Together Under the Sun

With the sun, a banner, a barter of the highest order, in celestial trade for our relative comfort back on earth, all our hopes. We shattered silence with the voice of our emptiness, raised in a world without end, a walled city, founded on a fount of fear and threat. 

In 1961, Paul Schaefer, self-appointed Lutheran minister, former Hitler Youth and former Luftwaffe medic, stepped from his plane onto the Chilean tarmac. In photos he is seen smirking. Perhaps it is because he has escaped justice back home for his crimes against boys. And perhaps it is because his true legacy lies before him. 

He purchases a large parcel of fertile land with the money he has collected from his followers. In time he brings them to Chile and from there they start to build a walled city. Within the confines of his city Schaefer’s followers develop the empty land into a seeming Utopia lush with gardens, crops, a bakery, a hospital, living quarters, an airport, a massive arsenal of weapons both brought in and manufactured on-site and even a secret maze of underground tunnels that wind beneath the colony, giving Schaefer a way to flee if necessary. 

As he establishes his stranglehold on his people through fear, intimidation and abuse, he also eventually cultivates a relationship with the newly-minted Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet, a military man, seizes power from Salvador Allende through a U.S. backed coup. 

Pinochet has many enemies, both real and imagined, a side-effect of deposing a democratically elected leader through violence. Pinochet develops a systematic plan for torturing and executing those accused of being his enemies. Unfortunately for Pinochet, his torturers are not very skilled, and thus are often unable to get much in the way of confessions from their victims because the torturers are so heavy-handed most of their victims die long before anything of value can be beaten out of them. 

By the time Pinochet is in power it is 1974 and Shaefer has virtually mastered the art of control. In fact, there is supposedly good reason to suspect that Shaefer has learned much of his torture techniques from some of the most notorious fugitives in history - men like Josef Mengele. There is also reason to believe that Schaefer’s colony is virtually a waypoint for other Nazi fugitives being funneled into South America as a sort of evil underground railroad. Schaefer, seeing opportunity fall directly in his lap, offers Pinochet his expertise on the arts of torture and murder. It’s a match made in Hell. Schaefer gets the umbrella of official protection he needs, as well as an utterly ridiculous charity status for his colony.

Shaefer is not only a revolving door for the world’s worst, however. For him, Colonia Dignidad is more of an outward expression of the way in which he wishes the world to be. He is fully established in a position of ultimate power. He surrounds himself with young boys, charged with all sorts of menial tasks at his whim, and he sexually abuses them as he sees fit. This literally goes on for decades. He creates layered and immutable laws designed to keep families apart, to keep men from being sexually involved with women. This plan is so well executed that he is able to keep his congregation from producing any children for 15 years. On the occasion that someone eventually does happen to become pregnant he separates the parents not only from each other, but also from their newborn until the child reaches the age of 6. And on, and on, and on, etc . . .

As what I imagine is a way of endearing themselves to the surrounding locals, the Colonia hospital takes in the Chileans and provides them with world-class medical care. As the Colonia’s reputation grows outside of its walls, a growing number of Chileans actually long to have their children live in the compound in order to get an education at the Colonia grade school. Many of these Chileans are trained to become loyal followers of Schaefer’s cult of personality, and many of the young boys are also sexually abused. 

Eventually, in 1990, Pinochet voluntarily leaves power as a response to pressure from the Vatican as well growing international dissatisfaction with his legacy, and is replaced by a newly-elected president, Patricio Aylwin (an opponent of Schaefer’s). With their governmental protection revoked, and as members of the Colonia escape and get the word out on what really goes on in the compound, it is a matter of time before the authorities raid the Colonia and attempt to capture Schaefer. 

Somehow, Schaefer is able to escape with a staff of thugs and nurses and eventually makes his way to Argentina. He is able to remain there, undetected, until 2005 when he is finally captured and brought to trial. 

He died last week. He was 88. 

In the footage of his being brought to the courthouse in a wheelchair, he looks at peace, calm, he gently smiles. 

There is no way to measure the damage this one man has wrought on the world. 

The colony is still there today. There are attempts at contrition from this outpost of evil, many of those so willing to comply, to enforce his madness, free to live out their days in the Chilean sun, utterly outside of the justice they deserve.