The shocking documentary film Antares de la Luz: The sect of the end of the world can be seen on Netflix. It is about the formation of a sect led by Ramón Gustavo Castillo Gaete, who called himself Antares de la Luz and called himself “God’s messenger on Earth,” committing all kinds of crimes, including the sacrifice of a baby. . The sect, which predicted the end of the world on December 21, 2012, settled in Colliguay, near Valparaíso, Chile.
The film, directed by Santiago Correa and produced by Fábula, follows his crimes and subsequent prosecution of the members of the group, as well as the persecution of Ramón Gustavo Castillo Gaete 12 years after the events. And it brings together the voices of most of its protagonists: investigators, police officers, lawyers and judges.
The Netflix film is characterized by a meticulous weaving of the actions from the beginning of the formation of the sect, with the open testimony of Pablo Undurraga, the only former member of the group who tells the events in first person, and whose story is taken as the guiding thread of the argument.
Its axis serves for interaction with testimonies from other members who preferred to preserve a certain anonymity and about twenty voices that contribute to the complete reconstruction of the events. The range of voices that manage to reveal the different faces and approaches of history like a prism is a success.
As the basis for the central axis of the documentary’s plot, the Netflix proposal takes the book Five Drops of Blood and contributions from the police investigative journalist Verónica Foxley, who is also one of the protagonists of the film.
”When the case broke out in the press at the end of April 2013, and the police in Chile and Peru were looking for Antares, a lot of information began to emerge about the sect and its members,’ Foxley explains in a conversation with Clarín. The only thing that crossed my mind there is how they could have done what they did. What happens in the minds of young people who had access to universities, who had jobs within a framework of logic, and who could still become convinced that an ”other” could be God and by virtue of that continue his opinions in detail.”
And he continues: “How fragile can the personality structure be so as not to set off the alarm at the imminent crime of a three-day-old baby? How can we not realize that he is an innocent creature and not Lucifer, as Antares called him? ?”
The researcher, at that time, wanted to know the mechanisms that had operated in the group, who Antares was, how he exercised his power and also what the limits of consciousness are. In Chile there was no precedent for such a crime.
It is worth commenting that before believing himself to be God, Castillo had worked as a musician.
– I heard her say that she is interested in police investigation because it is linked to people, to what impacts and motivates them. Could you tell me, after all your experience in this case, what do you think happened humanly to the participants of the Colliguay sect?
-I think that the majority were people with basic psychological problems, with family breakdowns, with many scars and with a need to find a new way of life, but at the same time, although it is a paradox, I think they wanted to be better people, to the point that they wanted to participate in the salvation of the world. Antares, like all these leaders or gurus, had a surgeon’s eye to realize who he could recruit. That’s why he was so effective.
Foxley’s book tells the complete story of Antares and manages to enter the heart of the sect, in the process of mind control and delirium of this group. It tells the story from its origins, the details of how each person’s ”awakening” process was. Through its chapters the story takes a dramatic and fierce turn. He also manages to profile Antares from when he was a quiet, solitary musician, with pain in his body, but who seemed like an ordinary subject, until he established himself as God.
”The book describes very important chapters in this story, such as the sacrifice of the baby, the end of the world that was not and Antares’ flight to Peru that culminates with his last days and his death in an abandoned house in Cusco,” the journalist completes. All facts that are recounted in the documentary based on the contributions of the newborn’s own mother, Undurraga, police officers and investigators, as well as Foxley herself.
Considered Castillo’s right-hand man, Undurraga was sentenced to five years in prison for his participation as the perpetrator of qualified homicide. The court argued that he did not act under the concept of shared mystical delusion. He also noted that he had the ability to leave the sect.
For their part, María del Pilar Álvarez, David Pastén, Carolina Vargas, Josefina López and Karla Franchy, all members of the sect, were sentenced to three years of intensive probation, due to their participation as accessories.
Natalia Guerra, who remained a fugitive for two years: she was the one who had Castillo’s son in a clinic in Viña del Mar. In May 2021, the Court of Appeals released her on conditional release after serving a 5-year sentence for the crime. of patricide.
Chilean public opinion reacted with rage to these verdicts. ”We have been left with the feeling that justice works differently if it involves people with enough purchasing power to pay for a good lawyer,” says Foxley.
-How has your research process been?
-Hard. It is a difficult topic to investigate because the members of the sect were closed to telling what they had experienced. It was difficult for me to enter the story and gain the trust of those who agreed to talk to me until a woman who had shared with them for a long time, overcoming the terror that Antares would carry out his threat to kill her boyfriend, escaped from the sect. .
She was terrified at home for months, until when Natalia was two months away from giving birth, she went to the police to leave a report at the police station. She warned them that there was a group that had a leader who believed he was God, that her best friend was there, and that there was a pregnant woman whose child was in danger. Unfortunately, she was not given any importance and she was filed somewhere in the middle of cobwebs. If someone at that police station had given that person credibility, perhaps the story would have been different.
-Some criticisms have been raised about the documentary considering that it aims to clear up in a certain way the responsibilities of the sect’s participants. What is your opinion?
I think many emotions are mixed. This documentary cannot leave you indifferent given such a horrible crime (N. de R: two days after his birth, the leader ordered his followers to dig a hole in the hill where the baby was later burned alive ). I do manage to notice that the story causes a lot of anger, helplessness due to the brutality of what happened. So there is a sort of refusal to hear and also believe what was going through the members’ heads, how the mental control mechanisms had operated in this group and what produces the most anger are the sentences handed down by the courts.
– What parallels could you draw with Colonia Dignidad, another emblematic case in Chile?
-They are different, because this was a group of German settlers that had strong ties to the Pinochet dictatorship and whose leaders were Nazis who had escaped from Germany. We must not forget that there are testimonies that this place was a torture center. I remember that I once interviewed Manuel Contreras, son of the former head of the secret police (DINA) and the regime’s repressive apparatus, who told me that he was a child and that he was there on several occasions. He knew of his father’s closeness to Paul Schaefer, the sexual abuser and leader of this colony.
If you exclude the top brass of Colonia Dignidad, its members had no contact with the outside world and were indoctrinated from birth. Therefore, it was the only reality they knew, the only way to live was that. They were victims of sexual abuse, torture, also forced labor and a constant violation of their human rights. They had weapons and access to the world of power. Perhaps what they may have some similarity in is in indoctrination, in some punishments and in the use of destructive mind control techniques such as manipulation, sexual restrictions, the cult of the leader, the demand for ”purity” and the punishments. In their testimonies they report an annulment of critical thinking, of rationality.
-Do you consider, based on your research and experience, that Chilean society is prone, for some reason, to sects?
-No. Sects arise everywhere, it has nothing to do with the countries but with the loss of the meaning of life, a spiritual emptiness and a lot of loneliness. From the research for the book I was also able to realize that we must have the alerts on because some coercive organizations hide under harmless appearances such as healing workshops, new age movements, all types of cults, spiritual and work growth organizations.
Cults are much closer than we suspect and their operating mechanisms today are more powerful, since they use social networks to recruit potential followers who will mostly end up being victims. This happens for several reasons, the first is that in Chile the law guarantees freedom of worship, which implies and at the same time assumes that people choose of their own free will where they want to be, therefore to criminally prosecute them there must be a crime; and the second, because the subjects who are in sects do not realize it, since they believe in what the leader says. Furthermore, the mere thought of escaping and reporting them causes paralyzing fear. The power of the sects is so strong that the victims who manage to free themselves from their tentacles must undergo therapy and take a long time to ”deprogram” and most of the time take years to recover.
It is precisely this last point that Foxley relates that is revealed in the voice of Undurraga, father of a teenager and currently in a relationship, who begins the documentary and warns that if he told everything that actually happened, whoever is on the other side of the screen would not I could keep looking. Raw, accurate, creepy and with impeccable photography that accompanies the facts.
