Colonia Dignidad: Chile's Nazi colony

[Jan Klimkowski]

Testimony of a survivor:

DIGNIDAD TESTIMONY


"My body was full of cuts and bruises. I was rotting everywhere. I had pus in my eyes, my nose. My mouth was completely numb. I could feel nothing in my penis and I couldn't feel my limbs. My body was full of cigarette burns..."

In February, 1975, a young medical student named Luis Peebles spent nine days in Colonia Dignidad. ... His testimony, along with that of other survivors and a former agent of the Chilean secret police, formed the basis of reports by Amnesty International, the United Nations and other human rights organizations that accused Colonia Dignidad of functioning as a prison camp and centre for training and experimentation with torture techniques, after the 1973 military coup.

"They tied me to a metal cot, but this time they put a helmet on my head. It had movable earflaps which allowed them to apply electrical current to my ears and rubber bands for around the jaw. This was so that when they kicked or punched me, my jaw wouldn't get thrust out of joint. They taped little wires to my wrists, thighs, glands, chest, neck and applied current in different parts.

"There was also an agent who used a little rubber object which gave off shocks when he hit me with it. They had something they used on my eyes, mouth, teeth, under my tongue and sometimes, when I was shouting, they'd put it right at the back of the palate. I had another one in my anus, at the base of the urethra and another under my nails... This went on for hours and hours. ...The pain was so great that I twisted and several times lifted up the bed. I even bent the cot which was of iron and broke the straps with the strength of desperation.

"The brutality of the treatment made me think I was the subject of an experiment to find out how much I could resist both physically and mentally. I was the guinea pig and they were there to learn."

Adriana Bórquez of Talca was taken from her home on April 23, 1975, thrown onto a bus "full of people" and taken across the Maule River and past Linares, whose lights she saw shortly before the bus turned off the highway onto a gravel road.

"They took me into interrogation, the shouting grew louder and there was music, I remember having heard "Capricho italiano" by Tchaikovsky. A man they called the prosecutor (fiscal) or "Doctor" did the questioning. They applied current; when they finished I could still hear the cries of others being tortured. It gave me diarrhea. ... I had electrodes everywhere and something gave me shocks that passed right through my body. I felt torn apart; just as I felt I was being emptied by mouth and anus, I lost consciousness."

Men speaking with both Chilean and foreign accents shut six-foot-tall Sergio González into a small box measuring no more than a meter, applying electrical current through holes. They also wrapped his head in a plastic bag and then applied current, until oxygen was used up; almost drowned him repeatedly in special tubs, which were at times electrified; and tied him to a sort of electric grill where they applied current generally and to specific parts of his body.

"Right after the coup, torture by the intelligence services and ordinary police wasn't very sophisticated and a lot of people died," Gonzalez said. "But in the Colony they produced the maximum of pain, without necessarily killing. They even put me in their hospital for a while, because of the torture."

From the book "After the First Death: A Journey Through Chile Time Mind",
by Lake Sagaris, Somerville House, Toronto, 1996

http://www.chipsites.com/derechos/testim...2_eng.html