Ingrid Olderöck

In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Olderöck and the second or maternal family name is Benhard.

Íngrid Olderöck
Born	Íngrid Felicitas Olderöck Benhard 14 September 1943 Santiago, Chile
Died	17 March 2001 (aged 57) Santiago, Chile
Other name	"The Woman of the Dogs" (Spanish: La mujer de los perros)
Occupations	Carabineros de Chile officer; intelligence agent
Years active	1962–1980s (Carabineros); 1973–1976 (Comisión DINA/DINA)
Known for	Human rights violations committed as a DINA agent

Íngrid Felicitas Olderöck Benhard (14 September 1943 – 17 March 2001) was a Chilean Carabineros officer who reached the rank of major and, from 1973, served as an agent of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the secret police of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Nicknamed "the Woman of the Dogs" (Spanish: la mujer de los perros), she was the director of the DINA's Women's School and trained roughly 70 female agents in interrogation and torture methods. She is best known for her role at the clandestine detention and torture center known as Venda Sexy, where survivors have testified she directed a trained German Shepherd to sexually assault detainees. She was not, however, the facility's commanding officer.

Olderöck's role in the DINA became publicly documented through testimony that former DINA collaborators Luz Arce and Marcia Merino gave to Chile's Rettig Commission in 1990. She survived an assassination attempt in 1981 and was eventually transferred out of intelligence work. She gave testimony as a witness in at least one judicial proceeding connected to the dictatorship's crimes, including an expanded declaration before the Chilean judiciary in August 1992 in the investigation into the assassination of General Carlos Prats. She was never convicted of the human rights violations attributed to her. Her life inspired the Academy Award–nominated Chilean animated short film Bestia (2021).

Early life and Carabineros career

Olderöck was born in Santiago, the daughter of German immigrants who were sympathetic to Nazism and Adolf Hitler. Her father, Walther Gustav Olderöck Frank, was born in Hamburg and emigrated to Chile in 1925; her mother, Kreszenz Bernhard Zillner, was born in Munich and arrived somewhat later, having left Germany amid the hardship and unemployment that followed the First World War. The couple married in 1932.

According to journalist Nancy Guzmán, author of the biography Ingrid Olderöck: la mujer de los perros, the future agent was raised in a strict, authoritarian household in which German customs were prized and Latin American culture was regarded with contempt as insufficiently orderly. The children were required to learn music, dance, or writing, and to speak only German at home. In an interview quoted by Guzmán, Olderöck recalled:

I have been a Nazi since I was a child, since I learned that the best period Germany experienced was when the Nazis were in power, when there was work and peace, and there were no shameless thieves.

— Íngrid Olderöck, quoted in Guzmán, Ingrid Olderock: La mujer de los perros

Olderöck studied at the Carabineros Academy (Escuela de Carabineros de Chile); General Carlos Prats was among the officers seated at the head table when she graduated. Her documented Carabineros career began well before the 1973 coup: she joined as a volunteer at a juvenile police station (Comisaría de Menores) in 1962, was promoted to lieutenant in 1968 while serving in the Department of Juvenile Police, and by September 1973 held the rank of captain and deputy commissioner (subcomisario). According to her own later account, quoted in Guzmán's biography, she also proposed the creation of a dedicated women's training school to the Carabineros' director and was among more than 100 women who applied to join it; this recollection has not been independently corroborated and reflects Olderöck's own retrospective telling of events. Olderöck was also an experienced dog trainer — Dobermans were reportedly her specialty — a skill she brought into her later intelligence work.

DINA service

Women's Brigade and the Purén Brigade

The DINA was formally created by Decree Law 521 on 14 June 1974, though a predecessor structure known informally as the "Comisión DINA" had been operating since late 1973 under Manuel Contreras. Olderöck joined this structure that October, weeks after the military coup, and went on to become the director of the agency's Women's School, where roughly 70 women were trained in torture methods and other repressive tactics used against opponents of the dictatorship. According to Guzmán's biography, Olderöck was known within the force for her strict, demanding character, and she owned three handguns, two of which she kept at home while the third accompanied her at all times.

She was also a member of the Purén Brigade, a DINA unit that, according to press investigations, was principally responsible for the killing and forced disappearance of detainees before those functions passed to the Lautaro Brigade later in the dictatorship. Former DINA collaborator Luz Arce, in testimony given to the Rettig Commission, identified Olderöck as one of the officers working within the Purén Brigade, alongside Major Raúl Carevic, Lieutenant Rolando Mosqueira, Lieutenant Marco Antonio Sáez, and army officer Germán Barriga. A second former collaborator, Marcia Merino, testified before Santiago's Third Criminal Court in January 1993 that she had also seen Olderöck operating at the Villa Grimaldi detention center, though Merino said she was not certain whether Olderöck belonged to the Purén Brigade or to a separate unit active at that site. Sources close to the agency have said that, in the course of her duties, Olderöck became aware of details of Project Andrea, a program run by the dictatorship to manufacture and deploy sarin gas against opponents of the regime.

Venda Sexy

Main article: Venda Sexy

In 1974 the DINA began operating one of its first clandestine detention and torture centers at a house on Calle Irán 3037, in the Macul district of Santiago, later known as Venda Sexy ("Sexy Blindfold") or La Discothèque. According to Chile's National Monuments Council, the center was placed under the command of Army Major Gerardo Ulrich, who reported to Purén Brigade chief Raúl Iturriaga Neumann; it also housed two named operational groups, "Chacal", led by Carabineros officer Miguel Hernández Oyarzo, and "Ciervo", led by army officer Manuel Carevic Cubillos, in addition to Carabineros Major Olderöck. The site functioned as a detention facility between June 1974 and March 1975, with operations concentrated between August and October 1974, and was used mainly to hold university students affiliated with the MIR and the Socialist Party. The name Venda Sexy ("Sexy Blindfold") referred to the blindfolds that detainees were forced to wear throughout their captivity and to the sexual violence inflicted on them. La Discothèque referred to the loud music played constantly at the site to mask the sounds of torture.

Survivors' organizations have estimated that at least 85 political prisoners passed through the center, of whom 23 were killed or forcibly disappeared. The National Monuments Council identifies the site's period of operation as June 1974 to March 1975, with its main period of activity between August and October 1974. Detainees were subjected to beatings, electric shocks, mock executions, asphyxiation and sleep deprivation, and sexual violence was used systematically against both female and male prisoners.

According to the National Monuments Council, sexual torture at the center, including torture carried out with animals, was specifically under the charge of Olderöck, who trained a German Shepherd to sexually assault detainees in the building's basement. A former detainee's account, drawn from Argentine truth-commission records, described one such interrogation:

They took her from the patio of the house and brought her into a room upstairs. There they sat her down, removed her blouse, and questioned her about "el Bruja". To make her talk, they brought in the dog they called Volodia, and ordered the animal to lick her breasts, threatening that it would rape her if she did not cooperate, since it had been trained for that purpose.

— Testimony quoted in Claudia Lanzarotti, Auge y caída de la DINA

Survivor Alejandra Holzapfel, who later became president of the survivors' association for the site, gave a similar account in a separate interview:

At Venda Sexy there was a dog named Volodia trained to sexually assault women [...] Ingrid directed the animal, while the other torturers forced detainees into positions that made the abuse possible. Men and women who passed through La Venda Sexy were victims of this atrocity.

— Alejandra Holzapfel, interviewed by The Clinic

Olderöck named the dog "Volodia" after Volodia Teitelboim, the writer and prominent figure of the Communist Party of Chile, according to Guzmán's biography.

Guzmán's biographical investigation, reported in the Chilean press, also alleges that after her parents' deaths Olderöck arranged for her own sister to be detained and tortured in order to claim a larger share of the family inheritance; this remains an allegation from Guzmán's reporting rather than an established judicial finding.

Return to Carabineros and assassination attempt

In 1976 Olderöck returned to the Carabineros proper and resumed work in its intelligence service; in 1978 she moved to the Intelligence Directorate.

On 15 July 1981, Olderöck was shot in the head as she left her home on Calle Coventry in Ñuñoa. Contemporary press accounts attributed the shooting to a commando of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). Olderöck herself publicly blamed SICAR for the attack, and a later compilation by a survivors' organization likewise describes her as having been attacked by former colleagues rather than by the MIR. According to El Mostrador, she maintained that although the MIR carried out the shooting, it had actually been ordered by the Carabineros in retaliation for her defection from the force; Guzmán records her as having "always insisted that the deceased General César Mendoza gave the order for her assassination and that it was Major Julio Benimelli who carried it out." She and others also named Manuel Contreras, the DINA's former director, and agent Raúl Iturriaga Neumann as possible instigators. Olderöck survived, with the bullet remaining lodged in her skull.

In 1982, following the attack, Olderöck was transferred to the Department of Transitory Commissions (Departamento de Comisiones Transitorias), a posting generally used for officers being phased out of active duty, and retired from the Carabineros some time afterward; the exact date of her retirement is not consistently given in available sources.

In August 1987, Olderöck gave an interview to West German television in which she acknowledged that political prisoners in Chile were tortured in "macabre" ways, including the abuse of children to coerce confessions from their parents, and separately accused Pinochet of having ordered Prats's assassination.

In 1990, former DINA collaborators Luz Arce and Marcia Merino identified Olderöck in testimony before Chile's Rettig Commission. In a March 1991 interview with the Chilean television news program 24 Horas, Olderöck confirmed she had known Luz Arce and other women who became DINA collaborators after their detention, and said she felt responsible for having served the DINA for so many years; she added that she would be willing to appear before the courts if summoned. She denied ever having belonged to "a brigade for detaining people," said she had witnessed some acts of torture but had stayed away once she learned torture was taking place, citing her Christian upbringing, and denied having witnessed the torture of Luz Arce specifically or having any knowledge of the whereabouts of disappeared detainees, saying she had not worked in the brigades responsible for that.

In an expanded declaration given to a Chilean court in August 1992, in the course of the long-running Argentine and Chilean judicial investigation into the 1974 assassination of General Carlos Prats, Olderöck testified as a witness that she had learned from fellow agents that Iturriaga Neumann had traveled to Argentina to carry out the killing, and that officers had celebrated his return.

Death and lack of accountability

Olderöck died in Santiago on 17 March 2001, at the age of 57, from an acute gastrointestinal hemorrhage. Despite her 1991 statement of willingness to appear in court and her 1992 testimony in the Prats case, and although she was processed in several human rights cases, Olderöck was never convicted of the human rights violations attributed to her at Venda Sexy or elsewhere. Guzmán wrote that Olderöck “always made justice believe she was crazy because of a bullet” that remained lodged in her head.

Other DINA agents were later convicted for crimes committed at Venda Sexy: in August 2023, Chile's Supreme Court upheld convictions against three former DINA agents, Manuel Rivas Díaz, Hugo Hernández Valle, and Raúl Iturriaga Neumann, sentencing each to 15 years and one day in prison for the aggravated kidnapping and sexual torture of ten detainees, six women and four men, at the center between September and December 1974, ruling that the crimes, as offenses against humanity, were not subject to reduced sentencing.

Legacy

The house at Calle Irán 3037 was declared a Chilean national historic monument in 2016. After a long campaign by survivors and human rights organizations, the Chilean Ministry of National Assets expropriated the property in September 2023 as part of commemorations marking the 50th anniversary of the coup, with the stated aim of eventually transferring it to the Irán 3037 Association of Memory and Human Rights, led by survivor Alejandra Holzapfel, for use as a memory site.

Olderöck's life inspired the stop-motion animated short film Bestia (2021), directed by Hugo Covarrubias, which was based in part on Nancy Guzmán's biography and depicts a DINA agent and her dog. The film won the Annie Award for best animated short subject and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 94th Academy Awards, but lost to the Spanish film The Windshield Wiper. The film has also drawn academic attention for its portrayal of the instrumentalization of animals under the dictatorship.

In 2019, the theater company La Bicibomba staged Yo amo a los perros ("I Love Dogs"), a play inspired by Olderöck's story and directed by Guillermo Alfaro, examining the violence of the dictatorship era. That same year, the play Irán #3037, directed by Patricia Artés and based on archival research and survivor testimony, dramatized the sexual and political violence committed at Venda Sexy.

See also

• Human rights violations in Pinochet's Chile
• Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional
• Villa Grimaldi
• Londres 38

Sources

• Guzmán, Nancy (2014). Ingrid Olderock: la mujer de los perros (in Spanish) (1 ed.). Santiago de Chile: Ceibo Ediciones. ISBN 978-956-9071-89-8.
• Valenzuela Sarrazin, Antonia (2024). "La instrumentalización de los perros como práctica de tortura en la Dictadura Militar de Chile". In Plaza Casanova, Diego; et al. (eds.). Dossier de Estudios Animales N.º II: Estudios críticos y prácticos sobre la explotación de los animales no humanos. pp. 177–192.
• Vásquez Santander, Natalia Andrea (10 January 2010). Género y represión. Realidades, construcciones e imaginarios sociales en torno a la participación femenina en los servicios de inteligencia del régimen burocrático autoritario en Chile (1973–1990) (PDF) (Licenciatura thesis). Universidad de Chile, Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades.

External links

• "Bestia": Íngrid Olderöck la cruel torturadora que inspiró el cortometraje chileno nominado al Oscar – BBC News Mundo