Chile’s Era of Brutality Preserved

The demons of memory stalked Pedro Alejandro Matta from the Mack truck assembly line in Hayward to the streets where he worked as a private detective to his bungalow in a San Francisco suburb.

There was no escape from Villa Grimaldi.

When the Chilean refugee closed his eyes, he was back in the concentration camp on the outskirts of Santiago, an elegant 19th century estate converted into the dictatorship’s biggest clandestine detention center.

He was stumbling blindfolded through a gantlet of unending torment, natural beauty and human absurdity: The smells of prisoners’ urine and of 5,000 rose bushes. The tower where guards tortured prisoners to death and sniped idly at cows in neighboring fields, whose carcasses they retrieved for impromptu barbecues. The “barbecue grills”--electrified interrogation racks where victims could hear off-duty captors cavorting in the estate’s swimming pool.

The torture damaged Matta’s shoulder. And his face was scarred by the worst injury of all: “The psychological pain of having felt the shame of belonging to the human race. Of learning what one human being is capable of doing to another human being.”

Matta will never forget Villa Grimaldi, and he has made sure that Chile will never forget either. After 15 years in exile, he returned and joined fellow survivors in transforming the landscape that claimed at least 227 lives. The Park for Peace-Villa Grimaldi--a combined park and memorial that human rights monitors say is the first of its kind in Latin America--was opened in March by Chile’s government.

Villa Grimaldi represents the clashes that persist beneath the surface in Chile and other former Latin American dictatorships--conflicts between past and present, military and civilian, left and right.

Despite the repression that killed as many as 3,000 people, former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet still heads the military here. A onetime commander of Villa Grimaldi holds the rank of brigadier general, protected by an amnesty law. Many Chileans see the military as heroes who laid the seeds for the nation’s continent-leading prosperity.

But for many other Chileans, the remaking of Villa Grimaldi challenges an alarming tendency in the region to hide the past. In neighboring Argentina, for example, the Navy School of Mechanics functions on the Buenos Aires riverfront with no outward sign that, 20 years ago, it was a death camp where prisoners were dragged onto airplanes and then hurled into the Rio de la Plata.

Democracy and free-market prosperity flourish today in Argentina, Chile and other South American nations partly because pragmatic accords with former military rulers left atrocities unpunished. There is a delicate balance between moving forward and denying recent history altogether, as the Chilean housing minister explained when he inaugurated the memorial.

“We wanted to preserve this place in order for Chileans to conserve this piece of our history and reflect on the future with the firmness that comes from acknowledging the past,’ said the minister, Edmundo Hermosilla.

The efforts of the government, neighbors and survivors prevented the site from becoming “just another condominium,” Hermosilla said. The new Villa Grimaldi tells the stories of the place, the history of Chile and the mission of a man who traveled back into the depths of the horror.

Nightmarish Details

Matta, 47, is tall and rugged. His eyes slope slightly downward and his mustache droops, contributing to his melancholy look. On a recent tour of the park, he reconstructed his nightmare with wry humor and an oral historian’s obsession with detail. He has memorized such things as the names of the four techniques with which he and other prisoners were hogtied and hanged from beams and the home addresses of former torturers whom he tracked down in comfortable retirement.

“There is a part of the population for whom this is the past, it is far away,” Matta said. “They don’t care what happened here. And when people don’t care, that is when you are in danger that experiences like Villa Grimaldi can repeat themselves.”

The estate was once a bastion of refinement. Built in the early 1800s, it was the headquarters of the Uruguayan ambassador’s extensive farmlands outside the capital. Against the backdrop of the snowcapped wall of the Andes on the east, the Spanish-style main house featured a pillared facade and a surrounding array of fountains, a garden of statues hewn from Carrara marble, exotic trees and flowers.

In the early 1970s, the government of President Salvador Allende used Villa Grimaldi as a conference center that hosted receptions for Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Cuban President Fidel Castro.

After the military overthrew Allende in 1973, Villa Grimaldi fell into the hands of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), one of South America’s most thuggish secret police forces.

The DINA chief was Gen. Manuel Contreras, whom at least one former political prisoner has accused of personally beating her. Once the second most powerful man in the nation, Contreras is serving a seven-year prison term for ordering the assassination in Washington of a Chilean exile leader.

The front gate of the 129,000-square-foot property has been preserved as it was during the reign of Contreras. The bolted, black-steel gate has a sliding rectangular peephole. The designers of the memorial commissioned a multicolored abstract sculpture that slithers up the interior driveway like a tongue of flame or a claw-like hand.

An estimated 5,000 political prisoners passed through the front gate between 1974 and 1978, years when the facility functioned as a concentration camp. Through this gate, the arrest teams of the DINA went marauding across the capital in Chevrolet C-10 pickup trucks, which were often disguised with logos of television stations.

Abduction in Daylight

On May 17, 1975, the C-10s hunted down Matta. The son of a dentist and a teacher, he had been a law student and a leader of the ruling Socialist Party’s youth league at the time of the military coup. He left the university and bought a general store, using it as a refuge for members of the clandestine resistance to Pinochet.

Six agents abducted Matta as he opened the store that morning. They took him first to a detention center in Santiago known as the Discotheque because prisoners were subjected to systematic sexual abuses as pop music blared over a sound system. The Discotheque is notorious because survivors allege that the DINA used a specially trained German shepherd dog to assault female prisoners there.

After a week, the blindfolded Matta was transferred. His captors pummeled him during a half-hour drive. He was dumped onto cement. Guards formed a circle for the standard welcome: a blizzard of punches, kicks and curses. Through the pain and the darkness, a fellow prisoner whispered: “Hey, Flaco [Skinny]. You are in Villa Grimaldi.”

The estate’s main house served as administrative offices and a casino for officers. The first stop for prisoners was a row of torture chambers and closet-size cells along a wall near the stables. In one of the “barbecue pits,” interrogators tortured Matta with prolonged electric shocks while they barked questions and pounded away on a typewriter.

Some victims suffered heart failure, forcing interrogators to perform heart massages or call in a cardiologist. Both victims and victimizers were up against the clock.

“The resistance groups were counting on us not to break for the first 24 hours,” Matta said. “That gave them a chance to find out you had been detained, to escape, to warn others. The torturers knew about this 24-hour policy, and they were trying to break it.”

Today, the sites of the demolished torture chambers and other buildings are marked by signs on the grass. The design of the park encourages visitors to stroll and reflect upon the memories it records. There are walkways, pools of water, sculptures fashioned from the debris of the concentration camp, and a curved wall that will bear an art exhibit commemorating the dead.

Memories of Solidarity

One spot that remains just as Matta remembers: a long red-brick bench. The prisoners were released from cells three times a day, shuffling single file, one hand on the shoulder of the prisoner in front. Their captors herded them to the bench to eat hurried meals--rotting leftovers, a cup of coffee--off their laps. It was the only time when blindfolds were removed.

“Here we could whisper messages and raise each other’s morale,” Matta said. “It was very risky, but we did it anyway. This bench represents memories of solidarity. It has profound value for us.”

Villa Grimaldi juxtaposed savagery and humanity. The guards seemed deranged by power, beating and raping at will. But their work haunted them. They insistently justified their actions and asked if prisoners would seek revenge if released. One harried torturer confessed to a captive that he spent sleepless nights in his living room, machine gun in hand, waiting for leftist assassins to come after him.

And two secret police agents were executed after they were caught passing messages from prisoners to their families.

The guards sometimes brought prisoners-turned-informants to the swimming pool to sunbathe and drink Coke. The pool was used to terrorize one 15-year-old collaborator, whom the guards convinced that the water was full of crocodiles.

“Given the circumstances, the things that he had gone through, it was totally logical to him: He wholeheartedly believed there was a pool full of crocodiles in Villa Grimaldi,” Matta said. “All they had to do to make him talk was threaten him with the pool.”

Nearby, military conscripts tended the villa’s renowned rose garden. The fragrance wafted up to the tower in the far corner of the grounds, the estate’s former water tank. The three-story structure contained tiny cells into which prisoners crawled on all fours. It was Death Row.

One of the few who did not “disappear” from the tower, journalist Gladys Diaz, recalled in a written memoir how she sang to fellow captives to keep their spirits up. She listened one day as guards in the next cell ordered Alfredo Rojas, the former director of the federal railroads, to sign a blank check from his checkbook for them.

Afterward, Rojas told Diaz through the wall: “You heard that, didn’t you? I just signed my death sentence.” He disappeared soon afterward.

Matta survived a week of around-the-clock abuse in the concentration camp. He believes his captors spared his life because they never learned that he was a Socialist youth leader. He was transferred to an official prison and ultimately released among a group of political prisoners whose cases drew pressure from U.S. human rights groups and politicians. The same government that had backed the Chilean coup took him in as a political refugee.

“We don’t know whether the United States was involved in advising the torturers, but the CIA knew what was going on at Villa Grimaldi,” he asserted.

Despite initial bitterness, the ensuing years have left him with a positive view of the United States. “I began to understand the great complexity of that society. I have excellent memories.”

Matta thrived in Northern California, moving from blue-collar jobs to a career as a private investigator. He spoke about his ordeal to churches and groups promoting democracy in Chile.

Stalking the Captors

After the return of democracy in 1990, he went home and put his investigative skills to work helping human rights organizations document the story of Villa Grimaldi. Accompanied by a journalist, he found himself knocking on the doors of his former captors.

Matta did not confront the retired agents with his true identity; he merely questioned them about Villa Grimaldi. The responses varied. In one of Santiago’s wealthiest neighborhoods, the wife of a former commander received Matta in a living room stocked with antique furniture and a silver collection. She told him that the secret police were heroes. As for human rights, she said you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.

Matta also tracked down Manuel Rios Orellana, accused by human rights groups of being a zealous torturer who caused 10 deaths in the “barbecue pits.” Now the owner of a liquor store, Rios admitted he was an interrogator, Matta said. But Rios claimed that all he did was sit behind a typewriter, according to Matta.

The confrontations were cathartic, dreamlike experiences. Matta says he was searching for truth, not revenge. “This is not about my individual story. It is about something bigger and more important.”

That sentiment underlies the memorial at Villa Grimaldi, which continues to grow. The survivors founded a nonprofit corporation to operate the park, and they plan to build a human rights archive and conference center. They hope that one thing does not change: Survivors and the relatives of the dead held a ceremony in which they symbolically closed the original entrance to Villa Grimaldi, bolting the steel black gate so that it will never open again.