It’s midday and the doorman won’t be on duty until 4:00 P.M., so a visitor can pass unimpeded to the Hormans’ eighth-floor apartment. Inside, at a bedroom desk, Ed Horman sits leafing through a sheaf of papers. To one side, a dozen books on Chile, Allende, and the CIA lie piled on the floor. To the other, stands a file cabinet containing several thousand pages of documents, newspaper clippings, and assorted memoranda concerning the death of his son, Charles.
“I began collecting documents shortly after I returned from Chile,” Ed explains. “As you know, Joyce and I were extremely disenchanted with the performance of our Embassy in Santiago and felt that someone should be called to task. The nature of the Nixon administration was to cater to big corporations like Kennecott and Anaconda. There was no room for the individual, and this lack of consideration for little people had clearly filtered down to Embassy level. I began my ad hoc review suspecting only arrogance and an absence of care. Then, as things progressed, I became aware of something far more serious. I am now convinced that the United States government had foreknowledge of and possibly planned my son’s execution.”
These are strong words, but Ed Horman is not a man given to irresponsible charges. He is a fairly conservative industrial designer, who lives a life of moderation and frequently votes Republican. For over four years, he has sought to learn how and why his son died. In painstaking fashion, he has written hundreds of letters, made innumerable telephone calls, interviewed scores of witnesses, pressured dozens of Senators and Congressmen, and exhausted every other avenue that might effect a thorough investigation into the causes of Charles’s death. If no active lead exists, he returns to old files and reads through them a fourth and fifth time. His professional life has been largely ignored. Searching for “the truth about Charles” has become the dominant motivating force in his life.
“I now see Charles’s death as incidental to a far larger conspiracy,” Ed explains. “But to understand what I’m driving at, you have to put things in perspective. You have to realize what our government did in Chile… focus on the nature of the government we helped to overthrow and the Junta we now so actively support.”
Salvador Allende took power without a shot being fired. He was the freely elected President of a democratic government in a country with a longstanding tradition of constitutional rule. He repeatedly disavowed the Communist Party’s obedience to world strategy and sought instead to create a new type of socialism which would maintain constitutional freedoms without revolutionary violence. His administration brought social reforms, not socialism, to Chile and was more reformist than revolutionary. Allende sought better health care, better housing, better jobs, better education, and a better way of life for his people. In most respects, his programs were far closer to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal than Marxist dogma. Indeed, had he carried out the same programs from an anti-Communist or neutralist pulpit, it is doubtful that the United States would have moved against him.
Allende was not above criticism. His nationalization of Chile’s copper industry was a pseudolegal “grab” which should have resulted in some form of compensation for Kennecott and Anaconda but did not. His administration was wracked by economic mismanagement. But an act of nationalization hardly justifies the covert subversion of a nation’s economy by a foreign power. And it will never be known how much of the economic turmoil that beset Chile was caused by Allende’s leadership and how much was the result of economic sabotage by the United States. For the fact of the matter is that the United States brought to bear its economic might against a nation with fewer people than the state of Ohio. If one ponders the disruption to the American economy (the strongest in the world) caused by a few Arab sheiks who decreed a short-lived, ineffectual oil embargo in 1973, the devastating effect of our nation’s full economic might crushing down upon Chile becomes obvious.
And what of the Junta? Economically, even with American support, its record has been one of dismal failure. In the year following the coup, the price of bread rose from three to twenty-four cents per kilo, milk from three to twelve cents a liter. The cost of living rose 145.6 percent in the first six months of 1974 alone. By 1976, real wages had dropped 21.5 percent below their precoup level. During his thirty-four months in office, Allende had presided over a lowering of unemployment from 8.3 to 3.1 percent. After three years of military rule, that figure had sextupled.
As for the larger issues of political freedom and human rights, the record speaks for itself. Allende was committed to governing within a constitutional framework. Under his administration, Chileans were free to read and write what they chose. They could petition their government and demonstrate in the streets. Free elections were a way of life, as they had been for decades. By contrast, the Junta presides over what Senator Frank Church has called “the desolation of Chile.”
The reign of book-burning, torture, and death which enmeshed thousands in the aftermath of the coup has continued unimpeded. Returning from a 1974 study mission to Santiago, former American Ambassador to Chile Ralph Dungan testified before a Senate subcommittee on political refugees as follows: “I am morally certain that tortures are taking place systematically and to a substantial extent. It is not an episodic thing where an individual soldier or intelligence agent went off and did something on his own. You have systematic torture being used in connection with interrogations with substantial numbers of persons. And, when I say substantial, I am talking about 10 or 20 percent of the total number of people detained. Electric shock, psychological tortures of one kind or another, plastic bag tortures, immersion of the head in water or oil, all kinds of tortures…. There was evidence of people being hung up by the wrists, of needles or other instruments under the fingernails…. The situation reminds one of the 1930s in Germany.”
A report by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations General Assembly continues this theme, citing “the transformation of Chile’s intelligence services into a secret police which is omnipotent and immune from responsibility…. Persons suspected of opposing or potentially opposing the regime are described as Marxists. This term is applied to anybody expressing views not corresponding to those officially held. The adjective is used not only in connection with personalities who had a political role in the past, but with those whose functions place them outside politics, who are members of moderate or centrist movements, writers, students, and even Catholic or Protestant bishops. Legal procedures have been bent to follow these concepts. ‘Subversion’ is given as a reason for arrests and imprisonment. The expression ‘offenses against the state of siege’ is commonly used to describe unspecified charges.”
A 1977 report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights—an agency of the twenty-five-nation Organization of American States—confirms that arbitrary arrest, torture, and murder remain rampant in Chile. Moreover, the Chilean people have been stripped of all possible defense against these abuses by the restructuring of political institutions to consolidate military rule.
On September 11, 1973, the day of the coup, the Junta ordered Chile’s Congress “indefinitely” closed. Ten days later, it banned all Marxist political parties, declared non-Marxist parties “in recess,” and announced the formation of a “distinguished committee” to formulate plans for a new Constitution. On September 25, 1973, all freely elected mayors and city councilmen were removed from their posts pending the appointment of replacements by the military. Two weeks later, the “recess” imposed on non-Marxist parties was changed to a “suspension.” It subsequently became a permanent ban.
On October 17, 1973, a decree forbidding all political activity by individuals, parties or other organized groups was put into effect and the Chilean Constitutional Court abolished. Thereafter, electoral registers containing the names of 3.5 million Chileans entitled to vote were destroyed. “I never said this was a transition government,” explained Junta President Augusto Pinochet. “It may last ten or twenty years.” In June, 1975, Pinochet amended his statement: “There will be no elections in Chile during my lifetime, nor the lifetime of my successor.”
Not content with controlling Chile’s political structure, the Junta has moved to suppress freedom of choice in virtually every other area of public life. In the wake of the coup, Chile’s largest labor organization—the eight-hundred-thousand-member Central Workers’ Confederation—was abolished. The university system has been placed under tight supervision, with professors required to submit their teaching programs for military review on a weekly basis. Mail and press censorship are common. Indeed, the Junta has gone so far as to ban use of the term “Compañero,” which had been a traditional greeting among Allende supporters.
“There is a new order in Chile,” Ed Horman says bitterly, “and that order is fascism. Let me tell you what our government has done about it. Two weeks after the coup, the United States recognized the Junta as the legitimate government of Chile. While Charles’s body was still in the morgue, the new Ambassador from Santiago arrived in Washington and was met by Henry Kissinger, who threw his arms out and hugged him. Then the Director of the CIA went before the House Foreign Affairs Committee and testified that the postcoup executions in Chile had done ‘some good’ because they reduced the possibility of civil war. Not once did our government issue an expression of disapproval, forceful or otherwise, against the Junta’s conduct in 1973. Not once has it exerted pressure to bring to justice those persons responsible for Charles’s death.”
The facts bear Ed Horman out. In the last full year of the Allende government, the United States extended a meager $2.5 million in Food for Peace assistance to Chile. For fiscal 1974, that total was multiplied fifteenfold. Shortly before the coup, the Nixon administration refused a Chilean request for credit to buy much-needed wheat to combat a food shortage. Less than a month later, a $24.5-million credit was granted, prompting Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts to declare: “I am shocked. The credit offered by this administration in a single day to the military junta is eight times the total commodity credit offered Chile in the past three years when a democratically elected government was in power.”
Yet Washington’s receptivity to military rule should have surprised no one. For three years, the Nixon administration had violated virtually every precept of international law in an effort to foment a military coup in Chile. Only the scope of the administration’s efforts was unknown, and this as a consequence of lies to Congress and the American people.
The case of Richard Helms is an example on point. Speaking before a student group at Johns Hopkins University in 1972, the CIA Director responded to a student who asked whether the United States had sought to influence the 1970 Presidential election in Chile with the answer, “Why should you care? Your side won.” Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February and March, 1973, Helms was somewhat less candid, categorically denying American involvement. Caught in his lie when the Church Committee Report revealed the scope of CIA conduct, Helms escaped indictment for perjury by threatening revelations that would endanger national security. Ultimately, he was permitted to plead “no contest” to a misdemeanor charge of “failing to testify fully before Congress.” His government pension intact, he was fined two thousand dollars and announced that his plea would be worn “like a badge of honor.” Hours after sentencing, the fine was paid by a group of former CIA employees, who met at a party and tossed checks into a wastepaper basket placed on top a piano.
The Justice Department’s handling of the Helms case prompted Senator Frank Church to comment, “I thought there was to be an end to the double standard of justice for big shots.” “What Church failed to perceive,” Ed Horman observes, “is that there is no inclination on the part of our government to rock the boat on Chile. The prevailing view, even in the Carter administration, is that the matter should be laid to rest.”
Indeed, one State Department official recently went so far as to suggest that Allende was “not really a democratically elected President,” since he was elected with only 36 percent of the popular vote. This, of course, overlooks the fact that, in ten of the past twenty-seven American Presidential elections, minority Presidents have been elected, the most recent being Richard Nixon who captured the White House with 43.4 percent of the popular vote in 1968.
Thus, it is hardly surprising that the only expression of regret to be heard from the Nixon administration regarding Chile’s fall from constitutional rule was the most perverse. Seven days after the coup, Jack Kubisch—then Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs—declared, “It was not in our interest to have the military take over in Chile. It would have been better had Allende served his entire term, taking the nation and the Chilean people into complete and total ruin. Only then would the full discrediting of socialism have taken place. The military takeover and bloodshed has confused this lesson.”
Kubisch’s remarks warrant special attention because, at the time he made them, he was the public official with primary responsibility for American relations with Latin America. Perhaps Richard Fagen (a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and former President of the Latin American Studies Association) has put them in context best:
[Kubisch evinces] no regret about the coup other than it interrupted his preferred scenario for Allende’s demise; no shame in equating the U.S. national interest with the destruction of the socialist experience in Chile; not even any sense of irony that discrediting Allende’s constitutional revolution lends support to the argument that structural change will come about only through violence and the rejection of democratic practices; just decades-old cold warriorism, twisted logic, total lack of concern for the Chilean people, and a single-minded commitment to the destruction of the Chilean way by the most convincing means possible.
So much for hemispheric cooperation, social justice, democracy, nonintervention and other fine phrases. What really matters to people who think this way is that the hemisphere be made safe for “the American way of life,” and this in turn implies that socialist experiments must be destroyed as convincingly as possible. Given this mission, it follows that human lives don’t count for much—especially if they are relatively young and think “wrong thoughts.” It is in this context, permeated by a mentality of destruction, that the death of Charles Horman must be placed.
“Fagen was half-right,” Ed Horman declares. “In limiting United States responsibility for Charles’s death to the creation of a climate in which the coup occurred, he overlooked something far more sinister. From the day I returned home on, the actions of our government have convinced me that the American Embassy in Santiago was very much involved in Charles’s murder. Let me tell you why.”
Straightening the papers on his desk, Ed pulls one file folder aside. “If anything was certain when I left Santiago, it was that Charles had been executed in the National Stadium by the Chilean military. Then, two days after I returned, the New York Post ran an article which quoted Kate Marshall, the woman I met in Washington with Charles Anderson, as taking a completely contrary position. Here! Look for yourself.”
Reaching into the folder, marked “Miscellaneous 1973,” Ed extracts a clipping from the October 23, 1973, New York Post, and points to a paragraph bracketed in ink:
State Department officials said they had requested an investigation of Horman’s death and suggested he may have been killed by left-wing groups masquerading as soldiers and parading around in uniforms after the coup…. “really wicked people who would kill him just to make the military look bad,” said Department spokeswoman Kate Marshall.
“The moment I saw that,” Ed explains, “I telephoned Kate Marshall and asked her how she could possibly make a statement like that. Fred Purdy himself had told me that Charles was executed in the National Stadium. Mario Rojas of Investigaciones and two agents from SIM had confirmed the report. What I didn’t know then and do now was that Nathaniel Davis had begun to circulate a far different version of events. The very same day Purdy told me my son was dead, Davis had cabled Henry Kissinger, saying that Charles’s body had been picked up, not at the National Stadium, but on the street by a passing military patrol. From the time I saw that clipping in the New York Post on, all I’ve gotten from our government are denials. Purdy now denies telling me that Charles was executed in the National Stadium. Rojas, Manesas, and Ortiz deny confirming the report; and the State Department has adopted the Junta’s story that Charles was killed by left-wing extremists. I’m up against a stone wall.”
His dismay clearly visible, Ed Horman returns the sheaf of papers he has been holding to their proper file. “Neither the Ford or Carter administrations has seen fit to reopen the matter of Charles’s death,” he says, annoyance present in his voice. “Well, I’m not going to let the matter die. There are three issues to be publicly resolved. One, was my son killed by the Chilean military? Two, did the United States government knowingly seek to cover up facts surrounding his death? And three, did our government have foreknowledge of or possibly even order his execution? I want a satisfactory response to each of these questions. Unfortunately, I think I already know the answers.”