This is an article I wrote some time ago that I’m updating and republishing here.
The Andean foothills of southeastern Chile contain some of the last patches of untouched wilderness in the world. At the base of the Andes mountain range, the foothills overflow with verdant greenery, with small pedestrian roads sneaking their way through the foliage. Trickling mountain streams, fed by melting snow high in the Andes, turn into coursing rivers in the foothills, racing through thickets of trees, while vineyards and haciendas, cut into the rolling countryside like steps in an immense staircase, flourish in the fertile soil.
Boris Weisfeiler was a mathematics professor at Pennsylvania State University. Born and raised in the Soviet Union, Weisfeiler was a gifted mathematician, and showed his potential from a young age. He received his Ph.D. from the prestigious Steklov Institute in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1970, and progressed rapidly in his career. In 1973, however, he was unfairly blocked from a promotion, allegedly due to unofficial antisemitism in Soviet academia. Seeing that there wasn't a future for himself where he was, he defected to the USA. Weisfeiler arrived in America in 1975, and in 1976, he joined Penn State as a professor. In 1981, he was naturalized as a US Citizen.
In December of 1984, Boris Weisfeiler had decided to take a solo backpacking trip through southeastern Chile. Even after a lifetime in Russia, Weisfeiler dreaded the long northeastern winters, and sought respite in more temperate climes during Penn State's winter break. He was an experienced trekker, having previously taken solo trips in Peru, Alaska, China, and Siberia, and so wasn't fazed by the remoteness of his chosen destination or the rugged terrain of his proposed route.
Weisfeiler boarded a flight from Penn State to Pittsburgh on December 24th, 1984. From Pittsburgh, he flew to JFK Airport in New York, and from there, to Santiago, where he landed at 10 PM. From Santiago, Weisfeiler took a bus south to the town of San Fabian, in the Nuble region of Chile, where he began his trek to the Andes. From here, the exact details of Weisfeiler's route are hazy, as he was traversing sparsely inhabited forest, eating from his own stores and sleeping wherever he could find cover, with occasional stays in the villages he passed through.
We do know, however, that on January 3rd, Weisfeiler had crossed the Nuble River, about 200 miles south of Santiago. He had dinner with two shepherds from the area, and spent the night sheltering in their tent, before leaving early the next morning. Weisfeiler continued travelling east, and reportedly saw one of the shepherds from the night before, a man named Luis Lopez Benavides. The two did not speak, but authorities would later find that this was the last confirmed sighting of Boris Weisfeiler.
Eight days then passed without incident. Weisfeiler was supposed to return to San Fabian on January 12th, and contact his sister Olga, before heading north to Santiago. He never did. He had a return flight to New York booked for January 13th, but the plane would depart without him. On January 14th, when Olga realized her brother hadn't returned, she immediately reported him to local police, who advised her that Weisfeiler had likely chosen to extend his stay in Chile. Uneasily, Olga waited for word from her brother. But on January 19th, at the start of the new semester, Boris still hadn't returned, and Olga and Penn State University jointly notified the US State Department about Weisfeiler's disappearance.
In Chile, the investigation had already begun. On January 14th, Chilean police had found Weisfeiler's backpack, which contained his US driver's license and credit card. Notably, his passport, return plane ticket, and money, were missing. This finding was only reported to the US Embassy on January 22nd, after the State Department approached the Chilean government about Weisfeiler's unexplained disappearance.
Then, the U.S Consular officer traveled from Santiago to the location the backpack was found. On arrival, he was presented with a body of a man, similar in height and build to Weisfeiler, who was supposedly found drowned in the nearby river, with police claiming it was indeed Weisfeiler. The officer objected, saying the face did not resemble Weisfeiler's, gesturing at a photograph he carried. Right then, a local man walked in and identified the body as that of his brother, Leopoldo Ponce Alarcon. When the consular officer examined the body after the man's departure, he noticed that the skin on the tips of the fingers had been peeled away, leaving no fingerprints for an identification.
Even after this incident, however, the Chilean police persisted with their original conclusion. On March 6th, 1985, the police declared Weisfeiler dead, marking the cause as accidental drowning in the Nuble river. The State Department never publicly questioned this conclusion, but privately, a number of questions were raised. Firstly, if Weisfeiler had drowned, what happened to the body? The Nuble river was narrow, and had a weak current, so it seemed unlikely it would have carried the body of Weisfeiler for any length. The recovered body of the drowned peasant the week before was further evidence of this. And second, at the spot Weisfeiler is said to have drowned, the Nuble river is barely four feet deep. Weisfeiler was an accomplished trekker, in good physical shape, and had crossed deeper rivers on the same trip: how would he have drowned in water he could have stood in?
The Chilean government has never publicly answered these questions. Indeed, after 1985, Chile hasn't made any public statements on Boris Weisfeiler's disappearance at all. And so, when this dubious pronouncement was made, the case went completely radio-silent. For sixteen years, it looked as if Boris Weisfeiler's death would remain yet another baffling mystery.
But in 1998, Augusto Pinochet, after years of political maneuvering, was finally indicted in England for human rights violations. In response, then-US President Clinton declassified a number of US diplomatic cables and reports from Pinochet-era Chile, which revealed a decade-long underground investigation by the State Department to uncover the truth about the missing American.
Some of the most salient information released was the intelligence the United States had on the Colonia Dignidad, a notorious religious-cult-turned-prison-camp, founded by Nazi defectors in postwar Chile, and used by the Pinochet regime for the torture and execution of political dissidents. The Colonia committed its crimes against humanity with the complicity of Chilean authorities, operating akin to a state-within-a-state, and it continued to exist through the late-1990s. The US had always believed the Colonia was related in Weisfeiler's disappearance, as it was at its height in the 1980s during some of the most active political repression in Pinochet's reign. Colonia involvement would also explain the conflicting Chilean responses to the disappearance, along with the general lack of transparency from Chilean authorities. When I read them, however, the documents revealed a much more obvious connection between the Colonia Dignidad and the disappearance of Boris Weisfeiler:
The Colonia Dignidad was located only twenty-five miles, as the crow flies, from the spot Boris Weisfeiler was last seen alive.
The real story of the disappearance of Boris Weisfeiler, then, begins with one Paul Schaefer, a committed Nazi and convicted pedophile, who, in the 1950s, built and led a small commune in West Germany. Schaefer was influenced by the teachings of American revivalist preacher William Branham (who would later also influence Jim Jones), and he quickly acquired great power over his followers, who were indoctrinated into a repressive cult of personality and forced into indentured servitude.
The public front for Schaefer's commune was as a community orphanage for war widows and their children, an endeavour supported by his followers' labor. Schaefer's was known for his charisma, which, as one follower said, "radiated from him like beams of light," and his exhortations for moral and spiritual upliftment, along with generous financial support for new arrivals, proved convincing. The commune grew rapidly, and soon had almost 300 members, working and living in a building outside Troisdorf.
Things soured quickly, however. In 1960, two widows at the orphanage accused Schaefer of molesting their children. These accusations were deemed credible, and German police issued warrants for Schaefer's arrest, leading him to flee the country alone. In the Middle East, he met with a Chilean ambassador, who encouraged him to bring his commune to Chile.
In 1961, Schaefer arrived in Santiago. Later that year, using funds raised from his most devoted followers in Germany, Schaefer purchased a 4,400 acre ranch near Parral, in the Andean foothills, about 200 miles southeast of Santiago. The first ten German emigrès arrived shortly afterwards, and together, began building on the ranch. In 1963, once building had progressed, another two-hundred-thirty members, the bulk of his original congregation, joined the commune. The commune was proclaimed by Schaefer as a center for moral revival, and was officially named the Colonia Dignidad. Residents proudly referred to themselves as Colonos, followers of Schaefer, and members of a commune attempting to restore the dignity of man.
But the reality of the Colonia diverged sharply from this romantic fiction. Schaefer's purported utopia was an authoritarian dystopia, where Colonos were subject to numerous insidious methods of social control, with brutal corporal punishment applied for any violations or perceived violations of the code. Schaefer banned private conversations of all sorts. A system of "confession" was instituted, where members were compelled, daily, to confess their wrongdoings and report the sins of others. Men and women were kept entirely separate, with celibacy enforced on all adults. Children were raised communally, separately from their parents, and under the direct eye of Schaefer. Schaefer was alleged to have kept his own harem of young boys, who he groomed and abused for years.
Besides his bastardized version of Christianity, Schaefer's other exhortation was anti-Communism. His flock was largely composed of German war veterans and war widows, carrying vivid memories of the devastating march of the Red Army across the German east. Communism, to them, was the everlasting scourge, and after years of propaganda, this latent fear had become omnipresent paranoia. Schaefer used this to his own advantage, justifying his totalitarianism with McCarthy-esque screeds on the danger of the "other side."
Schaefer and his captive followers felt vindicated in their belief in 1970, when the socialist Salvador Allende was elected to presidency. The Colonia took Allende's victory as an existential threat, using their connections in Chilean conservative circles to import automatic weapons and military-grade equipment. A militia was formed, patrolling the borders of the Colonia, which was now marked by an eight-foot barbed wire fence, interspersed with guard towers and observation posts. When few "enemies" surfaced, the Colonia turned their search for traitors inwards, developing new methods of torture to punish wayward members.
In 1973, the political situation radically changed. After years of political acrimony, a right-wing military junta seized the government, vaulting General Augusto Pinochet into power as the de facto dictator of Chile. Salvador Allende was found dead with a self-inflicted bullet wound in his skull, and Chile went from a Soviet-aligned socialist state to one with deeply anti-communist leadership. Pinochet began his regime with a mass purge of political enemies and dissidents, with almost forty-five thousand people detained at makeshift detention centers. During this purge, he discovered the Colonia Dignidad, and saw in it a potential use.
Pinochet and Schaefer were always predisposed to be allies. Schaefer was virulently anti-communist, with overt Nazi sympathies. Chile and Germany had a long history of military collaboration, dating back to the late-1800s, and Pinochet, who made his name climbing the military cursus honorum, was steeped in an admiration of German military valor, and admitted multiple times to an "enchantment" with Erwin Rommel. And so, when Pinochet heard of Schaefer and the Colonia, he probably saw a opportunity ripe for mutual gain.
A direct meeting between Schaefer and Pinochet has never been confirmed, but it's almost definite that one occurred. Because, by 1974, when Pinochet formally assembled his regime's secret police, it began redirecting many of its most sensitive political prisoners to the Colonia for torture, interrogation, and eventually, execution. The role of the Colonia in political repression only grew throughout the Pinochet regime, and it persisted after Pinochet's fall, with defectors from the Colonia reporting mass executions in its vicinity as late as 1997.
In 1984, then, when Boris Weisfeiler entered Chile, he was entering an authoritarian dictatorship with a history of political repression and extrajudicial detention. As a defector from the USSR, a nation with a very similar track record, he likely understood the dangers he faced, but he reasonably expected that as an apolitical traveller residing in an allied nation, taking a solo backpacking trip through a relatively prosperous country, he'd remain free of trouble. But, through no fault of his own, his route took him perilously close to Chile's most notorious prison camp, and that seems to have sealed his fate. For a man who fled his homeland searching for personal liberation, this was a particularly cruel outcome.
The last person to see Boris Weisfeiler alive, as mentioned above, was Luis Lopez Benavides, a farmer in the Nuble river region with whom Weisfeiler had stayed with the night before. According to documents released at that time, this was Lopez's last involvement with Weisfeiler, who was alleged to have drowned in the four-foot deep water of the Nuble shortly afterwards.
Released U.S diplomatic cables, however, tell a different story. Lopez, after passing Weisfeiler, did not carry on with his day; instead, he filed a report with the nearby Chilean army garrison, claiming that a "foreign extremist" was in the area. It's unclear why Lopez had made the report, but there are a number of potential reasons why Boris would be particularly suspicious to the Chilean military officers that accosted him, particularly in a time of renewed Cold War tensions:
Boris Weisfeiler carried an American passport, but his birthplace wa listed as Moscow. This was expected, given he was a Soviet defector, but to the army officials that captured him, it must have seemed quite suspect. Defection, after all, is historically the most common cover for many of the Soviet spies that embedded themselves in the West.
Weisfeiler's backpack was adorned with Cyrillic lettering, and he was supposedly wearing beige khakis, easily mistakable for military dress.
And of course, there's the unfortunate coincidence of Weisfeiler's route. As we know, Weisfeiler was only twenty-five miles from the Colonia at the time of his disappearance, and the fact that his former companion Lopez reported him seems to indicate that he was moving towards the Colonia.
This theory is supported by a declassified cable from 1987, which discusses the eyewitness account of a military informant known only as "Daniel." This "Daniel" claims to have been on the military patrol that captured Weisfeiler, and states that they "took off his shoes, tied him up and took him into Colonia Dignidad, where he was turned over to the chief of security for Colonia Dignidad." He goes on to say that Weisfeiler was interrogated and determined to be a "Jewish spy," and was "kept in animal-like conditions" for a further two and a half years before his eventual death.
While the informant's account of Weisfeiler's capture is corroborated, whether he was actually was kept alive that long is dubious. The U.S State Department received a different cable in 1987 from the US Embassy in Santiago, detailing a tape recorded by one Heinz Kuhn. Kuhn had defected from the Colonia Dignidad in 1968, but still lived in the area in 1985, aiming to help other defectors escape the Colonia. On Christmas Eve of 1984, Heinz Kuhn had received Hugo Baar into his home, a high-ranking member of the Colonia who had defected after tiring of Schaefer's abuse. Baar's defection had raised the hackles around the Colonia, and patrols that week were penetrating unusually deep into the Andean foothills searching for Baar. In early 1985, Kuhn was monitoring radio transmissions out of the Colonia, likely tracking progress of the search for Baar, when he overheard a conversation between Schaefer and two of his subordinates.
In it, Schaefer questions them about the recent "intruder" to the Colonia, with several oblique references to a "Jew." A man responded to this saying, "'Don't worry, the problem has been solved. He is already eating potatoes underground.'' This outcome is also supported by a separate informant to the CIA, who, in a declassified memo, claims that after Weisfeiler's interrogation at the Colonia, he was beaten to death and thrown in the river. This source also states that the first unit to be sent in the search for Weisfeiler was the CNI—Pinochet's secret police—who removed all evidence of Weisfeiler's murder from the area.
Both of these were deemed reliable sources, so it is most likely the Boris was killed shortly after his abduction. "Daniel's" evidence in about Weisfeiler is likely a case of mistaken identity, because, along with a probable explanation for Weisfeiler's death, the declassified documents have evidence of a large-scale coverup of the murder by Chilean authorities. This signals that they understood two things:
Weisfeiler was not a Russian spy but an American citizen, and his abduction was a mistake.
Weisfeiler had seen far too much to be let go.
Given both of those were true, it made little sense for Chilean authorities to leave Weisfeiler incarcerated for another two years. His immediate execution would have served their purposes of secrecy, while his immediate release could have potentially mitigated a major diplomatic incident. Leaving him alive would have left the operation in limbo, and increased the chances of an escape.
The cover-up began almost immediately after Weisfeiler's death, which most likely did occur near the Nuble river. As mentioned previously, an informant claimed that the very first unit to arrive at the scene of Weisfeiler's murder was the Chilean secret police, which thoroughly cleaned the area, eliminating as much as evidence of a wrongful death as possible.
Then, in November 1986, the U.S Embassy is informed that Luis Lopez Benavides, the witness that saw Weisfeiler last, and allegedly reported him to the Chilean military, was dead. He was found hanging on one of the cable posts of a bridge across the Nuble river, close to the spot that Weisfeiler is said to have been murdered. The embassy was told that this death occurred sometime in 1986, but Lopez's mother attested that it happened on May 5th, 1985. Officially his death was ruled a suicide; unofficially, it's at best a very unfortunate coincidence.
Olga Weisfeiler, from a visit to the area in 2002, reported that a separate witness to the crime "drowned in a lake" in 1985. This has never been corroborated by Embassy sources, but for reasons we'll see shortly, that doesn't necessarily mean it is incorrect.
Also in 1985, the Chilean Mathematical society, with funding from the Penn State mathematics department, hired a private investigator named Oscar Tapia to look into the case. Tapia, a former Chilean police officer, produced a report in May of 1985 reaffirming the official conclusion that Weisfeiler drowned in the Nuble. However, fifteen years later in September, 2000, a police raid at the Colonia, which was being dismantled and investigated, found thousands of files with intelligence on political and military figure. Among them, there was a file on Boris Weisfeiler, which contained a report, commissioned by the Chilean Mathematical Society, on the Weisfeiler case. This was likely the original Oscar Tapia report, and in it, he states that "one can deduce that Dr. Weisfeiler was the victim of an accident due to his ignorance of the conditions in the rivers Los Sauces and Ñuble."
Tapis explicitly mentions the Colonia, stating it can be discarded as the perpetrator because it was more than 60 miles from the spot of Weisfeiler's disappearance. This sounds like a transparent lie, however—even this quick Google Maps search shows that the walking distance between the two spots was less than 40 miles, and that's only the public entrance. It's not hard to believe that the Chilean army have more direct routes to and from their most sensitive prison camp. It's also been established that that the Colonia was sending patrols out farther than usual due to Hugo Baar's contemporaneous defection.
And while we have evidence of military and police patrols penetrating deep into the Andean foothills on January 5th, we only have one informant account of the actual capture of Weisfeiler. Why is this? Because, when the US Embassy journeyed to Parral to speak to other eyewitnesses and corroborate "Daniel's" account, they found that every police officer on the search was relieved from duty, the lead police officer was retired and inaccessible, and every army officer that had "assisted" was transferred away. None were interviewed until the early 2000s when the case was reopened.
Part of why the investigation on this case feels incomplete may be explained in this cable from the US State Department to the US Embassy in Chile. The memo, with a subject line of "Funding for the Weisfeiler case," is notable for its brevity: "At present time there are no funds available...for this project." The standard explanation for this is bureaucratic shuffling—the State department was undergoing a cost-cutting exercise at the time, after a realignment to the Middle East in preparation for Desert Storm. With a more conspiratorial eye, however, one can derive a different conclusion—1990 was also the year Pinochet was forced to step down as President. In either case, the abortive investigation would end here, as would any investigation at all in the case for a full decade.
After the US documents were released, the Chilean government reopened the Weisfeiler case, and worked to build a criminal case against Schafer, the Colonia, and the police and army officers complicit in the cover-up. This was lead by Juan Guzman Tapia, who had also lead the successful prosecution of Augusto Pinochet himself, and finally, after almost two decades, a proper investigation into Boris Weisfeiler's death commenced.
Little progress was made in the Weisfeiler investigation over the next decade, however. In 2002, the case was transferred from Guzman to Judge Alejandro Solis, who presided over it until 2005, when it was passed to Judge Jorge Zepeda. Olga Weisfeiler made numerous trips to Chile in this period, pressuring American and Chilean authorities for transparency and updates. Her work largely drove the media blitz of 2003, where Boris's case was published in many major American newspapers.
In the meantime, however, Paul Schaefer and his Colonia Dignidad were finally forced to confess their own sins. In the 90s, as Pinochet was forced out of the Presidency, the Colonia's governmental support began to wane. Its public subsidies were cut, new scrutiny was applied to its financial dealings, and its seeming police impunity began to waver. In 1995, Schaefer launched a subsidized boarding school for local children on Colonia grounds. This began as a success, helping rehabilitate the *Colonia'*s reputation, until one twelve year-old student managed to smuggle a note out to his mother. It said, "Take me out of here. He raped me."
His mother smuggled him away from the premises and took him to a doctor, who contacted the national police. This eventually led to the issuance of a warrant for Schaefer's arrest, and in 1996, the Chilean police launched their first raid on the property. Schaefer was not found on that raid, but he had not left the Colonia yet—he was believed to have been underground, mere feet from the searchers, in a bunker he'd built for this purpose. Schaefer remained hidden at the Colonia for an indeterminate period of time, while police conducted over thirty raids, until at some point in the late 90s, he fled for good. It would take until 2005 for his arrest, when he was found living in an exclusive gated community in Buenos Aires.
However, Schaefer's capture did not bring answers in Boris Weisfeiler's murder. Judge Solis, then presiding over the case, interviewed him in prison, but left empty-handed. Schaefer would die in a Chilean prison 2010, tight-lipped till the end. Meanwhile, the simultaneous investigation into the military and police progressed minimally, if at all. Finally, in 2012, Judge Zepeda authorized seven arrests, charging three police officers and four military members with kidnapping. There wasn't enough evidence to charge murder, but in a case that had been on standstill since 1985, this felt like a victory.
But it would be a false dawn. In 2016, Judge Zepeda would release the accused, stating the crime had passed its statute of limitations. In Chile, "crimes against humanity" do not have a statute of limitations, but kidnapping, the original charge, does. Judge Zepeda claimed there was not sufficient evidence to charge the conspirators with a coordinated attempt to deprive Weisfeiler of liberty, instead stating that the 1985 investigation was "genuinely professional," and the officers had "acted in good faith."
And yet, none of the testimony of the accused was made public, no results of the investigation were revealed, and most importantly, none of the key questions in the case were answered. It seems like the investigation that Judge Zepeda had led was just as "professional" as the original one. And, it seems like the true perpetrators of Boris Weisfeiler's death have escaped justice once again.
The Colonia, too, **did not end its existence after Paul Schaefer's capture. Instead, it transformed itself. The name was changed to the Villa Baviera, the grounds were opened to tourists, and descendants of the original Colonos, born from the few that were allowed to procreate, attend school and college in the area, or work at its new restaurant or music hall. Guides lead visitors through the Colonia's **historic Bavarian-style buildings, with guests enjoying regular live music and special celebrations during Oktoberfest, while police excavate mass graves nearby, digging and dating hundreds of decaying remains to determine the total death toll of the Pinochet regime.
And Olga Weisfeiler is still waiting. Waiting for truth, waiting for justice, waiting for two governments to recognize the lost humanity of her brother, waiting for answers to the questions that echo through the crevices of her mind. But tragically, like Vladmir and Estragon's, her Godot has not arrived, and closure—that effusive "why" that leaps from the larynx in times of pain—is yet denied. Boris Weisfeiler is dead, this we know. Any more remains in the aging memories of very few.
Sources
Primary Sources on the Case
A timeline of the case: link
Olga Weisfeiler's first person account of her investigation: link
http://boris.weisfeiler.com/memorandum2.html
Declassified Documents
I will not link each individual cable/memo I read, as they're not particularly meaningful without context. Instead, I'd encourage using the timeline above, along with links I included in the main article, to explore the declassified documents.
Secondary Sources on the Case
News articles at time of disappearance
U.S. Presses Case of Missing Professor
Early 2000s News Articles
Hints of Cruel Fate for American Lost in Chile
Tracing a Mystery of the Missing in Chile
Declassified Documents Point to Missing Man’s Violent Death
2010s News Articles
Woman pushes for news of brother’s fate in Chile
Judge in Chile orders arrests over missing US hiker
Chile Halts Inquiry on American Who Disappeared 31 Years Ago
Excavations at Chile torture site offer new hope for relatives of disappeared
Other
Boris Weisfeiler Minisode: Abducted by Nazis in Chile?
Colonia Dignidad Sources
Insight: German sect victims seek escape from Chilean nightmare past
Colonia Dignidad (Wikipedia) (Use this as an outline, as much of what I read on this page was contradicted by more reliable sources).
Fascinating read, thank you.