Just as I’m Still Here, Walter Salles’s Oscar-winning film, is reawakening interest in the years of ferocious military rule in Brazil, Costa-Gavras’s movie Missing reminded viewers of the brutal military coup that overthrew Chilean president Salvador Allende in 1973. Missing’s compelling narrative focused on the deaths of two American citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, in the days following the coup, and raised a series of highly troubling questions about Washington’s role in their murders and the demise of democracy in Chile.

By 1982, with Missing’s release, the charge that Nixon and Kissinger actively sought to undermine Allende, perhaps orchestrating the coup itself, had been investigated for years. In 1972, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee scrutinized ITT’s attempts to prevent Allende’s election. In 1975, the “Church Committee”—a select committee chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church—issued a startling series of revelations in its volume on Covert Action in Chile: 1963-1973. Missing’s release rekindled interest in these issues at a time when Pinochet had been in power for nearly a decade and Chile had faded from the public’s attention.

The publication of John Dinges’s new book, Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup (University of California), is likely to raise these controversies once again. Dinges explores the deaths of Horman and Teruggi, the two men referenced in the book’s title, in the first substantive revisionist account of Missing’s central narrative. For many readers of this prodigiously researched volume, Chile in Their Hearts may read like a true-crime novel, as the author examines why the two men were targeted and evaluates each of the possible suspects to their murders, considering means, motivation, and opportunity. If, in the end, Dinges finds he cannot definitively identify the culprit (or culprits), readers who come to the book with only a passing knowledge of the events discussed might be disappointed. But they will likely be satisfied that the author has conducted the most thorough investigation that the evidence allows.

A small set of readers, however, will read Dinges’ book more closely and, perhaps, more critically, because of personal attachments to the events he describes. This is not because the book rips the dressing from a wound that they would prefer to leave hidden. What happened in Chile is an injury, after all, that can only be treated by full exposure to the light. Rather, to disrupt long-accepted narratives without offering definitive answers can be deeply unsettling; it can feel like a challenge to one’s life work.

I am one of that small circle. My wife and I lived in Chile in 1972–73, were friends with Frank and Charlie (he will always be “Charlie” to many of us), and worked with them in the Fuente de Información Norteamericana (FIN), a group that translated and distributed articles supportive of Allende’s Popular Unity government. I played a part in the frantic search for both men after they were detained and went missing in the days following the coup. That pursuit ultimately led me to the discovery of Frank’s body in the Santiago morgue, and many angry confrontations with US consular officials.

Some weeks later, when I returned to the US, I would share with their families the stories I could tell of Frank and Charlie, impressions formed during the brief time that I was fortunate to have known them. Frank’s deep political commitments had roots in his Midwestern, working-class background, as I understood more clearly when I spoke with his father. Frank brought an intensity to his interactions, conversations that were always softened by his quick smile and mordant sense of humor. Charlie was both the adventurer and the intellectual, Harvard without the pretentiousness. He had been drawn to Chile by his enormous curiosity and quickly absorbed everything he encountered as he experienced the momentous struggles unfolding in Chile.

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For many of us, the events we lived through in Chile still shape how we view, understand and respond to political—and personal—crises. When two hijacked planes brought down the Twin Towers in 2001, my first (ungenerous) response was fury that September 11, which had been a yearly reminder of the day when Washington helped topple Chilean democracy, a marker of Chilean grief, would now be transformed into a day for remembering an attack on the United States, a marker of American grief.

My response to Chile in Their Hearts is more meditation and less review, shaped as it is both by an appreciation of the profound significance the book will hold for this small group of readers as well as by my interest as a professional historian in the new evidence Dinges reveals and the conclusions he draws. Both orientations led me to consider not just what is disclosed in the book, but what—to circle back to the movie—is missing: the absences, elisions, gaps; what it means not to know, as much as what it means to think one knows.

As an historian, I am comfortable with contingency, with ruptures, with conclusions based on available evidence rather than expecting we will ever gain access to all the evidence. But for those whose lives were upended by the history others dispassionately study, and who have stood for decades on a foundation of seemingly solid narratives that explained what happened to those who were abruptly taken, revisionist accounts can be profoundly disturbing. And an argument that we don’t know, and may never know, who gave the orders or who pulled the trigger that murdered our loved ones… that can feel like a betrayal.
 

The Missing Narrative

Based on a book by Thomas Hauser (The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice, 1978), Missing brought Charlie Horman and Frank Teruggi to the public’s attention. But it did more than draw attention to Charlie and Frank and the military coup that led to thousands of deaths, including their own. Starring Jack Lemmon, an actor widely considered to represent “the average American nice guy,” Missing conveyed the murderous reality of US foreign policy to a mainstream audience. As Ed Horman, Charlie’s conservative businessman father, Lemmon spoke to viewers who, although unsettled by Watergate and Vietnam-era lies, optimistically accepted Washington’s assurances that its activities abroad were intended to promote democracy. While the film’s action centered on Charlie’s disappearance after the coup, the heart of Missing was Ed’s transformation, a product of his dogged determination to learn the truth of what happened to his son. Lemmon carried the audience with him as he came to believe that US officials in Chile and Washington might have had a hand in his son’s death.

Cinema, Jean-Luc Godard once said, is about subtraction. By focusing on a single, in many ways unremarkable, American family, Missing offered a spare, compelling account of why Charlie (and, to a lesser extent Frank) was swept up by the military in the days after the coup. Its narrative drew from the eye-witness account of Terry Simon (played by Melanie Mayron), a friend of Charlie and “Beth” (Horman’s wife, Joyce, as portrayed by Sissy Spacek), who wanted to see the coast during her short visit with the couple in September 1973. She and Charlie set off for Viña del Mar only to be stranded there when the coup disrupted all travel.

Stuck in a hotel in Viña, Charlie and Terry found themselves in a dining-room conversation with a man at a nearby table, Arthur Creter in real life. He remarked that he worked for the US Navy and intimated that he had inside knowledge of the coup. “I work for the US Navy,” Creter offered. “Now my job is done here and I’m just waiting to get out.” (The coup began in the early hours of September 11 in the port city of Valparaiso, a few miles up the coast from Viña.)

The film, as well as Hauser’s book, indicates that it was this conversation, as well as others that took place between the two travelers and a small circle of staunchly anti-Allende US military personnel who took them into their confidence, that inadvertently put Charlie and Terry in harm’s way. The two soon returned to Santiago in a car driven by Capt. Ray Davis, the chief of the US Naval mission in Chile and liaison with the Chilean Navy; Charlie was detained by Chilean soldiers soon after. While both Charlie and Terry were privy to the Viña conversations, only Charlie would be fingered as a man who “knew too much” and needed to be silenced.

I first became aware of these events when Terry and Joyce Horman stopped by my Santiago apartment shortly after Joyce learned that her house had been ransacked. According to her neighbors, Charlie had been taken away in a military vehicle. When she reported this to the US consulate, officials there rudely rebuffed her (as I would be on a number of occasions). I typed up Terry’s account, squeezing the onion-skin pages into an empty ChapStick tube which I carried with me when I flew out to New York some weeks later.

It is undisputed that Charlie’s arrest was not the result of a random action taken by an over-zealous group of soldiers. They were searching for him. But why? Both Hauser’s book and the film implied that his detention and subsequent murder were either ordered directly by US officials in an attempt to silence someone who had learned of Washington’s role in the coup, or at the very least, that American officials declined to intervene to protect a US citizen they knew to be in military custody. And they did this because of what they, and Chilean officials, had learned about him. This narrative, as Dinges elaborates in his book, would find its way from Missing into many future reports, articles, and court proceedings.

What remains certain in all these accounts, as well as in Chile in Their Hearts, is the fact that US embassy and consular officials, on orders from Washington, would lead Ed and Joyce on an unspeakably cruel search for Charlie that dragged on for days after those officials had reliable information he was dead and that his “unidentified” body had been interred in a section of Santiago’s general cemetery.
 

The Search for Truth and Understanding

If cinema is about subtraction, investigative journalism and scholarship are about addition. In the half-century since the coup, scholars, journalists, and activists have continued to scrutinize Washington’s role in Allende’s overthrow, providing a damning indictment of the Nixon-Kissinger policies in Chile and their cynical disregard for human life.

Chile in Their Hearts adds to these accounts, with a singular focus on what happened to the two Americans in Chile and less attention to Washington’s role in Allende’s overthrow. Dinges challenges Missing’s “man-who-knew-too-much” thesis as an insufficient explanation for why Charlie, in particular, was targeted. He remains unconvinced by the assertion that Frank was detained solely because he was denounced by a neighbor who had become suspicious of activities occurring at his house. He finds no credible evidence that would allow him to conclude that American officials had a direct hand in the murder of either man, even as he excoriates US officials for withholding knowledge of their deaths while in Chilean military custody, part of Washington’s effort to shield the new regime from any international repercussions that would likely follow such a revelation.

By contrast, Dinges argues that we can only fathom what happened to the two Americans by understanding how they came to the attention of the new regime intent on rooting out anyone perceived as threatening. He puts forward a different theory of the case, one that requires us to view Frank and Charlie as active participants in Allende’s experiment and not simply innocent bystanders to the events that swirled around them. The book provides a fuller narrative of their lives, exploring why they came to Chile and what they did once there, how they were shaped by the effervescent and rapidly changing political environment of those turbulent years, and how their activities were likely to have brought them to the military’s attention and, ultimately, to their deaths. In short, Dinges insists that we need to understand what it meant for Frank and Charlie to have engraved Chile “in their hearts.”

Dinges challenges many of the arguments both of Missing as well as the judicial findings of an investigation first opened by Judge Juan Guzmán in 2000 when the Horman family filed charges of murder and kidnapping in a Chilean court. The case was later taken over by Santiago Appeals Court Judge Jorge Zepeda who, in 2011, leveled murder charges against US Navy Capt. (ret.) Ray Davis and Chilean Army Lt. Col. Pedro Espinoza—the officer in charge of interrogations at the National Stadium where both Charlie and Frank had been taken. Davis had died in 2013, but in 2015 the judge held Espinoza to be guilty of aggravated homicide. He also convicted Rafael Gonzalez as an accessory in Charlie’s murder.

Rafael Gonzalez stands at the heart of the accusation that American officials were complicit in Charlie’s death. Zepeda’s case, as Dinges puts it, “fundamentally” rested on Gonzalez’s testimony; his revisionist account, in contrast, highlights Gonzalez’s unreliability and the capriciousness of his testimony.

Rafael Gonzalez was a veteran civilian intelligence agent who often worked with Chile’s Ministry of Defense. In September 1975, having fallen out of favor with his military superiors, he sought refuge from detention in the Italian Embassy, along with his wife and 8-year-old son. To call attention to his situation, in June 1976, Gonzales offered an interview to three foreign journalists—Frank Manitzas (CBS), Rudolf Rauch (Time), and Joanne Omang (The Washington Post)—who had accompanied Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Santiago for an OAS annual meeting.

Gonzalez told the reporters that some days after the coup, he had been summoned to the offices of Gen. Augusto Lutz, General Pinochet’s first chief of military intelligence, to interpret for an American prisoner. Gonzalez revealed that while there he recognized an American at Horman’s questioning, because, he claimed, the man cross-laced his shoes in the distinctive way that Americans do. And he revealed to the reporters what Lutz had said at the time. Horman, the general had insisted, “needed to disappear because he knew too much.”

The phrase, “The Man Who ‘Knew Too Much,’” headlined a Washington Post article by Lewis Duiguid published on June 20 and would shape much of the “Missing” narrative that followed. And yet Gonzalez would later disavow his statements to the reporters, explaining that he had implicated the CIA in Horman’s death to avoid being expelled from the Italian Embassy, and that he had crafted his account of a man who “knew too much” based on a 1974 London Sunday Times story by Godfrey Hodgson and Wiliam Shawcross.

Readers of Dinges’s book will have to determine Gonzalez’s trustworthiness for themselves. At the very least, Dinges is quite convincing in criticizing US and Chilean investigators for abandoning clearly promising leads that have long since gone cold.
 

Memory and Resistance

I share, from both a personal and a professional vantage point, some of Dinges’s questions about the “man-who-knew-too-much” thesis. If the conversations that Charlie and Terry heard were the critical factor behind Charlie’s detention and death, why was Terry allowed to tell the story? If Charlie and Frank’s arrests were linked to the activities of FIN, why was David Hathaway—another member of FIN who was arrested with Frank and brought with him to the National Stadium—released unharmed?

But neither am I am fully convinced by Dinges’s alternative theory, that both men were identified and ultimately murdered because of their specific activities in Chile, as well as some of the work they carried out in the United States. Dinges, for example, reads more into some conversations that Charlie had during a brief trip to New York shortly before the coup than I think the evidence can sustain. Neither man, it is certain, was a naïve bystander, a mere observer to the crisis surrounding all of us in Chile at the time. Both chose to defend the Popular Unity government and Chilean democracy in different ways. At the same time, many of us were engaged in activities that could easily have brought us to the new regime’s malignant attention, and yet… here we are. I wish Dinges could have provided more definitive evidence, but I also understand—as an historian—that we may never have that evidence.
 

We’re Still Here

I have never been able to put aside my anger at the callousness of US officials who put their interests—both official and personal—above their obligation to treat the Horman and Teruggi families with honesty and respect. “Appalling” hardly covers it. But, as I have thought about this for many years, I find that recalling the events that took place so many decades ago no longer sadden me. Let me return to Walter Salles’s I’m Still Here to explain why.

I’m Still Here is based on a memoir written by Marcelo Rubens Paiva, who was a young boy when his father, the congressman Rubens Paiva, was abducted by the Brazilian military in January 1971 and murdered soon after. Marcelo’s mother, Eunice Paiva (a remarkable Fernanda Torres in the film), carried on a decades-long search for information about her husband’s death as she struggled to provide a sense of normalcy for her five children. In one scene, based on an actual event, a reporter arrives to interview her not long after her husband’s arrest and asks the family to gather for a photograph. To his displeasure and consternation, Eunice tells her children to smile for the camera. They do. Eunice’s message to her children and to us is that the military will never destroy them.

At a New York’s Film Forum, Salles referred to cinema and literature as “incredible instruments against oblivion.” “Memory,” he remarked, “is a muscle of imagination and of resistance.” As painful as it is for Charlie’s family and his friends, for Frank’s family and his friends, each time we are forced to confront their deaths—with the publication of Hauser’s book, the release of Missing, the lawsuits against Kissinger and other US officials, the judicial processes in Chile, and now, with Chile in Their Hearts—we are once again forced to flex that muscle.

These “instruments” help us remember the days of hope when Chileans and their international supporters sought to seize the future of that country with determination and generosity. They help us remember the lives of Frank and Charlie and all who died to keep democracy and human dignity alive. In this way, we remain indebted to all who have sought for more than a half a century to answer unanswered questions, for they help us keep this muscle of imagination and resistance alive.