Parents seeking son who disappeared 23 years ago

Twenty-three years after their teenage son vanished on a volcano in southern Chile during General Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, Dutch pensioners Paulus and Loes Visser are still putting up 'missing' posters.

They've turned to clairvoyants, faced down a cult, examined teeth and even tested the DNA of a drifter with memory loss and a likeness to their son Maarten, who they suspect was taken for a spy by Pinochet's secret police, tortured and murdered.

"Only once I have seen something, bones or something, then I will believe it. We owe it to Maarten to know what happened, so we come every year," said Loes, 66, on an annual two-week visit to south Chile's picture-postcard lake region to search.

"I sometimes think maybe he's alive, but I know in my heart it can't be true," she said. The couple have visited Chile 26 times since Maarten disappeared in 1985, aged 18.

Chile, which is now a stable democracy, lists 3,195 people who were killed or disappeared under Pinochet's 1973-1990 dictatorship, and many victims' families are still in the dark and waiting for justice. Eighteen years after Pinochet's rule ended, 1,183 of those people are still listed as missing.

A linguist and a keen photographer, high school graduate Maarten traveled to Chile in December 1985 on the final leg of a trip across South America before he was due to head home to the Netherlands and go to university.

Three days after crossing over to Chile from neighboring Argentina, he disappeared while on a walk to take photos on the picturesque, snow-capped Osorno volcano around 950 km south of the capital, Santiago.

A week later, an honorary consul phoned to say their son had been killed in an accident and that they should not travel to Chile -- advice which raised their suspicions.

"They took us in a helicopter and went to a lot of trouble to show us the most dangerous part of the volcano," Paulus, 69, recalled. "And they would not give us some of his personal belongings. Only later did the DINA (secret police) return them. All his rolls of film had been over-exposed."

Juan Guzman, the investigating judge who indicted Pinochet, on charges of kidnapping and murder, took on the Visser's case seven years ago. But he has since retired and the case is frozen. Pinochet died in 2006 without facing full trial.

"At first I thought it could have been an accident, but afterward I began to suspect that unfortunately the young man was kidnapped and disappeared," Guzman told Reuters, citing the fact that strangers had been asking after Maarten just before he disappeared and the over-exposed film rolls.

He believes the Vissers' son may have been taken to Colonia Dignidad, later renamed Villa Baviera, a once-closed community home to a religious cult of German immigrants in the area which he says Pinochet used as a detention and torture center.

The Vissers visited the hermetic colony to ask after their son, but were met with a wall of silence.

They even turned to clairvoyants in Holland and in Chile.

There have been false hopes over the years. Six years ago a relative traveled to Argentina after a report about a tramp who looked like their son and had apparent amnesia, and even sang Dutch songs to him. DNA tests on a hair sample ruled him out.

Now, DNA tests are being done on a set of bones found 50 miles away from the site Maarten was last seen, but the teeth were nothing like his, so the Vissers have ruled it out.

"We are always so jealous of people who had a coffin (to mourn)," said Loes. "We are not in that position."