New Hope in Mystery of Missing Professor

By Adam Smeltz, Centre Daily Times, State College, Pa.

Mar. 12–Two decades have slipped by since Boris Weisfeiler, a Penn State mathematics professor, vanished during a 1985 vacation in the Chilean mountains.

He was 43 years old, a State College bachelor who ventured into a South American wilderness then controlled by the dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

His friends and loved ones, confronted with an uncooperative Chilean government, still do not know his fate.

But the inauguration this weekend of Chile’s first female president, Michelle Bachelet, is giving them renewed optimism.

Weisfeiler’s sister, Olga, said she maintains hope that the Bachelet administration will be more open in releasing information about her brother’s case.

“Still I need to find what happened and who’s responsible,” Olga Weisfeiler said Saturday from her Massachusetts home. “There’s no proof of his death.”

The Weisfeiler disappearance has also gathered renewed attention on Capitol Hill. In a letter dated Wednesday, 14 members of Congress urged Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to ask Bachelet about the Weisfeiler case this weekend.

Rice met with Bachelet, a socialist, for about 30 minutes after Bachelet’s inauguration Saturday. Reached Friday, a State Department spokesman said he wasn’t sure if Rice was planning to talk about Weisfeiler with Bachelet.

The women made no public comments after their Saturday meeting, The Associated Press reported.

“The excruciating waiting period without answers or closure has only exacerbated this tragedy for professor Weisfeiler’s family,” Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry said in a prepared statement Friday. “No one should have to wait 20 years to know what happened to a loved one.

“President Bush has an important opportunity to speak out for the Weisfeilers for all the families of the missing, and I hope he’ll do that,” Kerry went on.

Other signees of the Wednesday letter to Rice include Pennsylvania Sens. Arlen Specter and Rick Santorum, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy and U.S. Rep. John Peterson.

Peterson tried three times in recent months to address the Weisfeiler case with outgoing Chilean President Ricardo Lagos, Peterson spokesman Chris Tucker said.

Each time, Tucker said, Lagos failed to answer Peterson’s letters.

“We can only comment on what we’ve seen, and what we’ve seen from the Chilean government is nothing at all,” Tucker said.

A Chilean coup linked to the U.S. government hoisted Pinochet to power in 1973. He remained there through 1990, a 17-year rule during which 1,100 people disappeared.

Bachelet was jailed and tortured during the Pinochet years, and Weisfeiler is thought to be the only U.S. citizen among the vanished. He disappeared in January 1985.

Olga Weisfeiler said she thinks his case is connected to the Chilean military and to Colonia Dignidad, a secluded German enclave about 15 miles from the spot where her brother went missing.

The enclave, suspected of holding ties to the Pinochet military dictatorship, tortured and killed political prisoners, according to human-rights groups.

U.S. documents released in 2000 show a distinct possibility that Weisfeiler was taken to Colonia Dignidad. An informant told U.S. embassy officials that a foreigner who matched Weisfeiler’s description was found in a forbidden area and interrogated at Colonia Dignidad, according to government documents.

Chilean courts in 2000 reopened an inquiry into the Weisfeiler disappearance. But in the years since, “there have been few additional developments in the case despite the investigation by four separate judges and the relatively recent arrest of Paul Schaefer, the former leader of Colonia Dignidad,” U.S. legislators wrote in their letter last week.

David Tubbs, an academic who has sought the release of information in the Weisfeiler case, said that “there’s still very small hope that perhaps he’s living.”

The pursuit of his fate, Tubbs said, is key to determining whether “he was the victim of a human-rights violation.”

“I do hope, if he was the victim of a human-rights violation, that the persons responsible will be brought to justice,” said Tubbs, a 1987 Penn State alumnus. He teaches political science in New York.

Olga Weisfeiler emigrated to the U.S. from Russia after her brother disappeared. She and her daughter are planning a trip to Chile this month.

“I believe he may be alive,” she said. “… (But) I’ve come to the realization that there’s not much chance.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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