The UN today denounced receiving information about the holding of weddings and other parties in an old community founded by a former Nazi military in Chile, where there were serious violations of human rights. UN experts warned that the celebrations took place in Villa Bavieta, a former dignity colony enclosure, and asked the Chilean authorities to preserve evidence of violations.
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20/10/2026
by
Lusa
A UN denounced today having received information about the holding of weddings and other parties in an old community founded by a former Nazi military in Chile, where serious human rights violations were committed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
According to experts from the United Nations, the celebrations will have been held in Villa Bavieta, a former precinct of the Colony of Dignity, founded in 1961 by a former Nazi military, identified as Paul Schäfer.
“ We are concerned that celebrations can be held in a place where serious human rights violations have been committed and the expropriation of which was foreseen,” UN experts stressed in a joint communiqué that similar activities are being prepared in the coming weeks.
The experts, including the special rapporteur on torture Pau Pérez-Sales, and members of the UN Working Group on Forced Disappearances, urged the Chilean authorities to take the necessary measures to preserve relevant evidence that may still exist in the enclosure.
The Dignity Colony, founded by German migrants, worked in coordination with the Chilean Armed Forces to carry out arbitrary arrests, torture, sexual abuse, summary executions and forced disappearances, recalled the signatories in the statement.
The bodies of the victims were buried, exhumed and incinerated in the enclosure itself, where it is estimated that more than a hundred people may have been victims of forced disappearance.
“It is a place where some of the most serious human rights violations have been perpetrated in Chile’s history, and it cannot be treated simply as a tourist or entertainment place,” they insisted.
Paul Schäfer was already accused of pedophilia in Germany before he fled to Chile and founded the Cologne of Dignity, where other German settlers and Chilean citizens lived.
After fleeing Chile, the German was captured and arrested in 2005 in Argentina where he would eventually die in prison in 2010.
The authoritarian military regime led by Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile between September 11, 1973 and March 11, 1990, totaling 17 years in power.