Charles Horman

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Charles Edmund Lazar Horman (born May 15, 1942 in New York , † September 18, 1973 in Santiago de Chile ) was an American journalist and documentary filmmaker who was kidnapped and murdered by the military shortly after the 1973 coup in Chile . The coup led by General Augusto Pinochet against the elected government of Socialist President Salvador Allende began on September 11, 1973 with the bombing of the Chilean presidential palace. The film Missing, shot by Costa-Gavras in 1982, is about the desperate search that Joyce, Horman's wife and his father Edmund ("Ed") Horman went on after the disappearance of Charles Horman in Chile.

life and death

Horman was born and raised in New York. He attended the Allen-Stevenson School there , which he graduated in 1957. Until 1960 he studied at the Phillips Exeter Academy , until 1964 at Harvard University . For several years he worked as a publicist for various media in the USA. In 1972 he traveled to Chile to work temporarily as a freelance writer.

Before his death, Horman investigated the 1970 murder of the then Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, René Schneider , whose support for the newly elected President Salvador Allende and the constitution were seen as a hindrance to a military coup . On September 17, 1973, six days after the military came to power, Horman was arrested by Chilean soldiers and taken to the Santiago National Stadium , which the military used as a temporary detention center. Prisoners were interrogated, tortured and executed there. Until a month after his death, the location of Horman's body was kept secret, at least with the consent of the Americans. It later became known that after his execution, Horman's body was initially "made to disappear" into a wall of the national stadium. Horman's supposed remains were then found in a morgue in the Chilean capital. However, a DNA test later found that the body given to his wife was not Horman's body. - A second American journalist, Frank Teruggi , suffered a similar fate.

At the time of the military coup, Horman was in Viña del Mar, a tourist resort near the port of Valparaíso. This became one of the reasons for the distrust of the American and Chilean coup conspirators towards Horman. US officials suspected at the time that Horman had become a victim of "Chilean paranoia", but did not intervene. Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act in 1999 make it unlikely that Horman was killed without a "green light" from the CIA. Efforts to clarify Horman's fate met diplomats from the US embassy in Santiago with resistance and ambiguous, hesitant information from the start.

Book, film and television depictions of the case

The case Horman was the subject of the film Missing ( Missing ) of Greek filmmaker Costa-Gavras. Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek played the roles of the father and the wife, Charles Horman himself was played by John Shea . Father and wife try to solve Horman's fate together. The film shows in a flashback how Horman speaks to some of the US officials who helped out in the Chilean military coup. The film assumes that Horman discovered the US involvement in the coup and that this led to his arrest, disappearance and ultimately his assassination. US involvement in the Chilean coup was later confirmed by documents released during the Clinton presidency. The film is based on a book by Thomas Hauser that was first published in 1978 under the title The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice . In 1982 it was brought out again under the title Missing .

After the film was completed by Universal Studios, Nathaniel Davis , US Ambassador to Chile from 1971 to 1973, filed a $ 150 million defamation lawsuit against the director and the production company, even though - unlike the book - he was in is not named in the film. The court ultimately dismissed his lawsuit. During the legal dispute, the US was prohibited from showing the film, but this was lifted after the lawsuit was rejected.

In the television series Law & Order , the case was treated in the tenth season. The 24th and final episode of this season, Vaya Con Dios (Eng. An Old Story), is based on the Horman case.

State Department statement

Years later, the US government continued to insist that it had no knowledge of the incidents. Finally, in October 1999, a document was released admitting that CIA agents played a role in Horman's death. The relevant State Department memorandum dated August 25, 1976 was released on October 8, 1999, along with 1,100 other documents from various US agencies that dealt primarily with the events in the years preceding the military coup.

The August 1976 document was written by three State Department officials, Rudy Fimbres, RS Driscolle and WV Robertson, and addressed to Harry Schlaudeman, a senior official in the department's Latin America division. It described the Horman case as "awkward" because it led to press reports and Congressional investigations linking the incidents to an implication, "negligence on our part, or worse, complicity in connection with Horman's death." were. The State Department, according to the document, must ensure "that US officials are protected by categorically countering such allusions." Nonetheless, the document admitted that these "allusions" were well founded.

The three foreign ministry officials said they had evidence that "the GOC [Government of Chile] searched for Horman and felt so threatened by him that they ordered an immediate execution." The GOC perhaps believed that this American could be killed without negative consequences on the part of the USG [US Government]. "

The report went on to say that insubstantial evidence suggested “that US intelligence may have played an unfortunate role in Horman's death. The best thing to do would be to obtain or corroborate information that emphasizes the GOC [Government of Chile] interest in his assassination. In the worst case, the US secret service knew that the GOC [the Chilean government] was taking the Horman matter very seriously, and US officials did nothing to prevent the actions logically derived from the GOC paranoia. "

After the document was published, Horman's widow, Joyce, spoke of being "close to a smoking gun." The same document had been presented to the Horman family more than 20 years earlier, but the above-mentioned passages had been redacted by the State Department. The current version of the document also has blackened text passages for reasons of “national security”, but is more meaningful.

Research in Chile

In 2001, Chilean judge Juan Guzmán Tapia opened an investigation into Charles Horman's death. Among the five American citizens who testified on the case was Joyce Horman, widow of the murdered man. In December 2000, she filed a criminal complaint against Augusto Pinochet. The investigation also included a four-hour reenactment of the events at the National Stadium, where Horman was killed as one of 10,000 people who suffered there.

The judge also considered filing for extradition of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger after neither he nor former Ambassador Nathaniel Davis volunteered to cooperate and answer questions from the Supreme Court of Chile.

The judicial processing of the case would take over a decade. In 2003 the judicial investigation was taken over by a new judge, Jorge Zepeda Arancibia. This ordered the arrest of Rafael González Verdugo, a member of the military intelligence service, who was released on bail a short time later. Finally, in 2011, charges were brought against Verdugo and two other people involved, the Chilean General Pedro Espinoza and the American naval officer Ray E. Davis. The trial ended in 2015 with a seven-year prison sentence for Espinosa and a two-year prison sentence for Verdugo. The Chilean Supreme Court approved an extradition request for Davis, but this turned out to be irrelevant because Davis did not live in Florida as suspected, but under a false name in Chile, where he had died in 2013. In 2016, the case even ended up in the Supreme Court of Chile, which confirmed the convictions and also significantly increased the sentence. Espinosa's sentence would be increased to 15 years and Verdugo's to three years. They were also sentenced to pay $ 196,000 in compensation to Joyce Horman and $ 151,000 to Frank Teruggi's sister.

background

The murder of Hormans happened in the context of a larger political event, the investigation and criminal treatment of which continues to this day. In South America in the 1970s and 1980s, almost all states were ruled for a long time by politically right-wing military dictatorships supported by the USA . Almost all of them used force to suppress the mostly left-wing opposition in so-called dirty wars . A common means of doing this was the secret abduction ( disappearance ) of unpopular people by members of the security forces who remained anonymous. Most of the victims were cruelly tortured and humiliated while imprisoned in secret prisons , and in many cases they were murdered afterwards (see Desaparecidos ). For arrest and murder it could sometimes be sufficient if the name appeared in a “suspicious” context or if the victim happened to know a (already arrested) suspect who had mentioned the name under the distress of torture. During the military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983 alone, up to 30,000 people disappeared in this way without a trace. After the transition of states to democracy, mostly in the 1980s and 1990s, the prosecution of such crimes was prevented for years in many countries by general amnesty laws for the perpetrators. In recent years, however, these have been retroactively repealed in several countries , so that numerous former dictators and torturers have now been punished or are still on trial. The role of the USA during this period, in particular of the then security advisor to the President and Foreign Minister Henry Kissinger, is also critically examined in this context.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Derechos Human Rights [1]
  2. ↑ democracynow.org [2]
  3. ↑ National Security Archive [3]
  4. ↑ US Victims of Chile's Coup: The Uncensored File. In: The New York Times. February 13, 2000.
  5. ^ Ad Hoc Interagency Working Group on Chile (December 4, 1970) - United States Department of State [4]
  6. ↑ George Washington University. October 8, 1999. Checked July 31, 2011 [5]
  7. ^ World Socialist Web Site [6]
  8. ^ Kissinger may face extradition to Chile. In: The Guardian. June 12, 2002.
  9. ↑ Reporters Without Borders Archive Link ( Memento from October 15, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ^ Eva Vergara (AP): Chile court: US had role in 'Missing' killings . SIFY.com, July 1, 2014
  11. ↑ Eva Vergara: Chile toughens sentences in 'Missing' killings of Americans . AP News, Jan. July 2016
  12. ^ Salvatore Bizzarro: Historical Dictionary of Chile . Rowman & Littlefield, 2017, ISBN 9781442276352 , pp. 421-422
  13. ↑ Larry Rohter: New Evidence Surfaces in '73 Killing of American in Chile . New York Times, March 12, 2004
personal data
SURNAME Horman, Charles
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Horman, Charles Edmund Lazar (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American journalist and documentary filmmaker
DATE OF BIRTH May 15, 1942
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH 18th September 1973
Place of death Santiago de Chile