Charles Horman
Charles Edmund Lazar Horman (May 15, 1942 – September 19, 1973[1][2]) was an American journalist and documentary filmmaker.[3][4] He was executed in Chile in the days following the 1973 Chilean coup d'état led by General Augusto Pinochet,[4][5][6] which overthrew the socialist president Salvador Allende. Horman's death was the subject of the 1982 Costa-Gavras film Missing, in which he was portrayed by actor John Shea.[3][4]
Charles Horman
In June 2014, a Chilean court ruled that US authorities had played a "fundamental" role in Horman's murder.[7][8] In January 2015, two former Chilean intelligence officials were sentenced in Chile for the murders of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi.[9]
Biography[edit]
Horman was born in New York City, the son of Elizabeth Horman and Edmund Horman. An only child, he attended the Allen-Stevenson School, where he was a top student in English as well as an excellent cellist; he graduated in 1957. He then graduated cum laude (top 15%) from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1960 and summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1964, where he was President of Pendulum literary magazine. Working as filmmaker at King TV in Portland Oregon, Charles created the short documentary "Napalm", which won a Grand Prize at the Cracow Film Festival in 1967.
Upon returning to New York City, Charles wrote articles as an investigative journalist for magazines in the United States such as Commentary and The Nation, and newspapers, including The Christian Science Monitor. In 1967–68, he worked as a reporter for INNOVATION magazine.
Charles protested against the Vietnam War at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and was honorably discharged from the Air National Guard in 1969.
In December 1971, Charles and his wife, Joyce, left New York on a journey that eventually led them to Chile. The pair studied Spanish in Cuernavaca, Mexico at the Ivan Illich school for a month, before proceeding southward through Central America.
In Panama, they sold their camper and flew to Medellin, Colombia. They arrived in Santiago in the late spring of 1972 and settled temporarily in Santiago, where Charles worked as a freelance writer.[4]
On 16 September 1973, six days after the military coup, Horman was detained by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been converted into an ad hoc prison camp. Prisoners were interrogated and tortured, and many were executed. For close to a month after Horman's death, the whereabouts of his body were purportedly unknown to American officials. However, it was later determined that he had been executed on September 19 and his remains buried inside a wall in the national stadium, after which the body was transferred to a morgue in the Chilean capital. A second American journalist, Frank Teruggi, met a similar fate.
At the time of the military coup, Horman had been in the resort town of Viña del Mar near the port of Valparaíso, a key base for American and Chilean coup plotters. US officials speculated at the time that Horman had been a victim of "Chilean paranoia," but did nothing to intervene. It is unlikely that Horman would have been killed without the knowledge or permission of the CIA, according to papers released in 1999 under the Freedom of Information Act.[10] Efforts to determine his fate were initially met with resistance and duplicity by US embassy officials in Santiago.[4]
Joyce and Edmund Horman donated their extensive files related to their pursuit of justice to the Benson Latin American Collection at The University of Texas - Austin. The collection includes biographical files, correspondence, Freedom of Information Act request documents, press clippings, and case files from Joyce Horman's lawsuit against Henry Kissinger.
Book, film, and television depictions of the case[edit]
The Horman case was made into the Hollywood film Missing (1982), directed by Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras. It starred Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek as Horman's father and wife, who attempt to discover what had happened to Charles. Horman himself was portrayed by John Shea. In the film, Horman is depicted as having spoken with several U.S. operatives who assisted the Chilean military government. The film alleges that Horman's discovery of US complicity in the coup led to his secret arrest, disappearance and execution.
American complicity in the Chilean coup was later confirmed in documents declassified during the Clinton administration.[11]
The film was based on a book first published in 1978 under the title The Execution Of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice, and written by Thomas Hauser; this book was later republished under the title Missing in 1982.
When the film was released by Universal Studios, Nathaniel Davis, the United States Ambassador to Chile from 1971 to 1973, filed a US$150 million libel suit against the director and the studio, despite not having been named directly in the movie (he had been named in the book). A court eventually dismissed Davis's suit.[4] The film was removed from the market during the lawsuit but re-released upon its dismissal.
In season 10 of Law & Order, the season finale "Vaya Con Dios" was based on this murder.[4]
U.S. State Department memo[edit]
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 CIA agents may have played an unintentional role in his death.[12][13] The State Department memo, dated 25 August 1976, was declassified on 8 October 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. Driscolle 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 alleging that the affair had involved "negligence on our part, or worse, complicity in Horman's death." 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.[4]
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 had 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."[4]
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 contains blacked-out passages for reasons of "national security," but it reveals more.[4]
Several other documents released in 1999 revealed that a Chilean intelligence officer, claimed an agent of the CIA, was present when a Chilean general made the decision to execute Horman because he "knew too much."[14]
Chilean investigation[edit]
In 2001, Chilean judge Juan Guzmán Tapia opened an investigation into Charles Horman's death. Among five Americans who gave evidence was Joyce Horman, who had filed a criminal suit against Augusto Pinochet the previous December.[15] The investigation included a four-hour re-enactment of the scene in the National Stadium where Horman was killed, one of 10,000 who suffered there.[16]
The judge also considered extradition proceedings against former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger after receiving no cooperation from him nor from Nathaniel Davis in the wake of requests from the Supreme Court of Chile. "At the time of his death, Horman was investigating the murder of René Schneider, the Commander-in-Chief in the Chilean army whose support for Allende and the constitution was seen as an obstacle to the coup."[17][18]
On 29 November 2011, a Chilean court indicted Pedro Espinoza, Rafael González Verdugo and Ray E. Davis. Espinoza was a general in the Chilean army and Verdugo, a Chilean intelligence officer. Davis was a retired U.S. military officer who headed the U.S. military group in Chile in September 1973.[19][20][21] Davis was charged with complicity in Horman's murder; he had driven Horman from Vina del Mar, in the coastal area where the coup was launched, to Santiago during the coup.[22] On 17 October 2012, Chile's Supreme Court approved a request to seek Davis's extradition from the United States.[23] As of 11 September 2013, the U.S. had not yet been served with the request.[22] It was later revealed that Davis had been living secretly in Chile and had died in a Santiago nursing home in 2013.[24]
In 2015, the court sentenced Espinoza and Verdugo to prison for 7 years and 2 years, respectively. However, Chile's Supreme Court reviewed the case in 2016 and increased the sentences to 15 years and 3 years, respectively. In addition, the two were ordered to pay $196,000 to Horman's widow and $151,000 to Teruggi's sister.[21]
