Chile Yesterday, America Today

Ariel Dorfman revisits acts of brutality in the 1970s and John Dinges’s investigation of who is to blame.

By Ariel DorfmanNovember 23, 2025

• History

• Politics

AT THIS PERILOUS MOMENT in which we are living, when men in masks command unmarked vans and snatch innocent people from the streets, homes, and workplaces of the United States, often without their families or friends able to ascertain where they are being held or even whether they are alive, other chilling events in the nation’s history regrettably come to mind. Of those many precedents, it is sadly appropriate to remember and lament the similar fate of our compatriot Charlie Horman. Even though the tragedy that befell him happened in another country—Chile, half a century ago—it carries important and sobering lessons for us today.

Charles Horman was a 30-year-old American citizen who traveled to Chile with his wife Joyce to participate in the peaceful revolution that Salvador Allende, the country’s socialist president, had launched when he won the runoff election in September 1970. Horman was just one among a large contingent of idealistic young Americans (and many others from around the world, over 20,000 or so) who were stimulated by the Chilean experiment that posited the possibility of drastically confronting injustice and inequality without spilling the blood of those adversaries who opposed radical changes, an attempt that reversed what had been the violent norm in all previous revolutions. Charlie Horman did not imagine that, ultimately, his was the blood that would be spilled, that his body was to suffer intolerable violence.  

On September 17, 1973, six days after a brutal coup headed by General Augusto Pinochet deposed Allende, Horman was arrested at his home in Santiago by a military patrol, a detention unfortunately typical of the terror that ensued after the takeover. Also typical was that the authorities did not admit to detaining him, despite the testimony of neighbors who had witnessed what was clearly a targeted and planned operation, given that a truck, a jeep, and as many as 12 soldiers were involved. Such an extravagant deployment of public force in the days after the coup could only occur with official benediction. Over the next several days, Joyce Horman frantically searched for news about her kidnapped spouse, only to face a wall of denial from Chile’s rulers and no significant collaboration from the embassy and consular officials of her country, the very representatives who were supposed to be protecting their endangered nationals. She was soon joined, from the United States, by her father-in-law, Edmund Horman, a successful businessman “that mostly voted Republican,” who quickly realized that all those implicated in his son’s abduction were lying, and that he and his daughter-in-law were facing an elaborate and deliberate cover-up.

In effect, like thousands of Chilean sympathizers of Allende, Horman had become a “desaparecido.” Unlike those other disappeared men and women—1,162 of whom are still missing and unaccounted for today, 52 years after the coup—Horman was, after all, an American, and the pressure to discover what had befallen him was consequently so intense that his bullet-ridden body was, more than a month after his arrest, at last identified as having been buried anonymously in a small niche (patio 23) in the Cementerio General (though it would not be until March 1974 that his remains would be returned to his family in the United States). He had, in fact, been tortured at the Estadio Nacional, which the junta had converted into a gigantic concentration camp; he was executed there on September 18. Another American, Frank Teruggi, suffered an analogous tribulation at that same coliseum (and they were just two of 58 foreigners killed in the days after the coup), but it was Horman’s case that would grow in notoriety, burning itself into public consciousness when the film Missing premiered almost nine years after the coup.

Missing was directed by Konstantinos Gavras, known professionally as Costa-Gavras, whom I first met in Santiago when he was filming State of Siege (1972) during the Allende years. Already famous for the 1969 thriller Z (which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film) and the 1970 biopic The Confession, both of which were dedicated to exploring politically fraught situations, it was not strange that Costa-Gavras, a friend of Allende and a sympathizer with his revolution, would take on the story of Chile’s tragedy. By focusing on Horman’s firebrand wife (played by Sissy Spacek) and his conservative father (played by Jack Lemmon), Costa-Gavras told a story that would be seen by millions across the world. He had created not only a stunning cinematic thriller but also an indispensable political instrument against Pinochet. I realized this as soon as I saw it, at the film’s first public screening in February 1982, during my Washington, DC, exile.

For Chilean refugees fighting the dictatorship, Missing marked a turning point in our struggle, making it much easier to secure funds for the resistance and lobby for votes in the US Congress to sanction and isolate Pinochet’s regime. Instead of long explanations (where is Chile, when did the coup happen, who is the dictator, what is so appalling about him?), it was enough to query: “Have you seen Missing?” And, invariably, everyone had. Hollywood has a knack for inspiring solidarity, filtering the news through performances and recognizable faces (in this case, Lemmon and Spacek). The film brought the multiple calamities of Chile—otherwise distant—home to an unfamiliar audience.

And yet, mysteries remained about Horman’s death. The film—and the 1978 book by Thomas Hauser upon which it was based (The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice, later retitled Missing)—suggested that there had been a criminal degree of American embroilment in Horman’s arrest and execution. Would the military regime have dared to kill citizens of a country that was their ally against Allende? Had the Americans, at the very least, provided tacit approval of his death? More controversially, the film implied that Horman was murdered because, while on a trip to the port city of Valparaíso, he and a friend had stumbled on proof that the US Navy had helped in coordinating and carrying out the Pinochet coup.

It was an incendiary thesis to which I, along with many on the left, enthusiastically subscribed. What reason did we have to trust the US government? We knew that the CIA, under orders from Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, had set in motion plans to stop Allende from taking power and, when that plot failed, proceeded to destabilize his government politically and economically, funding a violent and mutinous opposition. It seemed obvious that the United States would have also participated in secretly planning the military takeover, and just as obvious that anyone who learned about those secrets, like Horman, had to be eliminated.

Or were such accusations false, as administration after administration had staunchly maintained?

More than 50 years after the coup, we have the answer in Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After The Coup, the new book by distinguished journalist John Dinges, who made a name for himself with several well-researched books on contemporary repression in Latin America and how it relates to US actions and policy. Dinges has also been the managing director of NPR and a professor of journalism at Columbia University.

When Dinges embarked on his investigation of the murders of Charlie Horman and Frank Teruggi, he hoped to “put to rest the most critical question: did the U.S. government participate in or approve the murder of two American citizens by its ally the Chilean military?” and freely admits that he “fully expected to prove the hypothesis in the affirmative,” as he found the accusations to have “ample plausibility.”

Instead, Dinges comes, after a painful—and painstakingly documented—pursuit of the truth, to an unpredictably different conclusion: “The evidence presented here has established, to a high degree of certainty, that Horman and Teruggi were executed, without U.S. involvement, as part of the massive repression against leftists, foreigners and Allende government sympathizers in the days following September 11.”

Dinges confirms in these hundreds of pages what has made him such a superb investigative journalist. His expertise on postcoup Chile and repression in the Southern Cone had already been demonstrated in two of his previous books, Assassination on Embassy Row (with Saul Landau, 1980; republished in 2014 with a preface by me) and The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (2004). Dinges himself was one of those Americans who “experienced Allende’s Chile, even in its defeat, never forgot and never regretted, and came away changed for a lifetime.” The personal angle of his story lends extra pathos and drama to a work that might otherwise have been dry and detached. This is a man who breathed the same air of freedom and revolution that Horman and Teruggi did, and that circumstance shines throughout his attempt to understand their enigmatic deaths. “Speaking for myself,” he tells us at the very end of the book, “Chile is a great love, and what happened there was a great wound in our hearts.”

More reason, then, to trust him as he tracks down every source and eyewitness, every book, every document, every press article and typed note, every conceivable testimony, memorandum, and private paper; to admire his efforts to personally interview 89 men and women with knowledge of the events (along with major email communications); and to acknowledge the rigor with which he remarks on the flagrant failures of previous researchers to follow threads that could have led to the revelation of the truth, with the exception, Dinges declares, of the invaluable work of Peter Kornbluh in The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (2003) and of Pascale Bonnefoy’s Terrorismo de Estadio: Prisioneros de guerra en un campo de deportes (2005), along with germane interviews Bonnefoy conducted.

It is impossible here to reproduce each exhaustive and frequently exhausting step that Dinges took to collate and trawl through all the pertinent evidence, much of it unknown until now. His approach is both clinical and passionate, dogged in his pursuit of any information that could prove or disprove the assumptions with which he started out. He spent three weeks at Chile’s Supreme Court archives reading and scanning the 17 hefty volumes encompassing the official judicial investigation into the kidnapping and homicide of Teruggi and Horman. These records contained copious interrogations and documents but ultimately did not uncover the facts behind the case or punish the culprits.

Central to Dinges’s research (complete with a host of meticulous footnotes and bibliography) is the careful scrutiny of the statements that originated the theory around American involvement in both the coup and the murder of two US citizens. Much of this theory is based on the testimony of one man in particular: a veteran Chilean intelligence agent named Rafael González, who, in June 1976, sought asylum with his family in the Italian embassy. In interviews with three American reporters over the course of several days, he claimed that Horman had been killed because “he knew too much. And this was done between the CIA and local authorities.” González insisted that an unidentified man dressed like an American had been present when the order to “disappear” Horman had been given by the Chilean head of intelligence. Journalist Joanne Omang later characterized González in The Washington Post as “an authoritative source inside the Chilean military,” and his account was to become the base—and the sole one—for the accusations of US entanglement in Horman’s murder. But, as Dinges discloses, González had fabricated this story, recanting it in 2001 and 2003 and explaining that the Pinochet government, back in 1976, would not provide González and his wife and daughter with safe passage out of the country, and his Italian hosts had pressed him to “tell a story that would get him out of Chile.” The one detail that González stuck to was “that he saw Horman in custody and that he was being held as a ‘subversive’ based on ‘local’ intelligence about him.”

Having set aside direct American responsibility for that murder, Dinges proceeds to present a series of other credible scenarios that would elucidate how and why the two young men were executed. Among them: That Horman was living in a neighborhood known for its militancy, and Teruggi was lodging with members of a vocally extreme leftist organization; that they both possessed libraries stocked with Marxist books; that Chilean military intelligence had dossiers on their activities. To all of that, I would add the anti-foreign hysteria that had gripped Chilean fascists in the prelude to and aftermath of the coup. Like most fascists, they suspected and accused those born elsewhere of having infiltrated the country to corrupt its citizens and spread terrorism. Horman and Teruggi were “the enemy within,” a term that has always served nationalist authoritarians around the world to justify their repression of those they consider alien.

I am, in any case, entirely convinced that Dinges has reached the right conclusions, despite the healthy skepticism with which I kept appraising his analyses. For those readers who cling to the version espoused in the film Missing, there is comfort—if that is what we should call something so perverse—in knowing that the United States does not come away from this book unscathed.

The author’s unraveling of the allegations that Americans had expressly planned the coup, as well as the murders of Horman and Teruggi, makes his indictment of the way in which the embassy and consul officials acted (or failed to act) in the days before, during, and after the coup all the more damning. For starters, they could have saved lives merely by opening the doors of the embassy and consulate to the US citizens who feared persecution (as dozens of other countries’ embassies were doing, saving many lives, including mine), but the official policy, communicated to the junta, was that no such refuge would be offered. Or the military could have been peremptorily warned: Hands off our citizens! Worse still: Once the two men had been arrested, the American bureaucrats were callous and negligent, methodically and consciously (with a few exceptions of low-level functionaries) covering up the military’s systematic mendacity with a “pattern of passive acquiescence,” inaction, and misinformation. The American officials were more interested in protecting Pinochet’s reputation than in defending the lives of threatened compatriots: “More than murders to be investigated, the deaths of Horman and Teruggi were a problem to be finessed and an obstacle to be removed” so that the new military government could be shepherded into international respectability. Nor does Dinges flinch from condemning the United States for “bear[ing] indisputable responsibility for enabling the Pinochet dictatorship and supporting it regardless of the massive human rights crimes it committed.”

Despite these denunciations, I suspect that many progressives who have spent a lifetime—as I have—deploring immoral US interventions across the globe, and who were sure that the death of Charlie Horman proved yet again how nefarious that meddling could be, will not welcome this “untold story” and will consider it instead as providing ammunition to those who would like to whitewash the US government’s many past and present acts of malfeasance.

I think that, on the contrary, we should appreciate the chance to publicly correct misperceptions and “erroneous portrayals of past events” that critics like myself have harbored for decades, especially because such a self-critical attitude is woefully missing from so much of our wretched contemporary American discourse.

Undeniably, such a recognition of the need—whatever the consequences—to courageously explore the veracity of a legendary historical event that was misconstrued and mythologized by so many on the left contrasts with the way the right-wing forces that dominate in the United States today knowingly spread lies and “fake news” and then refuse to rectify their fabrications when caught out.

But this corrective is not the only service that Dinges’s book provides.

It also vividly brings to the shoals of memory the golden generation of young Americans in the 1960s and ’70s who believed in international solidarity, seeking a place to contribute to a more luminous world beyond the frontiers of the country from which they felt increasingly alienated, thanks to its monstrous wars abroad and discrimination against its own people at home. Before he even gets to the imprisonment of Horman and Teruggi, Dinges focuses, during the first part of his book, on the trajectory and ideals of these two young utopians whose existence would be snuffed out.

These radiant biographical pages (accompanied by a generous array of photos) were particularly moving for me. Born in Buenos Aires, I immigrated to New York at the age of two-and-a-half with my family due to my father’s troubles with the fascist Argentine military, and then spent the next 10 years as a child in the United States, feeling myself to be fundamentally American in my cultural (albeit not political) tastes, an endearing relationship that I carried to Chile when, once again, my dad ran afoul of right-wing zealots, in this case the redoubtable duo of senators Joseph McCarthy and Pat McCarran. I was therefore delighted when, after the 1970 elections, such a range of Americans from my generation (and even some older ones) began flocking joyously, full of curiosity and zest, into the homeland of Allende that I had adopted by then as my own—so much so that during the last months of the revolutionary government, I was working at the presidential palace as cultural and press advisor to Allende’s chief of staff.

As to the protagonists of this book, I met Frank Teruggi twice at the house in Santiago— adjacent to the one inhabited by two of my best friends—that he was sharing with several extreme left-wing militants. I have the vague impression of someone inflamed with tenderness and insurrectionist ardor, and, unless I am mistaken, we celebrated that both of us had coincided, and might even have participated in the same anti-war protests, at UC Berkeley in 1969 when he was an undergraduate there and I was a research scholar from Chile completing a book on violence and imagination in the Latin American novel.

I never, to my knowledge, crossed paths with Charlie Horman, though I was to learn more about him because Deena Metzger, the great visionary poet and novelist from Los Angeles who visited Chile in 1972 and became almost a sister to me, worked after the coup, as part of a California collective, on a documentary titled Chile: With Poems and Guns, which used some of the footage shot (by Horman, among others) for another doc, Avenue of the Americas (1975), for which Horman wrote the original script. I may, come to think of it, have run into Joyce Horman, as she was an extra in a film that one of my university buddies, Raúl Ruiz (though Dinges mistakenly calls him “Jorge”), was shooting (co-directed by Saul Landau and Nina Serrano). But I am hazy about whether that encounter ever took place. The only other mistake in the book regards how Dinges covers Allende’s death on September 11, 1973. Dinges states that Dr. Patricio Guijón “entered the room” where Allende had turned an AK-47 on himself. Guijón did not enter the room, but glanced into it through a half-open door, and serious doubts persist as to whether it was an AK-47, issues explored at length in my novel The Suicide Museum (2023).

As to the myriad other enthusiastic gringos whom my wife and I befriended, even lodging a couple of them for several months in our small bungalow in Santiago, they were quite a lively and chaotic crew, including, believe it or not, Robert McNamara’s son, a wonderful 21-year-old dreamer named Craig who was, of course, ashamed of his progenitor’s actions, previously, as secretary of defense under JFK and Lyndon B. Johnson, and, at the time, as the head of the World Bank, which was denying loans to Chile under Allende (promptly resumed once the military regime took power). Though we eventually, some years after the coup, lost contact with Craig, it was encouraging to discover, over time, that he had become an activist for sustainable agriculture back in California. He was only one of several US civilians inspired by Chile who later brought their experience of that country’s attempt to build a society based on solidarity, rather than greed, back to their own native land. Indeed, some of Teruggi’s and Horman’s compatriots in Chile, such as the indomitable and prematurely widowed Joyce Horman, dedicated their lives to furthering human rights and the cause of liberation, while others, like Dinges himself, became eminent experts on Latin America. I could list dozens more if space allowed.

Which raises (really, cries out) the question: who knows how Teruggi and Horman would have employed their creative talent and fervor for justice if they had not been tortured and slaughtered? It is mournfully ironic that, by dying so conspicuously and scandalously, due to the actions of the very nation they were born to and fleeing from with such vehemence, they should have ended up performing a posthumous service to the Chile they had come to hold so steadfastly in their hearts.

But their desecrated bodies also serve their own country today. Their fate reminds us of the long-term consequences that permitting lawlessness and lies from a government can have, how those qualities can corrupt the moral compass of officials who, through their inaction and silence, become complicit in the repression. Today, the United States itself veers toward authoritarianism, abrogates civil rights, and persecutes its opponents. An unavoidable question arises: are we that far from turning a tale about Chile yesterday into a story about America today?