Charles and Joyce Horman met in July, 1964. “I was traveling through France with a friend,” Joyce recalls. “It was Bastille Day, and the hotels were jammed. Finally, someone suggested we go to a small town on the outskirts of Nice. When we got there, we couldn’t find a hotel. I remember walking down a narrow street with confetti falling on my face, feeling very lost, when a young man in a blue-and-white-striped shirt stepped from a doorway and asked if I needed help. It was Charles. He was traveling in Europe with his parents and, after that, our paths seemed intertwined. We saw each other on the beach in Nice, at A Hard Day’s Night in London, and in the Paris markets. Then Charles went back to New York, and I went on to Stockholm for a semester abroad.”
Her fingers lock together and then release in a nervous gesture that repeats whenever she talks about Charles and Chile.
“That December, my father ordered me back to the University of Minnesota. He didn’t think I could be studying seriously five thousand miles from home. I flew into New York, and there was a twelve-hour layover between planes, so I telephoned Charles. He invited me to his parents’ home, and I helped trim the Christmas tree. We didn’t see each other again for two years. Then, after I had graduated from college, Charles tracked me down in Connecticut where I was working as a computer programmer.”
Charles and Joyce saw each other regularly from that point on… weekends at Cape Cod… spring walks… drives through New England’s autumn leaves. In June, 1968, they were married.
It was a union of different worlds. Charles Horman—educated at Exeter and Harvard; son of an industrial designer; grandson of a prominent attorney; great-grandson of a New York composer and orchestra conductor. Joyce Hamren—blonde with Scandinavian features; granddaughter of a Swedish immigrant who settled in Minnesota and found work as a lumberjack. Her father had run a small grocery store in Kiester, Minnesota, and was fighting with American troops in the jungles of New Guinea when Joyce was born. Not until the war ended eighteen months later did Duffy Hamren see his daughter for the first time.
Where Charles was shy, Joyce was outgoing. Where one was tentative, the other was bold. “You know,” Charles confided to his mother days before the wedding, “Joyce doesn’t read much, and she doesn’t like theater or classical music.”
“What does she like?” Elizabeth asked.
“Me.”
That was enough. “If there was any problem in our marriage,” Joyce recalls, “it was that we didn’t have enough time alone with each other. We were exhausted each day after work. Add onto that time spent with friends and Charles’s writing, and we didn’t see each other enough before conking out at night. After a year, we decided to travel through South America so we’d have more time to spend with each other.”
In preparation for the trip, they studied Spanish for several months and pooled their savings to buy a used camper. In late 1971, they left New York for Latin America, crossing into Mexico on December 3, Joyce’s twenty-seventh birthday. Stopping where and when they wanted, they made their way south through Mexico and Guatemala. In El Salvador, the camper needed a new set of tubeless tires, but only tubed tires were available. Buying what was on the market, they sought to correct the deficiency with makeshift lining. Nine blowouts followed. The roads grew progressively worse in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and, when Charles and Joyce reached Panama, they decided to sell the camper. For the better part of a month, they sat by the Panama Canal with a large “For Sale” sign on the camper’s front windshield, finally selling it for twenty-five hundred dollars.
Then the journey began anew… Colombia… Ecuador…. They traveled with peasants who sang their native songs in Spanish while Charles and Joyce sang American rock. On one level it was exciting, but on another they were in the midst of despair. For the first time in their lives, they were moving daily among people who were degradingly poor. They were learning what second- and third-class nationhood were all about.
In southern Ecuador the suffering verged on the unbearable. “We were traveling on a bus,” Joyce remembers. “It was a long trip through the mountains, over very bumpy roads. In the back of the bus, an Indian family sat huddled together—a mother, father, and three children. They had a big tin can with jagged edges which they passed among them, and each person spat blood and phlegm into it. The whole family was dying of tuberculosis.”
Day turned to night. The bus reeked of death. One of the children had dysentery, and the can served his purposes, too. The bus kept bouncing and Charles and Joyce gave up any thought of sleep. It was hard enough just to breathe in the stench. All night long, they heard coughing and people spitting up blood. “Finally,” Joyce remembers, “Charles looked at me and asked, ‘What kind of world is this?’ Several weeks later, we crossed into Chile, where health care was free and every child received a half liter of milk a day. We reached Santiago, and Charles said, ‘This is where I can write. This is where I want to be.’”
The Chile that Charles and Joyce Horman saw in July, 1972, was a land in the midst of change.
Taking office in November, 1970, Allende had told the Chilean people, “Chile now has in its government a new political force whose social function is to uphold not the traditional ruling class but the vast majority of the people.”
Supported by a fifteen-man coalition Cabinet which included three Communists and four members of his own Socialist Party, the new President sought to make his Chilean Revolution a reality. The minimum wage was increased by 35 percent. A “people’s health train” with free medical supplies and trained personnel was sent through rural provinces. In December, 1970, the government launched a program to provide every child and pregnant or nursing woman with free milk daily.
Land reform followed. Due to the inefficiency of its agricultural system, Chile in the 1960s had been forced to import 25 percent of its meat, one-third of its milk and 20 percent of all wheat consumed by its people. The Frei administration had presided over the enactment of remedial legislation which provided for the expropriation with compensation of excessively large, ill-managed estates. Thereafter, it had expropriated 8.5 million acres of land. During his first six months in office, Allende added 3.5 million acres to the total.
The new administration’s efforts met with stunning success. By early 1971, food production had increased markedly, the rate of growth in the gross national product had tripled, and industrial production had risen 14.6 percent. Unemployment dropped from 8.3 to 3.9 percent, and inflation was reduced from 35 to 22 percent annually. Chile’s infant mortality rate dropped by 11 percent. To Allende, the statistics were gratifying but hardly surprising. “I am a man who came to the Presidency after twenty-five years as a Senator,” he reminded one listener. “I know what I am doing.”
In the municipal elections of April, 1971, the people voted their thanks. Allende’s Popular Unity coalition, which had received 36 percent of the vote only seven months earlier, gathered 49.7 percent of the total. Several months later, Fidel Castro visited Chile and paid tribute to its leader. Speaking in Santiago’s National Stadium, the Cuban Premier told a crowd of eighty thousand, “A unique process is taking place in Chile. It is the process of change. It is a revolutionary process in which the revolutionaries are trying to carry out changes peacefully by legal and constitutional methods, using the very laws established by the society to maintain class domination. It is unique in the history of contemporary societies. It is unique in the history of humanity.”
Allende responded in kind: “Chile is very different from Cuba…. We are not the Cuba of 1959. The right has not been crushed here by popular uprising. It has been only narrowly beaten in elections. Our only chance of success is legality, using all the weapons that the Constitution gives us…. Our road is much more difficult because it is within the limits of the law and the Constitution. We have to accept what Congress decides according to the precepts of the law. There is an autonomous judicial power that can make its own decisions. We don’t expect to achieve socialism overnight.”
Allende flowered in the first year and a half of his Presidency. The power to do good was in his hands and he held it dear. Yet he refused to place himself above the people. Shortly after his term began, he insisted that the practice of placing the Presidential portrait in all government offices be discontinued. It was, he scoffed, a wasteful and needless formality more suited to kingdoms than a democracy.
The President’s private life remained largely unchanged. He continued to collect pre-Columbian ceramics, Impressionist art, and modern pastels. He still loved checkers, flowers, and good wine. More than ever, he sought to continue in the role of teacher. To student activists who supported his cause, Allende cautioned, “It is not important that a student, if he is a poor student, says to me that he is a left-winger. We need good students, good scholars. First they have to fulfill their responsibilities as students. Then they have the right to say they are political leaders.”
His sense of humor remained sharp. Enrique Kirberg, former President of the Santiago Technical University and a close friend of Allende’s, had the privilege of sitting next to the President at a banquet in honor of a visiting Chinese trade delegation. At the start of dinner, Allende made a brief toast:
It may well be that we will not reach a major commercial accord during the course of your visit. I do, however, ask one small favor I would like each person in your great country to drink one bottle of Chilean wine each year. This is all I ask.
He then sat down and, as the visiting Chinese reflected or what seemed to be a modest enough request, Allende turned to Kirberg and whispered, “That’s eight hundred million bottle of wine.”
Indeed, the only change in Allende’s demeanor once he became President was that his speeches became markedly longer One close friend who had studied American politics took note of the fact, and warned El Compañero that he was in danger o becoming “a Chilean Hubert Humphrey.”
“But,” Allende protested, “when I talk with the people I have so much to tell them.”
Yet, even as the Allende Presidency flowered, the seeds of destruction were being sown. Allende had campaigned tirelessly on the theme that for Chile to be truly independent, control of basic industries must rest in Chilean hands. Toward this end, soon after his inauguration he had begun a process of nationalization. Chile’s banking, communications, and automobile industries were all placed under partial government control. On the issue of copper, a crisis exploded.
For virtually the entire twentieth century, the Chilean economy had been characterized by dependence on the United States. One hundred ten American corporations had invested over one billion dollars in Chile. The largest American investors were the multinational copper companies. Kennecott Corporation owned and operated El Teniente—the largest underground copper mine in the world. From 1955 to 1970, it had realized an annual return of 34.8 percent on its Chilean investment compared with 10 percent on investments throughout the rest of the world. Anaconda Company controlled Chuquicamata—the world’s largest open-pit copper mine. Its annual return in Chile for the same period was 20.2 percent compared with 3.5 percent elsewhere.
The profits reaped by both companies from their Chilean operations were incredible. Yet rather than refine copper locally, they shipped it to the United States for processing. American refineries gained twelve jobs for every one mining job in Chile.
Copper supplied 80 percent of Chile’s export earnings. Whoever controlled the mines controlled Chile. In 1970, four-fifths of the nation’s copper production was in American hands. The primary obligation of these multinational corporations was to their shareholders, not the Chilean people. To Allende, the need for a change was obvious.
On December 21, 1970, the President proposed a Constitutional Amendment authorizing the nationalization of Chile’s copper industry. The idea was hardly novel. In 1969, the Frei administration had concluded separate pacts with Kennecott and Anaconda that called for partial Chilean ownership of the mines. Subsequently, Radomiro Tomic, Frei’s successor as leader of the Christian Democratic Party and Allende’s opponent in 1970, had called for full nationalization.
Allende’s proposal was similar in most respects to Tomic’s. It authorized the government to assume full state ownership of all minerals in the nation’s subsoil and to take operational control of the mines owned by Anaconda, Kennecott, and a third American mining company, the Cerro Corporation. Compensation was to be paid to the companies based on the book value of their installations, with a deduction for previously earned “excessive profits.” The proposal was founded on a Declaration of Principles adopted by the Seventeenth Session of the United Nations, which had held: “The right of peoples and nations to permanent sovereignty over their natural riches and resources is to be exercised by them in the interest of national development and the well-being of the people and the state.”
Speaking in support of the Amendment, Allende declared, “The nationalization of our copper is not an act of vengeance or hatred directed towards any group, government or nation. We are exercising an inalienable right on behalf of a sovereign people—that of the full enjoyment of our national resources.”
On July 11, 1971, the nationalization Amendment was unanimously passed by the Chilean Congress. Every Senator and Deputy present, representing every major Chilean party, voted in favor of the reform. Allende hailed the event as the “second independence” of the Chilean people and proclaimed July 11 as National Dignity Day. Three months later, his government announced that, because of “excessive profits” extracted from Chile, Kennecott and Anaconda would receive no compensation for their nationalized holdings. The Cerro Corporation was granted a claim of fourteen million dollars. Eduardo Novoa, Chief Legal Advisor to the President, defended the decision on compensation with an analogy to American history: “When Lincoln freed the slaves in the United States, there was no compensation paid to the planters.” Allende himself appealed to the American people’s sense of “historical purpose”:
We know that our attempts to recover the basic natural resources of the country for the Chilean people will affect certain North American private interests. However, we are sure that these interests cannot be identified with the great historical purposes of the North American people. Relations between our two states have much vaster and more far-reaching objectives than the protection of private gain. When the people of Chile carry out the nationalization of their basic wealth, Chilean copper, they are not engaging in any action against the North American people, but placing at the service of Chile something which indisputably belongs to it.
Washington’s official response was quick in coming. On October 13, 1971, Secretary of State William Rogers decried the Chilean government’s ruling on compensation as “a serious departure from accepted standards of international law. The Chilean decision,” the Secretary said, had “serious implications,” and left the United States government “deeply disappointed and disturbed.”
Just how disturbed was soon to become evident. One year earlier, Richard Nixon had failed in his attempt to keep Allende from the Presidency. Now he would wreak vengeance upon Chile with all the might he could muster.