Villa Grimaldi
Known to the military as Cuartel Terranova, Villa Grimaldi was one of the most notorious prison and torture centers between 1974 and 1976. More than 5000 people were detained and tortured in this center including Luz Arce and President Michele Bachelet. Conservative estimates indicate that at least 226 of the prisoners were murdered while detained at Villa Grimaldi. Today the camp is a public park to promote peace.
To learn more about the experience of prisoners at Villa Grimaldi, I recommend Inferno by Luz Arce. She was held at Villa as a prisoner, a collaborator, and eventually a DINA agent for several years.
Most of my information on Villa Grimaldi came from the Villa Grimaldi website and from the human rights tour I went on while in Santiago. If you are planing to visit Santiago I highly recommend the tour! http://www.labicicletaverde.com/walk_en.php
To learn more about the experience of prisoners at Villa Grimaldi, I recommend Inferno by Luz Arce. She was held at Villa as a prisoner, a collaborator, and eventually a DINA agent for several years.
Most of my information on Villa Grimaldi came from the Villa Grimaldi website and from the human rights tour I went on while in Santiago. If you are planing to visit Santiago I highly recommend the tour! http://www.labicicletaverde.com/walk_en.php
The Swimming Pool at Villa Grimaldi
Martín Espada Beyond the gate where the convoys spilled their cargo of blindfolded prisoners, and the cells too narrow to lie down, and the rooms where electricity convulsed the body strapped across the grill until the bones would break, and the parking lot where interrogators rolled pickup trucks over the legs of subversives who would not talk, and the tower where the condemned listened through the wall for the song of another inmate on the morning of execution, there is a swimming pool at Villa Grimaldi. Here the guards and officers would gather families for barbeques. The interrogator coached his son: Kick your feet. Turn your head to breathe. The torturer’s hands braced the belly of his daughter, learning to float, flailing at her lesson. Here the splash of children, eyes red from too much chlorine, would rise to reach the inmates in the tower. The secret police paraded women from the cells at poolside, saying to them: Dance for me. Here the host served chocolate cookies and Coke on ice to the prisoner who let the names of comrades bleed down his chin, and the lungs of the prisoner who refused to speak a word ballooned with water, face down at the end of a rope. When a dissident pulled by the hair from a vat of urine and feces cried out for God, and the cry pelted the leaves, the swimmers plunged below the surface, touching the bottom of a soundless blue world. From the ladder at the edge of the pool they could watch the prisoners marching blindfolded across the landscape, one hand on the shoulder of the next, on their way to the afternoon meal and back again. The neighbors hung bedsheets on the windows to keep the ghosts away. There is a swimming pool at the heart of Villa Grimaldi, white steps, white tiles, where human beings would dive and paddle till what was human in them had dissolved forever, vanished like the prisoners thrown from helicopters into the ocean by the secret police, their bellies slit so the bodies could not float. From The Trouble Ball http://www.martinespada.net/ |
The original tower was destroyed during the attempted cover up following the
“No vote” however the reconstruction is said to be an exact replica according to the prisoners who were detained at Villa Grimaldi. The tower had three levels. On the first level was the torture and interrogation room. The remaining two levels comprised of small enclosures where the prisoners were held in solitary confinement. Many of those held in the tower remain on the detained disappeared list. |
The main entrance to Villa Grimaldi is permanently blocked by a large leaf sculpture: a symbol of new life.
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