Before the coup, the house belonged to the Brazilian sociologist Theotônio Dos Santos, an intellectual who had found refuge in Salvador Allende's Chile. After September 11, 1973, it briefly sheltered Chileans seeking asylum under the protection of the Panamanian embassy. Then, in August 1974, it changed hands again, and its purpose was inverted entirely. The National Intelligence Directorate, the DINA, took it over and gave it a code name: Ollagüe Barracks. A house that had held a thinker and then protected the hunted became a place where people were brought to be broken. It served as a way station in the DINA's network, where prisoners were held in transit between the cells of Londres 38 and the larger compound at Villa Grimaldi.

Among those brought here was Lumi Videla, a young sociology student at the University of Chile. DINA agents detained her on September 21, 1974, along with her husband, Sergio Pérez Molina; both belonged to the Revolutionary Left Movement. Her captors wanted information about the movement's leadership, and they tortured her to get it. On November 3, 1974, Lumi Videla died during a torture session in this house. The regime then staged a lie around her death: her body was thrown over the wall of the Italian embassy under cover of the night curfew, and pro-government press claimed she had died in an "orgy" among the political refugees sheltering inside. It was a fabrication, later dismantled in court. She was 27. Decades afterward, Italy and Chile would jointly honor her at the embassy where her body had been so cruelly discarded.

It is estimated that 61 disappeared prisoners were held in this facility, and that roughly 50 people lost their lives here while more than a hundred were tortured. Once Villa Grimaldi was operating at full capacity, the house on José Domingo Cañas shifted into an operational headquarters, first for the DINA and later for its successor, the National Information Center. Behind these figures, recorded in the Rettig and Valech commission reports, are individual people with names, families, and futures that were taken from them in a quiet residential block where neighbors heard things they could not, at the time, openly speak about. Remembering them by number alone would repeat a small version of the erasure the regime intended.

In the mid-1990s, residents began to speak openly about what the house had been, and they organized to reclaim it. Their weekly vigils kept the memory alive long enough to matter. When the building was demolished in 2001, they did not give up; they installed a monument out front bearing the names of the disappeared and of Lumi Videla. Two parallel stone columns represent a human couple, and a flock of birds rises from the top, standing for the dreams and the hopes that the violence tried to extinguish. The site was declared a national monument on January 21, 2002. In 2010 the 1367 Foundation opened the José Domingo Cañas Memory House, where the preserved foundations let visitors trace the original rooms, a mural honors the disappeared, and a small museum displays objects recovered from the ground. The house is gone. The remembering, deliberately, is not.