Review: Chile in Their Hearts

U.S. citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were detained and executed in Chile during the early days of the US-backed dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Investigative reporter and author John Dinges, who has written extensively about Latin America and Operation Condor, investigates the earlier premise that both men were murdered by the Chilean military upon direct orders from the U.S. government. Chile in Their Hearts: The Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup (University of California Press, 2025) finds no evidence to confirm direct US involvement, upon which earlier books, as well as the 1982 film Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek, were based.

Dinges wastes no time in affirming the outcome of his research. In the early 2000s, thousands of declassified documents pertaining to the dictatorship were released, including some relating to Horman and Teruggi. ’I had long thought the movie’s theory of the case was highly probably, and I set out to find the evidence to prove it,’ Dinges writes in the introduction. The author also reveals a personal interest, having lived in Chile during which time he met Horman once, and was friends with Teruggi.

U.S. involvement in Chile’s destabilisation, brutal military coup and dictatorship is well documented. Thus the theory of U.S. involvement in the execution of both men is plausible. The only mention, however, of direct U.S. involvement rests on a statement by Rafael Gonzalez, a  National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) agent who was on the scene at the time of Horman’s detention, and who retracted his testimony years later.

There is a certain note of dejection that immediately strikes the reader in this book. Dinges’s meticulous research rests on careful scrutiny of documents, the court files and interviews, through which he pieced together a picture that reveals no direct U.S. involvement. This is disconcerting when one considers the extent of U.S. involvement in toppling the democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.

Elimination of the earlier premise is also compounded by the absence of a known motive for why Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were targeted and killed by the Chilean junta, other than them being leftists.

’The evidence I found,’ Dinges writes, ’led me to conclusions I had not expected, especially about the U.S. role.’ However, the author notes that the U.S. is not entirely lacking in culpability. ‘The evidence demonstrates definitively that the U.S. Embassy and State Department shielded the Pinochet regime by hiding the truth, conducting a sham investigation, and sanctioning Chile’s official coverup of the murders.’

Dinges devotes separate chapters to the backstories of Charles Horman and his wife Joyce, and Frank Teruggi, who arrived in Chile separately. Both men  met in Chile through their involvement in the Fuente de Informacion Norteamericana (FIN). Chile had become a safe haven for those fleeing oppressive dictatorships across Latin America. At a time when U.S. activists had mobilised against their country’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Chile offered alternative, participatory politics as part of the socialist reform implemented by Salvador Allende. At the time, Chile was hosting around 20,000 foreigners.

Both Horman and Teruggi became involved with left-wing movements in Chile. Horman was carrying out his own research into the assassination of General Rene Schneider, while also working with Chile Films, which brought him into close proximity to socialist and communist groups. Teruggi became involved with the Frente de Estudiantes Revolucionarios (FER, Revolutionary Students Front) and also became friends, and willingly involved with, the Movimiento Izqueirda Revolucionaria (MIR, Revolutionary Left Movement). Notably, Teruggi had also been on the FBI’s radar for his antiwar activism in the U.S..

Valparaiso, the port city which was central to the plotting of the coup, emerges as a key component of the earlier premise of direct U.S. involvement. Both Horman and Teruggi had taken photos of military ships in the port, to be published in the magazine Punto Final. Horman’s presence in Valparaiso and his conversations with Captain Ray Davies, the head of the U.S. Military Group in Chile –  as the coup was underway – were central to the narrative around his death. For decades, Horman’s execution and disappearance were linked to him having unearthed information about U.S. involvement while in Valparaiso, condensed into the phrase “he knew too much”.

U.S. Complicity

Dinges uncovered no documentary evidence to support this premise, but the book illustrates two main components that can be proven. One is about the U.S. embassy’s painstaking efforts to shield the Pinochet dictatorship from accountability over Horman and Teruggi’s murders. The other concerns the U.S. failure to investigate important leads on both men’s executions. These findings illustrate the U.S. intent to prioritise diplomatic relations with the Chilean junta at all costs.

Both Horman and Teruggi were reported as missing to the U.S. embassy. Their disappearance, however, is described by the author as representing to the embassy, ’an awkward inconvenience, a snag in the U.S. determination to help the junta succeed.’ The U.S. embassy could have investigated the detention and execution of both men, but orders from Washington, specifically from Henry Kissinger in the immediate aftermath of the coup, directed otherwise: ’The first thing for us not to do is to give the appearance that we are putting pressure on them.’

Thus, U.S. embassy officials upheld the dictatorship’s official narrative, which shifted from statements that no foreigners had been murdered, to denying the military operations that led to Horman and Teruggi’s detention and subsequent executions. One cover story disseminated by the Chilean military and taken at face value by U.S. diplomats was that both men were killed by leftist snipers in the aftermath of the coup. The State Department repeated this narrative to the media, allowing the U.S. to deflect questions on why it had failed to investigate.

With the U.S. rigorously maintaining the dictatorship’s official narrative, it stands to reason that the gaps would be filled by analysing the contradictions spouted by the Chilean dictatorship and U.S. officials. Dinges explains that this was Ed Horman’s process. Having travelled to Chile to investigate his son’s execution and disappearance, and encountered enough ambiguity and insufficient solid evidence from U.S. officials, Ed Horman concluded that the Chilean military would not have acted without U.S. complicity.

Dinges writes, ’The mere absence of such evidence cannot be used to argue that such evidence must exist. Or, as I tell my students in teaching the techniques of investigative reporting, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absent evidence.”’

While direct U.S. involvement can be ruled out for want of evidence, Dinges shows that upholding the Chilean dictatorship’s narrative aided the U.S. embassy’s refusal to investigate. One new piece of evidence that Dinges unearthed and included in his book is that Michael Townley, a U.S. citizen who worked for the CIA and DINA, and who was responsible for the assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976, knew the identity of Frank Teruggi’s killers. U.S. officials failed to pursue this lead.

U.S. officials also failed to follow up on the evidence gathered by Raul Meneses and Jaime Ortiz, the two Intelligence Military Services (SIM) investigators who told Ed Horman that his son had been executed, despite their names being included in an embassy draft letter dated 1973. Meneses’s report detailing that Horman had been killed on the orders of DINA agent Pedro Espinoza was destroyed by SIM. In 1987, the U.S. State Department hesitated to accept Meneses’s testimony. Embassy officials also knowingly withheld information and failed to call in the FBI to investigate the cases.

National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation

Such wilful negligence had legal implications. In 1991, the cases of Horman and Teruggi were among the first to be made public by the National Commission of Truth and Reconciliation. Nine years later, the Horman family filed charges of murder and kidnapping in the Chilean courts, but the judicial investigation was based on the interpretation of declassified documents, rather than hard evidence. By 2003, the court’s attention had shifted to the presumed U.S. involvement and Davis was charged with Horman’s murder, on the premise that the latter “knew too much”, based upon Gonzalez’s initial statement, later retracted.

Despite the U.S. coverup for the Chilean military, Dinges’s examination of court records do not reveal evidence of direct U.S. involvement. In his discussions with Judge Mario Carroza –  well known for his role in investigating crimes related to Operation Condor – Dinges notes that the Chilean courts required ‘an assumption deemed to be reasonably based on other established evidence.’  According to Carroza, the charges against Davis were so weak, ’It would have been easier to convict Henry Kissinger.’

Dinges also recalls research by Peter Kornbluh, director of the National Security Archives, and investigative author Pascale Bonnefroy, who conducted extensive research into Chile’s terror under the dictatorship. Neither unearthed evidence regarding US involvement in Horman and Teruggi’s executions. Reflecting Dinges’s own research, Bonnefroy stated that assumptions were being made upon association and liaison, rather than documented evidence.

This is perhaps an unsatisfactory conclusion to such detailed investigation into this snippet of U.S.-Chilean history. Even as Dinges lays bare the logic guiding his research, readers cannot help but grapple with the question of whether there is more to the story. While Dinges writes with both logic and humanity, it is in the acknowledgements that Dinges pays tribute to the questioning of the unknown, particularly to the Horman family, who remained committed to uncovering the truth. Dinges’s research narrows the search, but the heart will keep searching.