How the US covered up the murder of its own citizens in the Chilean coup

JUNE 15, 2025

Mike Phipps reviews Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing after the Coup, by John Dinges, published by University of California Press.

During the Popular Unity years, from 1970 to September 1973, (when Salvador Allende’s democratically elected Socialist government was brutally overthrown by a military coup), some 20,000 foreigners went to Chile to solidarise with the political process. This book is about two young Americans, Charlie Horman and Frank Teruggi, who arrived in 1972 and a year later were secretly executed by the Chilean military.

The US administration’s hostility to Allende was such that President Nixon ordered the CIA to prevent him from even being inaugurated. When that failed, the US government began a covert campaign of destabilisation, culminating in the military coup of September 1973.

Horman and Teruggi were just two of the thousands of victims of the repression, but their killing had a significant impact in the US and inspired the Oscar-winning 1983 film Missing, starring Hollywood A-listers Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. This new account by John Dinges aims to sift the facts from the fictionalised account, focusing on the issue of supposed collusion of US officials in the killing of the two men.

The author himself was in Chile at the time of the coup and shared the enthusiasm for the Socialist experiment of other internationalists. He knew Teruggi in particular. His investigation finds no evidence of advance US advance approval of the two executions, but demonstrates definitively that the US Embassy and State Department shielded the regime, “by hiding the truth, conducting a sham investigation, and sanctioning Chile’s official coverup of the murders.”

Charlie Horman was a middle class Harvard graduate, 30 years old when he went to Chile. He was a far more political figure than that portrayed in Missing, having been involved in the student movement to register Black voters in the Deep South in the 1960s and beaten by Louisiana police for his pains. He narrowly escaped another beating when as a journalist he covered the anti-war protests outside the Democratic Party National Convention in Chicago in 1968. In Chile, he and his wife Joyce threw themselves into film-making projects.

Frank Teruggi was just 22 when he arrived in Chile. From a more working class background, he had been an activist in the anti-war movement. In Chile, he joined the voluntary work brigades in the countryside to support the Socialist government’s agrarian reform programme, the centrepiece of which was the expropriation of the large latifundios. He was increasingly in contact with activists in the MIR, Chile’s largest revolutionary group.

The last year of the Popular Unity government was one of crisis. A transport strike by truck owners and small businessmen virtually shut down the economy for three weeks in October 1972. To defuse the growing crisis, Allende had given Cabinet posts to top military officers. Yet in March 1973, Allende’s party actually won seats in both houses of the legislature, demonstrating that it was likely that Allende and Popular Unity would be re-elected.

The possibility of a military takeover was real. In June 1973, a short-lived coup attempt left 22 people dead. Allende took to the airwaves to call on people to defend the government, “to act with prudence with whatever material they have at hand.” Horman did not hesitate to approach his New York contacts for financial help in providing workers’ self-defence.

Pinochet’s coup came on September 11th. Within a week, 4,000 people had been arrested within Santiago alone. Horman was one of them, seized on September 17th, his house ransacked. A day later, his body – although it would not be identified for a month – turned up in the morgue, with multiple gunshot wounds to the head.

On September 20th, five policemen came to Teruggi’s house and politely asked to search it. They then arrested him. His body, unidentified, arrived in the morgue two days later, with signs of beating, torture and gunshot wounds to the head and chest. Later testimony from people who had been interrogated alongside him confirmed that he had been tortured with electroshock and brutally beaten.

The situation of the two Americans was not unique. At least 840 foreigners had been swept into Chilean prisons in the coup and 49 killed. Many Embassies opened their doors not just to foreigners but also Chileans under threat. Not the US Embassy, however: Joyce Horman was one of many Americans refused protection when she went to the US Consulate. Nor is there any record of the US Embassy making any representations to the coup authorities between the time Frank Teruggi was seized and his execution nearly three days later.

As Dinges notes, “The Embassy’s duty to help its citizens was on collision course with its orders to cooperate with the government that was detaining and – in Horman’s and Teruggi’s cases killing – US citizens.”

Worse, as subsequent investigations took place, the US Embassy ignored and withheld from the families information gathered by its own personnel, as Dinges details here. It took over a month of pressure to uncover the truth about Horman’s murder and the Chilean military’s deliberate ‘disappearance’ of him. This new tactic was widely applied by the coup regime which ‘disappeared’ some 1,400 of its executed victims, which enabled it to deny responsibility for the mass killing it perpetrated.

Dinges spends a lot of time debunking the idea that Horman was perhaps executed, with the foreknowledge of US officials, because he “knew too much”, that is, had uncovered US involvement in the planned coup days before it happened. This narrative was advanced in the film Missing.

The truth is probably more banal. The political activities of the two Americans, their sympathy for the MIR, their possession of leftist literature – all this was more than enough to seal their fate during the ferocious repression in the first days of the coup. Those who ordered their execution probably reasoned that US officials, who had approved the military takeover would not be too bothered about what happened to the two individuals. On that, they were right. Many Chileans, it should be said, were executed for less.

The failure of the US to show much concern about the fate of its citizens may have had wider destructive consequences. It signalled to the Chilean dictatorship that it wished it to succeed, whatever the costs. Such an attitude may have encouraged the military regime to send assassins to Washington DC in 1976 to use a car bomb to kill a prominent exile leader, Orlando Letelier, alongside an American woman, Ronni Moffitt, who was riding with him.

As Pinochet’s power eventually waned, efforts were made to secure justice through the Chilean courts. The Horman family filed charges of murder and kidnapping in 2000. Sixteen years later, one of Chile’s notorious human rights criminals was convicted and sentenced and the two American families received financial compensation. The author went through seventeen volumes of judicial evidence as part of the research to reach his own conclusions about the case.

“It would be preferable,” says the author, “if the US government would allow alleged crimes and abuses involving US officials to be fully investigated by officially sanctioned bodies.” If that sounds far-fetched, it should be remembered that Chile itself has made significant efforts to uncover the human rights abuses of this period. But the US has shown little interest in examining its own role in the coup.

 In the absence of an official investigation into the fate of the two US citizens, journalistic efforts of this kind are virtually the only way to establish the facts. Horman and Teruggi were two of the thousands of victims murdered by the Chilean dictatorship, urged on by the US government. Most did not get a film made or a book written about them.  But in Chile they say “Ni perdon ni olvido”: “We will not forget and we will not pardon.”

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.