From 1892 the land around Villa Grimaldi belonged to the family of Jose Arrieta, where the cultural tradition was continued with meetings of musicians and people involved in literature and other cultural activities up to 1940, when the land was sold to Emilio Vasallo.
After that, the house was turned into a restaurant, which was still a well known meeting place for intellectuals and artists. The restaurant's ground had many beautiful plants, statues, fountains and mosaics to make it appear like an italian villa, hence the name Villa Grimaldi.
In September 1973, the vista was transformed by the arrival of military vehicles and army personal. From one day to another, the Commando of Army Telecommunications was situated a little distance from the villa. From now on that was Pinochets headquarter, from where he directed the bloody crushing of Chilean democracy from a safe, secure and pleasent place.
At the end of 1973, Vasallo was forced to handover the Villa Grimaldi and the land arround to the DINA (National Intelligence Directorate or Diréccion National de Inteligencia). From that moment on, the Villa Grimaldi became the secret centre of detention and torture. The place changed from a place which was once the centre of intellectual and artistic life into the place where the most committed intellectuals of Chile were destroyed.
After the dissolution of the DINA in 1978 Villa Grimaldi remained as army property. During the 1980s the Villa (also known as Cuartel Terranove) was not in use for pri-soners.
Ten years later on the 17th of September in 1990 vehicles started to demolishing the buildings at the Villa Grimaldi for being able to build flats on the land. A neighbour alerted the Chilean press. After that came through, that the land was sold by General Hugo Salas Wenzel to a building company on the 21st September 1987 for ten million pesos. Members of the Chilean Parlament reached the conclusion that such transfer was not possible due to the fact that the Villa Grimaldi was property owened by the Chilean Government. On the 6th November 1990 Human Rights Commission of the Lower House visited the Villa Grimaldi acompanied by former prisoners and decided to keep the property and later to make it into a place of memory where so much of Chilean history had taken place.
On the 17th January of 1996 several architects were commissioned to design a park for peace. The ex-Villa Grimaldi was re-designed as to provide the history or the Villa Grimaldi, to honour those who had died or disappeared after being prisoners and ?to provide a ritual landscape where the dead could finally rest in peace".
Symbolic architecture took part from this day on:
a) Circular signs explain to the visitors the significance of
particular locations (e. g. of torture)
b) Wall of names of all dead an disappeared people
c) fountain at the centre to symbolise the waters of life
d) a garden
e) selection of indigenous Chilean trees planted by the
families of the disappeared, one for each of those who
lost their lives at the Cuartel Terranova
Villa Grimaldi: centre of torture from 1973 on
Villa Grimaldi was the DINA's most important detention and torture centre. It was used from mid 1974 onward, first as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Intelligence Brigade (MIB) and then as its operation center.
Operative teams had their quarters at Villa Grimaldi. They brought prisoners there for initial interrogation after arrest and devices specially designed for different forms of torture were kept there. Prisoners who were not subject to torture were also kept there, sometimes for long periods, awaiting possible new interrogations or a decision on their fate.
As the number of prisoners increased, new structures were built to hold them. The conditions of these apparently differed depending on the state of the arrested individual and the effect the DINA wanted to produce in him or her. Prisoners were kept in the following structures:
a) The Tower: This was a tower-like structure with a water deposit. Inside it, ten narrow spaces were held. There was a small door at the bottom, which could only be passed by getting down on all fours. In each one of these cells one or two persons were kept in permanent enclosure. The tower also contained a torture chamber. If there were two people in one cell, they had difficulty fitting themselves into the space and sleep was almost impossible. Apperantly, people brought to the tower were detainees considered to be of some importance and whose stage of intense interrogation had finished. Many of those who went to the tower were never seen again.
b) Chile Houses: These were wooden structures designed for isolating individual prisoners. They consisted of vertical sections similar to closets in which the person had to remain standing in darkness for several days
c) Corvi Houses: These were small wooden rooms builtc inside a larger room. Each one contained a bunkbed. This was apparently where prisoners stayed while they were undergoing intense interrogation and torture. During their stay at Villa Grimaldi, the prisoners were unable to clean themselves or change clothing. They had access to the toilet at fixed times only and the food was very poor and insufficient. All this, combined with the torture, produced a noticeable deterioration of the prisoners' health.
Torture in Villa Grimaldi
The most common torture method was electrical shock, consisting of a metal rack to which the naked prisoner was tied and then electrical current would be applied to different parts of his or her body, especially the most sensitive areas such as lips or genitals or even on wounds or metallic prostheses. One particularly cruel variation of this method consited in further pressuring the subject of interrogation by placing him on the bottom rack of a double bunk bed and torturing a family member or friend above him.
Another torture method often employed was hanging. The victim was hung from a bar, either by the wrists or wrists and ankles. In both cases, the pain produced over time by the weight of the hanging body, was aggravated by applying electrical shocks, beatings, penetrating wounds and other types of aggravation.
Submerging the person's head in a container of water - usually dirty - or some other liquid, was another torture method often used at Villa Grimaldi. The victim's head would be held under water almost until the point of asphyxiation. A similar effect was obtained through the so-called ?dry submarine", which consisted in placing a plastic bag around the person's head to prevent him or her from breathing.
In Villa Grimaldi drugs were used to obtain declarations. For a while, hypnotizing prisoners was tried, but without results. Villa Grimaldi had specially designed rooms used for torture. Some agents applied the torture methods and others, usually officers, conducted the interrogations, althogh the officers at times employed the torture instruments themselves. On some occasions during interrogations, with or withour torture, another official took notesw on a typewriter.
In addition to those methods already described, which were the most common, some agents occasionally emploaed other techniques. Such as throwing boiling water or other liquid on various prisoners.
Villa Grimaldi operated virtually non-stop. The operative teams came and went 24 hours a day, bringing in prisoners and torturing them around the clock. |
