"Permanent Uncle" Sam

"Hey, kids..."



I find it equally ominous and amusing to read that "senior US administration officials are working on a policy to 'contain' Hugo Chavez." Ominous because Chavez is a man in the crosshairs of an empire growing increasingly ruthless with desperation. Amusing, because Chavez is just a man, and what the US hopes to contain is not contained by him. The continent is practically stinking with progressive thought, and action. Soon, the State Department will need to "contain" Evo Morales, of Bolivia's Movement to Socialism, the likely victor in next year's presidential election. And it's not down to one leader, or even several. As Tommy Douglas, the Greatest Canadian, liked to say, "You can lock up a man, but you can't lock up an idea."

US influence in Latin America is waning to the vanishing point of absurdity. Like today's warning to Suriname, that if its citizens elect former dictator Desi Bouterse, as they seem likely to do on May 25, then Washington will sever ties with the nation on account of Bouterse's cocaine conviction. The United States " won’t deal with a person in the presidential seat who is convicted on drug charges." That the American President has his own cocaine conviction is presumably nobody's concern, since it's been scrubbed from the records. Nevermind his family's prominent, though covert, and so unmentionable, role in the protected drug trade.

One small incident to illustrate the continent's emergence from its fascist legacy: Argentina has expelled Nazi pedophile - and isn't it something how often we see those words together? - Paul Schaefer has to face justice in Chile for having abused boys for decades at his fascist-cult compound, "Colonia Dignidad." (Germany is interested in Schaefer as well, for his alleged role in kidnapping German children for his camp.) Schaefer liked his abused charges to call him "Permanent Uncle." Not only was his organization long-sheltered by Chilean authorities, but it became a state torture camp, and a significant asset in "Operation Condor."

"Permanent Uncle" Paul Schaefer:


A little background from a New York Times article of Dec 30, 2002, "Chile Sect Thrives Despite Criminal Charges":

The group's reclusive leader is accused of sexually abusing scores of young boys. Former political prisoners say they were imprisoned and tortured in underground dungeons in the group's compound. An American who disappeared on a hiking vacation is reported to have been executed there. More than 50 other charges are pending against the group and its leaders, ranging from kidnapping and forced labor to fraud and tax evasion.

Yet the paramilitary religious sect known as Colonia Dignidad continues to flourish here in a 70-square-mile enclave in the Andean foothills that remains, in the words of a recent Chilean congressional report, a heavily armed ''state within a state.''

Protected by barricades, barbed wire, roadblocks, searchlights and hidden cameras and microphones, Colonia Dignidad has for more than 40 years been the fortress home of about 300 people, most of them German citizens. Their only loyalty is to the sect's German-born founder, Paul Schafer, who likes to call himself the Permanent Uncle and preaches an apocalyptic creed that includes strong anti-Semitic and anti-Communist elements.

The American presumed executed at Colonia Dignidad is mathmatics professor Boris Weisfeiler. His sister Olga maintains a website dedicated to uncovering the truth of his 20-year old disappearance. In a letter from last July 13 to George W Bush, she reveals that she "learned in June 2000 - through declassified State Department documents -"

- that Boris was apprehended by a Chilean military patrol and taken to Colonia Dignidad, a 37,000 acre German pseudo-religious sect with links to Nazism. Colonia Dignidad, during the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, was one of the most notorious and secretive detention and torture center, from where dozens of political prisoners disappeared.

According to military sources, Boris was accused of being a Russian spy, then a CIA, and later a Jewish spy. His detention and delivery to Colonia Dignidad was due to the outstanding order of the Chilean Army to arrest and bring all strangers found in the area to Colonia for interrogations. Two and a half years after his disappearance, my brother was reportedly seen alive inside the settlement. Colonia Dignidad, now under the name of Villa Baviera, still exists and is fully operational today, in spite of the approximately 70 criminal lawsuits brought against its leaders, for charges ranging from tax evasion and falsification of documents, to child abuse, kidnappings and torture.

In the past few months, the investigators of my brother’s disappearance have received additional information: Boris was detained in Colonia Dignidad for some period of time, brutally tortured there and later on killed either by Colonia's leaders or by the members of Chilean military. It has become obvious to me, now more then ever, that the key answers to the mystery of Boris' disappearance are hidden behind the barbed wires fences of Colonia Dignidad.

I wish her luck, but I don't think that will be enough. After all, the President's father, George Herbert Walker Bush, was CIA Director at the time of Weisfeiler's disappearance, during Operation Condor's CIA-enabled targetting of Chilean dissidents:

Operation Condor was based out of a bizarre Nazi colony in Chile known as Colonia Dignidad, whose founder is wanted in Germany for kidnapping and molesting young boys. Colonia Dignidad was used by Pinochets team to train for the 1973 coup d'etat, and then served as a torture center where prisoners were "disappeared". Many of the top ranking Nazi war criminals in South America are believed to have lived in Colonia Dignidad.

The camp survives, but under another name, having undergone an extreme makeover. It claims to have integrated into Chilean society, and shed Schaefer's legacy. Whether that's true, I don't know. But at least it recognizes a zeitgeist when it sees one.

Neither "Permanent Uncle," is.


By the way, those following the permutations of the Franklin Cover-Up/Gannon/Gosch story will want to get over to Tom Flocco today. Rusty Nelson, Lawrence King's photographer, has been re-arrested, and just two days after Hunter S Thompson's death. Flocco has lots of information that was new to me, including the recent death of Franklin victim and tormented witness Troy Boner, and some words from John DeCamp on Gannon's identity.