Venda Sexy (Sexy Blindfold), also known as La Discothèque, was a clandestine detention and torture center run by Chile's National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) during the early years of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Housed in a private residence at 3037 Irán Street in the Macul district of Santiago, it operated from mid-1974 to early 1975, with most of its activity concentrated in the final months of 1974. Along with Villa Grimaldi, Londres 38 and the José Domingo Cañas center, it was one of the DINA's principal secret prisons in the capital.
The site became notorious for the systematic sexual torture of detainees, most of whom were kept blindfolded throughout their captivity. Its name reportedly originated with the perpetrators themselves and referred to this practice; it was also called La Discothèque because loud music was played continuously to mask the sounds of interrogation and abuse. An estimated 85 people passed through the facility between 1974 and 1977, roughly a third of them women; according to a survivors' association, at least 23 were killed or forcibly disappeared, and most of the disappeared have never been found.
Declared a national historic monument in 2016, the property remained in private hands for decades. In 2019 it became public that its owner had listed it for sale on the open real-estate market despite the legal protections attached to its monument status, prompting protests from survivor and human-rights organizations. Chilean courts convicted several former DINA agents of aggravated kidnapping and torture with sexual violence committed at the site, in rulings issued in 2020 and definitively confirmed by the Supreme Court in August 2023. As part of the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the 1973 coup, the government of President Gabriel Boric expropriated the property in September 2023; the state took formal title in July 2024, and in September 2025 it granted a 25-year concession to administer the site to an association of survivors and victims' relatives. The site has also inspired Bestia, an Academy Award-nominated animated short film about DINA agent Ingrid Olderock.
Background
On 11 September 1973, a military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the elected government of President Salvador Allende, who died during the assault on the presidential palace. In the years that followed, the junta's security forces detained, tortured and killed thousands of perceived leftist opponents. The state's principal instrument of repression was the DINA, created in November 1973 and headed by army colonel Manuel Contreras. Contreras had trained at the United States Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and later maintained a paid relationship with the CIA, which continued its liaison with him from 1974 to 1977 despite internal warnings that he was "the principal obstacle" to human-rights reform in Chile. Contreras was later convicted in dozens of cases; according to Chile's prison service, at the time of his death in 2015 he was serving 40 confirmed sentences totaling 529 years for offenses including aggravated kidnapping, homicide and illicit association, with 59 further prosecutions still pending.
The DINA operated more than 1,200 secret detention sites nationwide during the dictatorship, including at least 220 in the Santiago metropolitan area alone. Venda Sexy operated in parallel with the DINA's larger Villa Grimaldi complex but was staffed by a separate team and ran only during office hours; survivors have noted that conditions there, including food, were in some respects less severe than at other DINA sites, even as the sexual violence practiced there was distinctively systematic.
History
Property and early use
The house at 3037 Irán Street was built in 1952 as a private, two-story brick residence with a basement and garden. At the time of the coup, it belonged to Héctor Domingo Muñoz Muñoz and his family, members of the Communist Party of Chile who left the country afterward; his brother Luis Gonzalo Muñoz managed the property in his absence. In early 1974, Carabineros officer and DINA agent Miguel Hernández Oyarzo rented the house from Luis Muñoz, telling him it would house Carabineros personnel visiting from outside Santiago. The building initially served as a dormitory for DINA agents before its conversion into a detention and interrogation center later that year.
Operation as a detention center
Venda Sexy functioned under the DINA's Brigada Purén, commanded by army major general Raúl Iturriaga Neumann, with day-to-day command held by army major Gerardo Ulrich. Two operational groups worked at the site: "Chacal," led by Hernández Oyarzo, and "Ciervo," led by army officer Manuel Carevic Cubillos, alongside Carabineros major Ingrid Olderock. According to the National Monuments Council's 2016 declaration, the center was active between June 1974 and March 1975, with its operations concentrated between August and October of 1974, and was primarily used to detain university students belonging to the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) and the Socialist Party. Other accounts describe related detentions continuing at the site into 1977.
Detainees arriving by car were received in the ground-floor living room, where they were registered before being separated by sex into rooms flanking the staircase; a circular bathroom window and a marble staircase to the second floor were later cited as distinguishing architectural features of the building. Interrogations, rapes and other forms of sexual torture took place in the second-floor bedrooms and in the basement, which was reached through the kitchen or the rear patio.
The site's two informal names both referred to its methods. "La Discothèque" reflected the loud music DINA agents played throughout the day, ostensibly to drown out the sounds of torture, while "Venda Sexy" referred to the requirement that detainees remain blindfolded while subjected to sexual abuse, a term survivors and researchers have said the perpetrators coined themselves. Chile's 1991 Rettig Report and its 2004 Valech Report on political imprisonment and torture both singled the center out for the systematic character of the sexual violence practiced there, including the use of a trained dog.
Sexual violence and torture
Chile's National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (the Valech Commission) found that sexual torture was applied at Venda Sexy "with special emphasis," and that abuse and rape of both male and female detainees was frequent, in part through the use of a trained dog. Survivors and researchers have described rape by guards, forced nudity, the taking of nude photographs, and beatings, electric shocks, mock executions and sleep deprivation as further methods used at the site. A German Shepherd named Volodia, after Communist writer Volodia Teitelboim, was trained to sexually assault female detainees; his handler was Ingrid Olderock, a former paratrooper and Carabineros major who became one of the DINA's most notorious agents and was later nicknamed "the woman of the dogs." Olderöck denied all accusations and was never brought to trial; she survived a 1981 assassination attempt and died in 2001. Her life was chronicled in journalist Nancy Guzmán's 2014 biography Ingrid Olderock: La mujer de los perros.
Beatriz Bataszew, a survivor and feminist activist affiliated with the Colectivo de Mujeres Sobrevivientes Siempre Resistentes and the Coordinadora Feminista 8M, has spent much of her post-dictatorship activism drawing public attention to the political sexual violence inflicted on women held at the center, and has argued that this repression persists in different forms today.
At least two of those detained at Venda Sexy in December 1974, medical student Renato Sepúlveda Guajardo and photographer Francisco Rozas Contador, were later confirmed by Chilean courts to have been forcibly disappeared after their detention there; neither has been found or accounted for since.
Later ownership
The property remained in private hands after the site ceased to be used by the DINA. In 1981, its then-owner put it up for sale; the first prospective buyers, neighbors who intended to open a nursery and student housing there, withdrew once they learned of the building's history, and it was subsequently purchased by another buyer. By 2016, the property was owned by the real-estate firm Aluminios Centauro S.A.
Legal accountability
In November 2020, Judge Mario Carroza, sitting on the Court of Appeals of Santiago, convicted four former DINA agents of aggravated kidnapping and the application of torture with sexual violence against ten political prisoners—six women and four men—held at Venda Sexy between September and December 1974. Three of the agents, Manuel Rivas Díaz, Hugo Hernández Valle and Raúl Iturriaga Neumann, received sentences of 15 years and one day; a fourth received a shorter sentence for complicity. In his ruling, Carroza applied a gender-based analysis, describing the sexual crimes committed at the site as a distinct and aggravated form of violence against women.
The Court of Appeals of Santiago confirmed the sentence in 2021, and in August 2023 the Supreme Court of Chile unanimously rejected a further appeal, definitively confirming the 15-year sentences against Rivas Díaz, Hernández Valle and Iturriaga Neumann. The court classified the offenses as crimes against humanity and refused to apply Chile's partial-prescription doctrine to reduce the sentences, holding that such crimes are not subject to statutes of limitation under international law. Survivor Alejandra Holzapfel, one of the plaintiffs, said the ruling confirmed that she and other women had been "subjected to torments of a sexual nature" at the center, though she noted the toll of pursuing the case for nearly two decades.
Memorialization and preservation
Historic monument declaration
Beginning in 2014, survivor groups including the Colectivo de Mujeres Sobrevivientes Siempre Resistentes and the Asociación de Memoria y Derechos Humanos de Macul "Venda Sexy" petitioned Chile's National Monuments Council to declare the site a historic monument. The council approved the request on 11 May 2016, and the declaration was formalized by Decree No. 277 of the Ministry of Education on 3 October 2016, which placed the house and an adjoining memorial plaque under legal protection and prohibited any alteration to the property. Despite the designation, the site remained privately owned, and survivor organizations continued to press the government to acquire it.
Sale controversy
In August 2019, it became public that Aluminios Centauro Limitada had sold the property on the open real-estate market to Sociedad de Inversiones Arriagui Limitada in April 2019 for 211 million Chilean pesos. More than 140 organizations, including the Colectivo de Mujeres Sobrevivientes Siempre Resistentes, Londres 38 Espacio de Memorias and the Coordinadora Feminista 8M, signed a joint statement condemning the listing as a symptom of what they described as the state's decades-long failure to adopt a heritage policy adequate to sites of dictatorship-era memory.
Expropriation