RIGHTS-CHILE: Communists Request UN Intervene in Colonia Dignidad

By Gustavo Capdevila Reprint | | Print |

Gustavo Capdevila

GENEVA, May 4 1998 (IPS) - Chilean Communist Party leader, Gladys Marin, asked the United Nations (UN) to investigate claims more than 120 of the dictatorship’s disappeared are still alive in Colonia Dignidad, a “Nazi” colony in the south of the nation.

Marin asked the UN Human Rights Commission to protect “the victims of serious human rights abuses who could still be alive,” in Geneva Monday.

She told the Commission that Humberto Lagos, a lawyer working in Chile’s interior ministry had claimed he had evidence “120 or 160 of the disappeared are living in Colonia Dignidad,” last week.

Lagos said some of the people made political prisoners under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989) are still alive within the colony, although “in a seriously poor state of health,” Marin told a press conference.

Colonia Dignidad, a settlement established in the centre-south of Chile by Germans fleeing Europe following the Second World War, has been denounced before for alleged neonazi activities and other human rights violations.

The National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation, created by the democratic president Patricio Aylwin (1989-1994), investigated the community and concluded it had been linked to the DINA, Pinochet’s secret police.

“It has been proven it was torture and detention centre and that hundreds of Chileans disappeared there,” said Marin.

She reminded the Human Rights Commission that German government officials and members of the UN working group on Forced Disappearances had already produced conclusive proof political prisoners had been held in the colony.

Marin also said the secret cemetery within the 17,000 hectare site “must have been the site of numerous illegal burials of people merely classed as disappeared up until now.”

She explained that last week she had taken her complaint to the Interior Ministry, but the authorities had said they could not intervene as there were no laws to authorise such action.

“We had no option but to go to the international bodies,” explained Marin, who also met with the World Council of Churches and the World Organisation against Torture, while in Geneva.

She said the Chile of the Eduardo Frei administration was still operating under “the same institutions and laws as during the dictatorship,” adding there is “are close links between the current government and militarism.”

Chile’s Communist Party, which took 7.8 percent of the vote in most recent elections, in 1997, formed part of the coalition which backed Socialist president, Salvador Allende, who was assassinated in Pinochet’s coup on September 11, 1973.

Marin also said she would be talking to Swiss authorities about the situation face by Patricio Ortiz, a young Chilean detained in Zurich awaiting extradition to his home country.

Ortiz was accused of belonging to the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front, a guerrilla group involved in several violent events in Chile, including the murder of a carabineer in 1991.

She called on the Swiss authorities to free Ortiz and grant him the political asylum he wants in order to remain with the rest of his family in Zurich.

Finally, she said she would be travelling to Madrid this week to testify before Spanish judge Manuel Garcia Castellon, as part of the case against Pinochet and his supporters for the disappearance and death of nationals during the dictatorship.