Twice, Dawson Island became a place to make people disappear. This cold, wind-battered island in the Strait of Magellan, about 100 kilometers south of Punta Arenas, looks like nothing so much as a refuge for seabirds. Antarctic weather lashes it for much of the year. But its remoteness was precisely the point. In the 1890s it became a mission where the Selkʼnam people were confined far from their homeland, and in 1973 it became a prison camp for the closest associates of a murdered president. The same isolation that drew the indigenous Kawésqar to its sheltered channels made it, for others, an island from which there was no leaving.
For thousands of years, the Kawésqar lived among these islands, moving through the western channels of Tierra del Fuego in their canoes. They were here long before the island had a foreign name. The Yaghan called them by one term; Europeans borrowed another, Alacalufe, and the older names slowly receded. The Kawésqar had no reason to think of this place as anyone's prison. It was simply home, a stretch of cold coast where they had always known how to live. What came next was not their doing, and it would not spare them.
In the late nineteenth century, sheep ranches spread across Tierra del Fuego, and the Selkʼnam who hunted there were treated as obstacles. Ranchers hired armed men to track and kill them for bounty, a campaign now recognized as the Selkʼnam genocide. The Chilean government's answer was not protection but removal. Beginning in the mid-1890s, Selkʼnam people were shipped to Dawson Island and confined to a Salesian mission granted a twenty-year concession in 1890, where missionaries meant to school them and remake them as Chileans. Instead, crowded together and stripped of their way of life, they died in waves as European diseases tore through the mission. The people sent there to be saved were, in the end, very nearly erased. One mission building still stands, a Chilean national monument to a vanished community.
Eighty years later, the island filled again. After the coup of September 11, 1973, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet shipped the men of Salvador Allende's government to Dawson, among them the foreign minister Orlando Letelier and the young mining minister Sergio Bitar. His guards renamed him Isla 10, a number to replace a name, and held him from September 1973 until October 1974. Some ninety-nine detainees were sentenced to forced labor in the cold; some accounts put the total held across the two camps as high as four hundred. They were beaten and degraded, as declassified records later confirmed. The Red Cross, the BBC, and the Brazilian press were allowed to look, briefly, before the camps were emptied.
Letelier survived Dawson only to be assassinated three years later in Washington by agents of the regime, killed by a car bomb on Embassy Row. Bitar lived, was exiled for a decade, and came home to serve again in Chile's restored democracy. He wrote his account of the island, Isla 10, and in 2009 the director Miguel Littín turned it into a film. Two prisons, two peoples, separated by lifetimes and joined by a single patch of frozen ground. Dawson Island keeps no monuments to its second tragedy as it does to its first. But the people who were sent here were never numbers or footnotes. They were a nation that had lived here for millennia, and a generation of men who believed in another future for their country. The island remembers both.
Dawson Island lies at roughly 53.97°S, 70.58°W in the Strait of Magellan, southeast of the Brunswick Peninsula. From the air it reads as a large, distinct landmass ringed by cold water, a useful waypoint for coastal navigation in a region with few. The nearest airfield is Punta Arenas (Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, SCCI), about 100 km north. Expect harsh sub-Antarctic weather: strong winds, frequent rain and snow, and low visibility for much of the year.