Colonia Dignidad ("Colony of Dignity") was an isolated settlement in southern Chile founded in 1961 by the German emigre Paul Schafer, who led a group of German settlers in a closed, religiously framed community. Under Schafer the colony functioned as a tightly controlled society, physically sealed off, in which members' labor, communication, and relationships were subject to his authority. Two distinct bodies of serious wrongdoing were later established through investigation and the courts.
First, during the Chilean military dictatorship of the 1970s, the colony collaborated with the regime's secret police (DINA), and its grounds were used for the detention, torture, and disappearance of political prisoners, findings documented by human-rights investigations and later Chilean and German judicial proceedings. Second, Schafer was found to have committed the systematic sexual abuse of children within the community over many years. He fled Chile, was located in Argentina in 2005, extradited, convicted, and imprisoned, and died in custody in 2010; other leaders were also convicted. The colony has since been partly transformed and opened, and efforts at memorialization and compensation for victims continue. It is studied as an extreme case of a closed community that became complicit in state crimes while concealing grave internal abuse.