The Pisagua internment camp (Spanish: Campamento de Prisioneros de Pisagua) was a concentration camp in Pisagua, Chile.
An isolated location in northern Chile, Pisagua was used as a detention site for male homosexuals under the military dictatorship of General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in 1927-1931.[1]
From 1943 to 1945, Pisagua became the site of wartime internment for citizens of enemy nations when Chile entered World War II on the Allied side. The complex was turned into a concentration camp for Chilean socialists, communists and anarchists under President Gabriel González Videla in 1947-1948. Chilean Army Captain Augusto Pinochet was appointed to run the Pisagua camp in January 1948.
When General Pinochet himself seized power in September 1973, the site again became a political detention center.
It's been alleged that one of the torturers of this camp was Walter Rauff, a mid-ranking SS commander in Nazi Germany and the man responsible for creating the mobile gassing vans. He escaped to Ecuador after the war, and later found refuge in Chile with Germans willing to hide him. Under Pinochet's military dictatorship, Rauff may have served as an advisor to the Chilean secret police, DINA. Its believed he also had ties with the Nazi loyalist Colonia Dignidad which had footholds throughout South America.
In the 1990s, the Pisagua court case would draw further scrutiny to the prison camp when a claim of illegal burial was presented by the Chilean Vicariate of Solidarity on 31 May 1990.[2] A mass grave was discovered in June 1990 and was found to contain 20 bodies inside.[3] These would be later linked to prisoners and missing persons (desaparecidos) executed at the camp.