Charles Horman
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Charles Horman (May 15, 1942 – September 20, 1973), an American journalist, was one of the victims of the coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile on September 11, 1973 which deposed the democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. Horman's case was made famous by Costa-Gavras's 1982 film Missing.
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Early years
Horman was born and raised in New York City. He graduated from Harvard University in 1964 and worked for a number of years in the US media. In 1972, he settled temporarily in Chile to work as a freelance writer.
Imprisonment and death
On September 17, 1973, six days after the US-backed military takeover, Horman was seized by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been turned by the military into an ad hoc concentration camp, where prisoners were interrogated, tortured and executed. One month later, Horman's body turned up in a morgue in the Chilean capital. A second US journalist, Frank Terrugi, met with the same fate.
At the time of the military uprising, Horman was in the resort town of Viña del Mar, near the port of Valparaíso, which was a key base for both the Chilean coup plotters and US military and intelligence personnel who were supporting them. While there, he spoke with several US operatives and took notes documenting the role of the United States in overthrowing the Allende government. This discovery led to his secret arrest, disappearance, and execution. Efforts by his family to determine his fate were met with resistance and duplicity by US embassy officials in Santiago, who knew he was dead and why he had been killed.
Book and film about the case
The Horman case was made famous by the Hollywood film Missing (1982), directed by Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. The film was based on a book first published under the title "The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice" (1978) by Thomas Hauser (it was later republished under the title Missing in 1982). When the film was released by Universal Studios, Nathaniel Davis, US ambassador to Chile from 1971 to 1973, filed a USD $150 million libel suit against the studio, even though he was not named directly in the movie (he was however named in the book).
State department memo
For many years thereafter, the US government steadfastly maintained its ignorance of the affair. However, in October 1999, Washington finally released a document admitting that US intelligence agents played a role in his death. The State Department memo, dated August 25, 1976, was declassified on October 8, 1999, together with 1,100 other documents released by various US agencies which dealt primarily with the years leading up to the military coup.
Written by three State Department functionaries — Rudy Fimbres, R.S. Driscoll and W.V. Robertson and addressed to Harry Schlaudeman, a high-ranking official in the department's Latin American division — the August document described the Horman case as "bothersome", given reports in the press and Congressional investigations charging that the affair involved "negligence on our part, or worse, complicity in Horman's death". The memo was written while Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State.
The State Department, the memo declared, had the responsibility to "categorically refute such innuendoes in defense of US officials". It went on, however, to acknowledge that these "innuendoes" were well founded. The three State Department officials said they had evidence that "The GOC [Government of Chile] sought Horman and felt threatened enough to order his immediate execution. The GOC might have believed this American could be killed without negative fall-out from the USG [US Government]."
The report went on to declare that circumstantial evidence indicated "US intelligence may have played an unfortunate part in Horman's death. At best it was limited to providing or confirming information that helped motivate his murder by the GOC. At worst, US intelligence was aware the GOC saw Horman in a rather serious light and US officials did nothing to discourage the logical outcome of GOC paranoia."
After the release of the State Department memo, Horman's widow, Joyce, described it as "close to a smoking pistol". The same memo had been released to the Horman family more than twenty years earlier, but the above-mentioned paragraphs had been blacked out by the State Department. The latest version still has blacked-out passages, for reasons of "national security", but reveals more.
Reference
- Missing by Thomas Hauser (1982) ISBN 0140064532
External links
- State Dept. Memos regarding Horman (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/19991008/) (both the blacked-out version given to the family and the more complete version released in 1999)
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