The U.S. Murders of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, Part 3
Imagine that in 1970, a right-wing, procapitalism, pro-U.S. candidate had been elected president of Chile. Imagine that in 1973, a Chilean communist group armed by communist Cuba had successfully implemented a coup that had installed a communist dictator into power and left the democratically elected Chilean president dead. Imagine that Chilean communist forces were grabbing right-wing supporters of the ousted regime off the streets and from their homes and transporting them to the national stadium and other facilities, where they were being interrogated, tortured, raped, sexually assaulted, executed, or disappeared.
Imagine also that there were several American citizens living in Santiago who had moved to Chile to participate in the capitalist system that the rightwing president was adopting for the country.
Does anyone doubt what the response of the U.S. government would have been to such a coup insofar as the safety and welfare of those Americans were concerned? The U.S. government would have immediately put out a formal warning to the new communist regime to not inflict any harm on American citizens. At the same time, U.S. officials in Santiago would have immediately put out the word that the U.S. embassy was prepared to accept American citizens who were seeking safety and sanctuary from the communists.
Indeed, that is precisely what foreign nations did when the Chilean military coup took place on September 11, 1973. They opened the doors of their embassies to their citizens and others, especially those who had been ardent supporters of President Allende and his socialist experiment. They knew that so long as those Allende supporters remained in Chile, their lives were in danger. Once they reached their respective embassies, they would almost certainly be safe from the military goons who were rounding up tens of thousands of Allende supporters, taking them to the national stadium or other facilities, and torturing, raping, sexually assaulting, executing, or disappearing them.
But not the United States. Once the coup got started, it closed the doors of its embassy in Santiago to American citizens living in Chile, knowing full well the brutal measures that the Chilean military was taking and would be taking in the days and weeks ahead — measures that had been taught to them at the Pentagon’s School of the Americas. Thus, American citizens who were ardent socialists and enthusiastic supporters of Allende’s socialist experiment were on their own — and U.S. officials knew it.
Those American citizens included Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, who, like many other people from around the world, had moved to Chile to participate in what they considered to be one of history’s greatest socialist experiments, one that had been brought about democratically.
Dangerous Marxists
But there is something important to note about Horman and Teruggi. They were not just two American leftists who had moved to Chile, gotten jobs, and become spectators of what was occurring. Both of them were died-in-the-wool Marxists who, prior to the coup, were participating with Chilean groups that were actively involved in making plans to violently resist any military coup.
For example, in his excellent new book Chile in Their Hearts (which I highly recommend, notwithstanding the conclusion he reached regarding U.S. complicity in the murders of Horman and Teruggi), John Dinges tells about a trip to New York City that Horman took in the month prior to the coup. During that trip, Horman was raising money to help pro-Allende defenders purchase weaponry to violently resist (i.e., kill) Chilean soldiers in the event of a coup.
A good friend of Horman’s, Don Lenser, stated, “Charlie asked me if I would contribute any money to what I understood was his efforts to raise money for arms that he would on his return to Chile give to groups that would defend the revolution against a coup. My recollection is that they were organized workers who were supporters of Allende, but who were more radical, and who believed in arming the people to defend the revolution.”
Another friend, Dick Pearce, stated, “He asked me for money to help arm the Cordones Industriales around Santiago against the threat of a right-wing military coup….[Horman] said the Cordones were going to be the battleground in the coming conflict. He said arming the Cordones was what was needed.”
Simon Blattner, a real estate investor, stated, “Charlie’s politics were much leftier than mine. We talked about the situation in Chile. I thought it was dangerous and I tried to talk him into staying in the U.S. He was fomenting political action, trying to bring about a democratic Chile.”
Teruggi was no different. He was tied in with an extreme radical Marxist group known as MIR, which was prepared to violently resist with arms any coup attempt. He was even living with MIR members even though they were careful not to store weaponry in the house in which Teruggi was living.
Dinges writes, “But in the days just before the coup, Teruggi was preparing not for a coup but for his departure from Chile. He had acquired a formidable collection of Marxist classics and was wrapping them in packages to mail them back to the United States. David Hathaway and others described Frank as spending a lot of time reading in the house. He was aware in general terms that there were MIR Central Force activities in the house, but knew they were ‘compartmented’ and he should not ask questions.”
When the Chilean military goons came to Teruggi’s home to arrest him, a policeman exclaimed, “Ah ha, he’s got all this Marxist literature.” Dinges writes, “The books included Teruggi’s complete set of Lenin’s writings, and a recently acquired biography of Leon Trotsky. They packed up the books and took them ‘as evidence.’” One of the policemen said to Teruggi, “I have seen you before, I know you.”
U.S. government versus Horman and Teruggi
That Chilean policeman wasn’t the only one who knew Teruggi. So did the U.S. government. That’s because the FBI, which maintained a secret file on Teruggi, had conducted an investigation into actions he had taken in protest against the U.S. national-security state’s war in Vietnam.
The same was true with respect to Horman. Dinges writes that according to a Chilean man named Enrique Sandoval, while Horman was being interrogated in the national stadium, “a dossier had been presented which spoke of Charles’ participation in the March on Washington and his activity in civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements. He said that it also referred to Charles as a member of MIR.”
Of course, monitoring Horman and Teruggi as threats to U.S. “national security” would not have been unusual, especially given the FBI’s COINTELPRO program and the belief that the communists had installed themselves into most parts of American life. A premier example of the anticommunist mindset was the monitoring of Martin Luther King, who U.S. deep state officials were certain was a communist agent.
What are the chances that the U.S. military and the CIA in Chile, which spent three years paving the ground for a military coup in Chile, were unaware of Horman and Teruggi in Chile? There is no reasonable possibility of that at all. The CIA was actively preparing for a coup for three years prior. If U.S. intelligence officials were keeping track of Horman and Teruggi in the United States, it stands to reason that they were keenly aware of their presence and their activities inside Chile, especially given the enormous national-security implications of the Allende regime.
Given such, what interest would U.S. officials have in opening the doors to the U.S. embassy in Santiago to provide refuge to two enemies of the United States? It was still the height of the Cold War. This was going to be a war to the finish. It was the communists versus the advocates of freedom. In Vietnam in 1973, the Reds had already killed more than 58,000 American men and were on the verge of defeating the U.S. national-security state. The communists were also in Cuba — just 90 miles away from American shores. And they had recently elected one of their own in Chile, with aims to do the same in the rest of Latin America.
Most important, insofar as both the U.S. and Chilean national-security establishments were concerned, Allende and his socialist supporters were part of this enemy communist force. That’s why Chilean Gen. Pinochet had no reservations whatsoever in ordering his goons to round up those tens of thousands of Chileans — not because they had shot and killed any Chilean soldiers, which they hadn’t, but because they were communist enemies of freedom who were trying to put Chile, the United States, and the rest of the world under communist rule.
That’s also why U.S. officials stood silently by and were even supportive when all these thousands of Chilean socialists and communists were being kidnapped, tortured, raped, or executed. In the global war on communism, Pinochet, the Pentagon, and the CIA were balancing the books. The Reds were killing U.S. soldiers and winning in Vietnam, but in return, the forces of freedom were rounding up, torturing, and killing or disappearing thousands of communists in Chile.
Therefore, why would the Pentagon and the CIA have any desire to save Horman and Teruggi, given that they were clearly part of the communist enemy forces that were hell-bent on defeating the advocates of freedom?
After all, don’t forget about the CIA’s kidnapping attempt and murder of Chilean Gen. Rene Schneider. If they were willing to kill a totally innocent man to achieve their goal, why would they hesitate to participate in the killing of two American communists who were purportedly trying to destroy the United States and the world?
While we will never know exactly how the murders of Horman and Teruggi were authorized by U.S. officials, it is virtually certain that neither the Pentagon nor the CIA would have put a directive to their Chilean counterparts in writing authorizing them to kill these two American citizens. Nobody would be that dumb. And if they were that dumb, that secret written directive would have been destroyed a long time ago. Therefore, anyone who bases his conclusion on whether the U.S. national-security establishment participated in the murder of Horman and Teruggi solely on what is contained in official written records will inevitably acquit the national-security establishment of the murders.
The more likely thing that happened was the following: In the months and weeks leading up to the coup, there had to be close contact between CIA officials in Chile with their counterparts in the Chilean national-security establishment. Remember: By this time, the CIA would have been paving the way for a coup for three years. At some point, a high Chilean military-intelligence official would have said to a high-level CIA official, “We’ve got two Americans living in Chile who are part of the Marxist forces that are planning to violently resist the coup. We need to know if we have authority to handle them once the coup gets underway.” The CIA official would have responded obliquely, “We have no interest in interfering with the success of the coup.” And that would have been the end of the matter. The only thing left would have been to keep the doors shut on the U.S. embassy to ensure that Horman and Teruggi had no means of escape.
Horman’s trip to Viña del Mar
It’s worth mentioning Horman’s trip to the Chilean city of Viña del Mar immediately before the coup. That was where the coup began and where U.S. warships were stationed offshore. Horman had decided to take a friend, Terry Simon, who was visiting from New York City, to see Viña del Mar. Horman had the bad luck to be visiting there when the coup began. At his hotel, he encountered a man who appeared to be a CIA official, with whom he conversed. Horman and Simon were later given a ride back to Santiago by a U.S. military officer who, conveniently and revealingly, had a pass entitling him to easily pass through military checkpoints on the way to Santiago.
Obviously, seeing all this did not help Horman, especially given that the U.S. military and the CIA were steadfastly trying to keep their role in the coup secret from both the American and the Chilean people. Keep in mind, for example, that when CIA Director Richard Helms testified under oath before Congress in 1973, he committed perjury by denying U.S. involvement in Chile’s internal affairs from 1970 to 1973. That’s how important secrecy was to the CIA and the U.S. military.
Horman’s ability to return to the United States and write an article in the mainstream press disclosing what he had seen and heard at Viña del Mar would necessarily have put his life in danger, but it’s my conviction that his fate was sealed anyway. After all, Teruggi wasn’t at Viña del Mar, but they still murdered him. Moreover, they didn’t murder Terry Simon, even though she had traveled with Horman to Viña del Mar. It is my conviction that Horman and Teruggi were murdered for the same reason that the U.S. and Chilean national-security initiated a coup in the first place. As died-in-the-wool Marxists, Horman and Teruggi were enemies of the state, especially since they were prepared to violently resist a military coup intended to restore “freedom” to Chile and help protect the United States from a communist takeover.
The cover-up and the felony-murder rule
For many years after the Horman and Teruggi murders, the Pinochet regime falsely denied that it had murdered them. Not surprisingly, the U.S. government went along with the cover-up. Indeed, to this day U.S. officials steadfastly maintain the secrecy of thousands of their records relating to the three-year period paving the way for a coup and records relating to the coup itself and its aftermath. They say that disclosing those long-secret records would jeopardize “national security.” Would those records contain a “smoking gun” that establishes U.S. complicity in the murder of these two American citizens? Almost certainly not. But circumstantial evidence and common sense, I believe, leaves but one possible verdict for the U.S. government in the murders of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi: Guilty.
Finally, there is a legal doctrine that also convicts the U.S. government of Horman’s and Teruggi’s murder. That doctrine is called the felony-murder rule. It holds that if a person is killed in the course of a felony, all of the participants in the felony are guilty of murder. Since it was the U.S. government that fomented, supported, encouraged, funded, and procured the Chilean coup, which was clearly illegal under both the Chilean and U.S. constitutions, that makes the U.S. government equally culpable for the Pinochet regime’s round-ups, torture, rapes, executions, and disappearances of the tens of thousands of Chilean victims — as well as the murders of American citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi.
This article was originally published in the October 2025 issue of Future of Freedom.
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