Tejas Verdes prison camp

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Tejas Verdes prison camp
Campamento de prisioneros Tejas Verdes
San Antonio, Valparaíso Region, Chile
Memorial to victims of political execution in San Antonio, near the former camp
Type	Clandestine detention, torture, and extermination center
Site information
Controlled by	Chilean Army / National Intelligence Directorate (DINA)
Site history
Built	1973
Garrison information
Garrison	Army Corps of Engineers School "Tejas Verdes"

The Tejas Verdes prison camp (), also known as the Campamento Escuela ("School Camp"), was a clandestine detention, interrogation, and torture facility operated by the Chilean Army on the grounds of the Army Corps of Engineers School "Tejas Verdes" in San Antonio, Valparaíso Region, Chile. Established immediately after the coup d'état of 11 September 1973, it functioned as the army's "Prison Camp No. 2" and operated as a center of interrogation and torture until around mid-1974, although arrests and detentions linked to the site continued to be recorded as late as 1976.

Tejas Verdes is widely regarded by historians, journalists, and Chilean courts as the birthplace of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the secret police of the Pinochet dictatorship: it was there that army colonel Manuel Contreras, the base commander, first assembled and trained the interrogators who would go on to staff DINA's network of more than a thousand detention and torture centers nationwide. At times the camp held more than 100 prisoners, brought in from other DINA detention sites in Santiago, San Antonio, and Melipilla. Survivor testimony collected by Chile's truth commissions describes systematic torture, including electric shock, beatings, sexual violence, and mock executions, often carried out in the presence of medical personnel tasked with keeping victims alive for further interrogation. Several prisoners were executed after summary court-martial proceedings, and others died from torture, their deaths concealed by falsified death certificates; some bodies were returned to families in sealed coffins.

Chilean courts have since convicted numerous former army officers, including Contreras, of aggravated kidnapping and other crimes against humanity for their role at Tejas Verdes, in a series of prosecutions that continued into 2025.

Background

The compound had originally been a seaside army engineering school, established in 1953 on the banks of the Maipo River near its mouth on the Pacific coast, about 70 miles (110 km) southwest of Santiago. Weeks before the coup, when the province of San Antonio was placed under a state of emergency amid a national truckers' strike, the school's commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Contreras, effectively became the military ruler of the port. In the days following the coup of 11 September 1973, Contreras used his authority to round up local labor and left-wing political leaders; a wave of extrajudicial killings and disappearances followed almost immediately in San Antonio, including union leaders whose bodies were returned to their families within a day of a failed negotiation with Contreras.

By late September 1973, word had spread locally that Contreras had established a prison camp near the regimental headquarters, on a military storage site by the Maipo River bridge; relatives of the missing gathered daily on a hill overlooking the camp, which prisoners nicknamed after the two cement statues of Christ visible from inside, "the Hill of the Christ of Maipo." Officially, the camp did not exist: no prisoner lists were kept, and the army refused to respond to inquiries from families or from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Facility and layout

The camp lay hidden from the coastal highway in a hollow along the river, screened by eucalyptus groves, an apple orchard, and the surrounding maize fields, with the beach a short distance to the west and grazing land to the east. It comprised separate huts and yards for male and female prisoners, an officers' house, soldiers' quarters, a sick bay for prisoners recovering between interrogation sessions, a kitchen, and a latrine consisting of an open trench; watchtowers surrounded the prisoners' yards. Interrogations and torture sessions took place away from the camp itself, chiefly in the basement of the regiment's officers' casino and in a former music room of the main school building. Chilean writer Hernán Valdés, who was held at the camp for a month in 1973, later recalled in his memoir that the camp's proximity to the beach and river was visible but permanently out of reach to prisoners, framed by barbed wire and the curve of the riverbank.

Today no structure from the camp survives on the site, which has been used to store army construction material; the engineering school itself was relocated nearby under the same name.

Operations

According to testimony gathered for the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (Valech Commission), prisoners transferred from the public jail in San Antonio were driven to Tejas Verdes bound and blindfolded in refrigerated trucks belonging to local fishing companies, then held in damp cells to await interrogation. After hours of waiting, prisoners were typically stripped and tied to a chair or a metal bed frame before being beaten and subjected to systematic torture methods that survivors and later judicial testimony describe as including electric shocks (on what agents called the parrilla, or "grill"), burns, extraction of fingernails, rape and other forms of sexual violence, and simulated drowning and hanging. Medical personnel and nurses attended to victims between sessions specifically to prevent premature death and permit further rounds of torture.

Investigative reporting by journalist Javier Rebolledo, drawing on judicial testimony not previously made public, found that torture at Tejas Verdes was unusually severe and inventive even by the standards of later DINA facilities, and included forcing prisoners to eat their own excrement, the use of dogs, mice, and spiders against female prisoners' genitals, and burning detainees with boiling wax; his sources also described the systematic rape of both female and male detainees. Rebolledo's reporting further implicated Tejas Verdes medical staff in concealing pregnancies resulting from rape and in the subsequent illegal adoption of children born to detained women, cases that Chilean courts investigated separately as part of the wider inquiry into children stolen during the dictatorship.

Some prisoners were formally sentenced to death by councils of war; others died under torture, with the cause of death concealed through falsified legal proceedings or death certificates that did not identify how the victim had died. In some cases, the bodies of victims were returned to their families in sealed coffins transported in the same refrigerated fishing trucks used to bring prisoners to the camp. Journalists and human-rights lawyers have also identified Tejas Verdes as the site of Chile's first recorded "death flights," in which the bodies of detainees were weighted, loaded onto boats or helicopters, and thrown into the sea or the port of San Antonio, a practice later associated chiefly with the Cuartel Simón Bolívar extermination center in Santiago.

Personnel

Tejas Verdes was commanded by then-Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Contreras, the regiment's commanding officer since June 1973, who ran the camp alongside his duties as military governor of the San Antonio emergency zone and administrator of the army-controlled EPECH fishing conglomerate. It was at Tejas Verdes that Contreras assembled and trained the interrogators who would go on to staff the DINA's wider network of detention centers once the agency was formally organized in 1974; journalists and historians describe the camp's early cadre as DINA's founding "contingent," whose personnel and interrogation methods were subsequently exported to other DINA facilities in Santiago.

Among those later identified as instructors at the camp was Carabineros officer Ingrid Olderock, who according to reporting by the Chilean newspaper El Siglo served as an instructor of interrogators at what it described as Tejas Verdes' "initial school," before going on to head DINA's Women's School and, later, to gain wider notoriety for her role at the Venda Sexy torture center in Santiago.

Judicial testimony has placed several other individuals at the camp's interrogation site in the basement of the officers' casino. Survivor Anatolio Zárate, a socialist labor leader detained on the day of the coup, testified to seeing Contreras, San Antonio police subcomisario Nelson Patricio Valdés Cornejo, and physician Vittorio Orvieto Tiplitzky present during his torture; both Valdés Cornejo and Orvieto were later convicted by Chilean courts for their roles in Tejas Verdes-related cases. Zárate also identified then-Lieutenant Cristián Labbé, later mayor of Providencia, as present at the camp, a claim corroborated years afterward in separate judicial testimony by a former army conscript, Patricio Salvo, who said he witnessed Labbé in the underground torture chamber. Journalist Javier Rebolledo's research also identified an army physician, Roberto Emilio Lailhacar Chávez — nicknamed "El Hipnotizador" ("the hypnotist") by agents at the camp — who reportedly introduced hypnosis as an interrogation technique after other agents' brutality caused detainees to die too quickly for effective questioning; Lailhacar gave judicial testimony in 2013 confirming his presence and role.

Judicial accountability

Chilean prosecutions into crimes committed at Tejas Verdes were led for many years by Judge Alejandro Solís, acting as a special investigating magistrate for human-rights cases. In April 2014, the Supreme Court of Chile's Second Chamber issued a unified sentence covering a series of Tejas Verdes cases investigated by Solís, convicting Contreras and several other retired army officers of aggravated kidnapping, torture, and qualified homicide for crimes committed against a number of named victims, several of whom remain disappeared.

Prosecutions continued for more than a decade afterward. In November 2025, the Supreme Court's Second Chamber upheld several further convictions of retired army officers for the aggravated kidnapping of political detainees interrogated under torture at Tejas Verdes between September 1973 and February 1974, formally classifying the crimes as crimes against humanity; in one of the confirmed rulings, the court also granted one elderly convicted officer the right to serve his sentence under electronically monitored home detention because of his advanced age.

Memory and commemoration

A commemorative plaque that forms part of the Memory Route, located outside the Tejas Verdes Regiment

Memorial located in the square outside the Tejas Verdes Regiment

A plaque commemorating Tejas Verdes forms part of Chile's "Route of Memory," installed outside the site of the former regiment in the Llolleo sector of San Antonio, and a separate memorial to victims of political execution stands in central San Antonio. In 2017, the Court of Appeal of Valparaíso suspended, on the petition of local human-rights groups, a planned municipal ceremony to award San Antonio's honorific medal to the Tejas Verdes military school, pending a ruling on whether the award was lawful.

In 2012, a French-Chilean architectural team, AGC Concept Architectes, working with the Santiago firm YH Arquitectos, submitted a design called "Amphibia" to Architecture for Humanity's Open Architecture Challenge, proposing to convert the abandoned Tejas Verdes site into a mixed memorial, ecological, and community-use complex for the city of San Antonio; the proposal reached the competition's semifinal round but was not built. In March 2026, regional authorities under then-president Gabriel Boric laid a foundation stone for a permanent Tejas Verdes memorial to be attached to a new bridge under construction nearby; weeks later, following a change of national government, the incoming administration of President José Antonio Kast suspended the project indefinitely, citing the absence of a finalized design or dedicated funding mechanism.

In literature

Chilean writer Hernán Valdés was detained at Tejas Verdes for roughly a month in late 1973 after being arrested in Santiago on suspicion of ties to the Revolutionary Left Movement. After his release, he sought asylum at the Swedish embassy and left Chile, writing an account of his detention that was published in Barcelona in 1974 as Tejas Verdes: Diario de un campo de concentración en Chile and in English translation the following year as Tejas Verdes: Diary of a Concentration Camp in Chile. The book was not published in Chile itself until 1996.

See also

• Villa Grimaldi
• Londres 38
• Cuartel Simón Bolívar
• Venda Sexy

References

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