Chile

3 profiled groups with documented operations in Chile — 2 Extreme-band, 1 High-band, 0 Moderate or below. Presence here describes documented operations, not a judgement about Chile or its communities; many listed groups also operate elsewhere.

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New Religious Movement

Antares de la Luz (Ramon Castillo Gaete doomsday sect)

Antares de la Luz was the religious identity adopted by Ramon Gustavo Castillo Gaete, leader of a 12-member Chilean doomsday sect active from around 2009 to 2013 that relocated repeatedly through the Valparaiso region before settling near Colliguay/Mantagua. Believing himself God and expecting the world to end on 21 December 2012, Castillo declared the newborn son of member Natalia Guerra -- his own child -- to be the Antichrist, and in November 2012 the group bound the two-day-old infant, gagged him, and burned him alive. Castillo fled to Peru and hanged himself in Cusco in May 2013 before facing trial. Chilean courts subsequently convicted Guerra of parricide and Pablo Undurraga of qualified homicide (five years' effective imprisonment each, per Chilean press reporting), with five further members convicted as accomplices (three years each); several other members were found not criminally responsible by reason of insanity. Guerra was a fugitive for two years before her 2019 capture and 2021 conditional release. The case was the subject of a 2024 Netflix documentary.

Christian

Colonia Dignidad (Paul Schäfer)

Colonia Dignidad was a sealed German colony in southern Chile founded in 1961 by Paul Schäfer, a lay preacher who fled child-abuse charges in West Germany with some 300 followers. Behind fences, floodlights, and watchtowers, the colony ran on total control for four decades: families deliberately separated, marriage and contact between the sexes suppressed, unpaid labour from childhood, informing institutionalised, and systematic sexual abuse of the colony's children by Schäfer — established in Chilean courts, which convicted him in absentia contexts and, after his 2005 capture, sentenced him for the abuse of 25 children. Under the Pinochet dictatorship the enclave served the DINA secret police as a detention and torture site where political prisoners were interrogated, tortured, and in documented cases disappeared. Schäfer died in prison in 2010; the settlement, renamed Villa Baviera, persists as an ordinary village whose reckoning — German-Chilean commissions, memorials, compensation — remains contested.

Christian

Cornelia Connelly Society / Society of the Holy Child Jesus

The Society of the Holy Child Jesus (SHCJ) is a Catholic women's religious community founded in 1846 in Derby, England by Cornelia Connelly (1809–1879), an American-born convert. SHCJ operated girls' boarding schools and day schools across the UK, Ireland, and the United States from the 1840s through the late 20th century. Mid-20th-century coercive-control patterns at the schools have been documented in survivor memoirs, *Guardian* + *Irish Times* 2024 reporting, and the broader Irish state-inquiry context (Mother and Baby Homes, Magdalene Laundries). The contemporary order has substantially reformed and operates a much smaller educational footprint.

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