In September 1973, Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup that he did not survive. General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship followed. Who overthrew Allende, why, and what explains his death, remain hotly contested issues in legislative and judicial proceedings in Chile, the United States, and Spain. Some blame the Nixon administration, the CIA, and/or the Pentagon, while others cite Chilean actions, especially Allende’s bad politics. Some allege that American-controlled Chilean military officers assassinated Allende, while others believe he took his own life. This coup represents Exhibit A to those who take a prosecutorial attitude toward the United States government when writing the history of American foreign relations. According to National Security Archives researcher Peter Kornbluh, “Chile remains the ultimate case study of morality — the lack of it — in the making of U.S. foreign policy.”
The Church Committee investigated the coup in 1975, finding “no hard evidence” that the CIA had done it, and professional historianshave convincingly rejected narratives that reduce this event to the agency’s covert operations, too. Meanwhile, Chileans subjected Allende’s remains to three autopsies. La Nación, Chile’s official newspaper, published the latest results, including a ballistics report, in July 2011. This report reconfirms, beyond any doubt, that the president committed suicide. He sat down, placed his AK-47 on the floor, pointing it up under his chin, and fired two rounds. The Chilean Supreme Court finally closed the case last January.
This closure notwithstanding, angry allegations against the United States persist. One interpretation, a conspiracy theory, alleges that the shadowy “Milgroup,” the American military mission in Chile, not only engineered the coup under cover of the annual UNITAS naval maneuvers, but that it assassinated Allende — and then executed two Americans, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi.
These allegations became deeply embedded in popular imagination in Chile, the United States, and several other countries through an oft-cited book, Missing: The Execution of Charles Horman, and the Oscar-winning Hollywood film by the same name, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. The man behind this is New York attorney Thomas Hauser.
According to Hauser, Captain Ray Davis (USN) commanded not only Milgroup, but the Chilean armed forces as well. Thus he was among the most powerful men in Chile, second only to the American ambassador. Davis’s subordinate, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Ryan directed the Chilean Navy from his offices in Valparaíso, which was where both men were when the coup began on 11 September.
Hauser recounts how the Chilean Army stormed La Moneda, the presidential palace, that day, the first officer inside firing six rounds into Allende’s abdomen before another soldier approached the president’s body and fired a machine gun into his head.
Meanwhile, American citizen Charles Horman and his friend Terry Simon were visiting Viña del Mar. Confined to their hotel, they found Arthur Creter, a U.S. Navy covert operator, who bragged, “We came down to do a job and it’s done.” He also met Davis and Ryan, who proudly recounted all they had done while driving them back to Santiago — all this simply because they recognized Horman as a fellow American. But Davis soon changed his mind and ordered Horman’s execution, which the Chilean military intelligence services duly did.
Hauser claims he learned this from Simon. She escaped Horman’s fate because Davis was sexually interested in her, and she was somehow able to return to the safety of the United States to tell her tale.
He also cited interviews with Rafael González, a civilian Chilean intelligence operator seeking asylum. González claimed only to have translated during Horman’s interrogation, reporting that “Horman was killed because he knew too much. And this was done between the CIA and the local authorities.”
Someone in this chain of reporting fabricated much of this narrative, as the most recent autopsy made undeniably clear.
Hauser and others rejected the first autopsy because the Chilean military and police supervised the proceedings. It became more difficult to continue dismissing it after Chileans transitioned to civilian rule. A new government exhumed Allende’s body, reinterring him in Santiago’s Cementerio General in 1990. Several officials, including a medical doctor, examined the president’s remains and reported a head injury consistent with the first autopsy’s findings. They saw no other wounds. Análisis, a leftist Chilean magazine, urged Chileans to reconcile themselves to this and move on, to no avail.
Numerous historians, still under Hauser’s spell, breathed new life into his narrative after British authorities detained Pinochet in fall 1998, the Clinton administration declassified over twenty thousand documents, and Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) instructed the CIA to disclose “All activities of officers, covert agents, and employees of all elements of the Intelligence Community with respect to the assassination of President Salvador Allende.”
Chilean courts leapt into action, reopening the investigation into Allende’s “assassination” and more. Last month, a Chilean judge indicted Davis, posthumously, for having a fundamental role in creating Horman’s death. The judge accepted Hauser’s argument that Chilean military intelligence officers could never have executed Horman without Davis’s instructions. Some are interpreting this as, finally, official vindication of Hauser’s narrative. Thus it will likely continue. Unfortunately, without more imaginative researchers, and without Chilean records or honest testimony from González and his superiors, we may never reconstruct why Chileans targeted Horman, what happened during the interrogation, and why they killed him.
Hauser’s fantastic narrative shares the same distortions that mar much of the writing on U.S.-Latin American relations. It exaggerates American influence in Chile, and badly mischaracterizes the two countries’ military relationship. It assumes that the United States functions as the prime mover in all things anticommunist, with actors such as Allende and the Chilean officer corps representing either tragic, powerless victims or mindless puppets. It fails to even consider alternative scenarios, such as Chilean intelligence officers’ possibly targeting Horman on their own, and for their own purposes. Indeed, it refuses to appreciate the dictatorship’s xenophobia in its early years, when it detained not only American, but British and Spanish citizens, among many others, and brazenly assassinated former Allende officials in Argentina, Italy, and the United States. That is, this narrative remains blind to the fact that Chileans, above all the dictatorship, had their own agendas and were acting.
James Lockhart is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Arizona. He specializes in U.S.-Latin American relations. He will defend his dissertation, “Reimagining Chile’s Cold War Experience: America, Britain, and Chile, 1945-1970,” this fall.
Photo credit: Jorge Barahona Ch.
Hernán Fuentes 
Mark Munson 
James Lockhart 
Enrique Alvayay 
I do not believe your narrative at all. First of all, you ignore completly the fact that Allende’s personal doctor , Dr. Patricio Guijón , was the only eye witness to the actual suicide of Allende. Dr. Guijón told his story to the chilean military after the fact and he was himself a man of leftist political leanings. Dr. Guijón never changed his story of what he saw that fateful day of September the 11th, 1973. He was pressured in several occasions by members of the chilean left to change his story about Allende’s suicide but he never flinched or wavered from what he had originally said it happened that day. It was Fidel Castro who pressured Allende’s widow, Tencha Bussi de Allende , into changing the real truth about Allende’s suicide , obviously , for political reasons (portray the chilean military as murderous and barbarians agents of “imperialism”). As you mentioned, the final autopsy of Allende’s body confirmed, without a shadow of a doubt, that Allende had commited suicide. Why do you keep bringing up the false narrative about the so called “murder” of Allende , when it has been proven beyond any doubt that he commited suicide, like the coward that he really was, trying to evade facing History and the chilean people about bringing the country close to total collapse and civil war during his mandate?
There is room for a middle ground regarding US involvement in the 73 coup….even if the US didn’t actively organize or support Pinochet’s rebellion, it certainly did little to discourage it or the widespread human rights abuses in the aftermath.
As to the Horman/Teruggi murders, no mention here of the investigation that the State Dept investigated in the 70s and concluded that “at best,” CIA and/or other US intel failed to stop Pinochet’s forces from killing two Americans (http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB366/docs/Charles%20Horman%20Case.pdf ). Also, no mention of the weirdness that while the Chilean government was attempting to extradite Ray Davis, he was actually living in Santiago (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/27/world/americas/chile-hunt-for-justice-winds-up-as-enigma.html?_r=1& )
Mark, this is a classic distinction without difference. If you want to argue that although the Pentagon or any other US dept. or agency may not have actively organized the Chilean Navy’s rebellion or what became Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, Americans nevertheless failed to discourage or stop this or the human-rights violations that followed, you are still advancing an historical narrative unsoundly premised on US control of Chilean affairs.
By the way, the US govt has no obligation to discourage or stop coups, and it is unreasonable to expect a Cold War-era American administration to discourage or stop an anticommunist coup (whether you agree with these politics or not).
With respect to the Dept. of State’s report and opinions on the two executions, I agree with the Church Committee’s view that “American officials had exaggerated notions about their ability to control the actions of coup leaders” throughout the developing world, throughout the Cold War. “Events demonstrated that the United States had no such power. This point is graphically demonstrated by cables exchanged shortly before the coup in Vietnam. Ambassador Lodge cabled Washington on October 30, 1963, that he was unable to halt a coup; a cable from William Bundy in response stated that ‘we cannot accept conclusion that we have no power to delay or discourage a coup.’ The coup took place three days later.
“Shortly after the experience of the Bay of Pigs, CIA Headquarters requested operatives in the Dominican Republic to tell the dissidents to ‘turn off’ the assassination attempt [against Rafael Trujillo], because the United States was not prepared to ‘cope with the aftermath.’ The dissidents replied that the assassination was their affair and that it could not be turned off to suit the convenience of the United States Government.” And they killed Trujillo a week or so later.
Professional historians such as Britain’s DW Brogan and America’s Sally Marks have criticized “the illusion of American omnipotence” and “the world according to Washington,” respectively, which supports the Church Committee’s views. This means we need to stop taking such reports as the one you cite here at face-value. American officials say and write a lot of things when describing the United States and world affairs, and this did not stop after the Soviets collapsed. They believe they can wave a wand and create democracy in Iraq and the entire Near East; or they draw imaginary red lines in Syria, truly believing they actually carry weight in the real world, to cite but two recent examples. Too many Americans and others throughout the world remain under this illusion or live in the world according to Washington. This may support one or another group’s politics; but it’s historically inaccurate, which becomes plainly visible to anyone taking the time to critically interrogate American officials’ grandiose assumptions and statements from at least as early as President Woodrow Wilson forward.
In any case, I’m afraid I don’t share your views that this Dept. of State report settles anything. And as it is, it remains a very weak conclusion: maybe some embassy officials might have speculated that it could have been possible that these two Americans may not actually be missing, but might have been executed by the junta, etc. It resonates only with those who are desperate to grasp any straw that might support their prosecuting American officials for what are likely Chilean decisions and actions.
I say “likely” because we just don’t know enough to reach firm conclusions, let alone get a conviction in a court of law. We have many allegations, but only some redacted documents from the US side, and none from the Chilean side.
If I can add one more thing, I believe the other comments here come from two Chilean nationals. I note that our views closely coincide, and I thank them, and you as well, for all of your responses here. jdl
The only thing that makes sense to me in this article is that someones “exaggerates American influence in Chile, and badly mischaracterizes the two countries’ military relationship.” In May 1973 I was a 14 year old naval cadet and wearing uniformed at the streets of Valparaiso, chilean civilians -not the CIA nor a USN Captain – threw me corn. The message was clear: the militaries are cowardly chicken if not expel the Allende´s government in order to stop the chaos this nation was.