Horman, Charles

   One of two United States citizens killed in Chile by the regime of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. Charles Horman, 31, and his friend Frank Teruggi, 24, the second victim, were leftist supporters of the overthrown Marxist president Salvador Allende Gossens. Both worked as journalists, contributing to a newsletter that criticized U.S. policy. On 17 September 1973, security forces abducted Horman from his apartment; he was last seen alive at the Estadio Nacional (National Stadium), which had been converted into a detention center. On 20 September, security forces abducted Teruggi and his roommate, David Hathaway, who were also taken to the Estadio Nacional. Hathaway was released; the bodies of Teruggi and Horman turned up in a morgue. Unlike Teruggi’s body, which was quickly returned to the United States, Horman’s was not released until March 1974. It is plausible that U.S. officials and the Chilean military delayed releasing Horman until the body was too decomposed for an autopsy to reveal evidence of torture. The story of the two men’s deaths is told in the book Missing (1982), by Thomas Hauser (originally published in 1978 as The Execution of Charles Horman), and dramatized in the film Missing (1982), directed by Costa-Gavras.

   Owing to State Department internal reviews conducted in 1976 and the recent declassification of U.S. documents on Chile, there is wide conjecture about a possible Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) involvement in the killing of Horman and Teruggi. The CIA might have either supplied information on the two men to the Chilean government, information that led to their being labeled subversive, or, aware of the danger they were in, failed to prevent their deaths. In his book, Hauser suggests that Horman may have been perceived as especially dangerous to Chilean and U.S. interests. On the day of the coup, Horman was at the coastal resort of Viña del Mar, where he met some U.S. military officers and may have come across evidence that the United States was involved in the overthrow of Allende Gossens. It is now known that Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, knew of Horman’s arrest.

   In December 2000 Joyce Horman, Charles’s widow, filed a criminal suit against Pinochet Ugarte, who had recently been stripped of his immunity from prosecution. Although Pinochet Ugarte was declared unfit to stand trial, the investigation continued, and on 10 December 2003 Judge Jorge Zepeda Arancibia indicted Colonel Rafael González Verdugo, a former military-intelligence officer, as an accomplice to the murder of Charles Horman. The case is still being litigated.