to Christianpedia may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see Christianpedia:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission! Cancel Editing help (opens in new window) Discuss this page