Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing after the Coup

by John Dinges

"Cincuenta años después, esta notable investigación de John Dinges proporciona un relato histórico, trágico y revelador sobre dos crímenes emblemáticos que marcaron las relaciones históricas entre los Estados Unidos y Chile".

Peter Kornbluh


Estados Unidos fue el más importante aliado mundial de la Junta Militar en 1973, pero el asesinato de dos de sus ciudadanos días después del golpe de Estado dio pie a un enigma internacional cuyo misterio repercute hasta hoy. Charles Horman y Frank Teruggi, opositores a su propio gobierno, estuvieron entre los miles de extranjeros que confluyeron en Chile para participar de la "vía chilena al socialismo" de Salvador Allende y que fueron recluidos en el Estadio Nacional, calificados de "extremistas".



La ejecución de los dos estadounidenses manchó la imagen positiva del golpe de Estado que el gobierno de Estados Unidos promovía al mundo, por lo que encubrió los hechos que ya conocía y se sumó a la versión falsa del régimen de que "nadie sabe" quién los mató ni por qué. La película Missing hizo famoso el caso, pero distorsionó hechos relevantes. La verdadera historia se revela ahora en esta contundente investigación.



El autor, John Dinges, arribó a nuestro país en 1972, siendo uno de los internacionalistas que, como sus compatriotas asesinados, llegó a tener a Chile en su corazón.

Genres: History

308 pages, Paperback

Published April 29, 2025

About the author

I am a journalist who writes mostly about Latin America, dictators, intelligence agencies (usually secret ones) and human rights. I have a previous career as a theologian--not incompatible with journalism. I am the Godfrey Lowell Cabot professor of international journalism at Columbia University. Previously I worked for the Washington Post and NPR (as foreign editor and managing editor at the latter.) Current writing: democracy and media in Latin America.
I founded the nonprofit Center for Investigation and Information (CIINFO), which runs projects on investigative journalism in Latin America. Founded the Chilean on-line media organization CIPER (www.ciperchile.cl). Currently run ArchivosChile (www.archivoschile.org).

Reviews

[Julie Capell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and detailed investigation into the assassinations of two US citizens during the first few days of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Many in the US are familiar with the story of one of the victims, Charles Horman, because of the movie “Missing,” which starred Jack Lemon as Charles’ father, who traveled to Chile in 1973 to look for his son. The film posits that the US government was complicit in Charles’ assassination, but nothing was ever proved.

The author of this new book is a US journalist and expert on Chile and the human rights abuses committed by the Pinochet government during its 19-year tenure. Here, John Dinges brings his usual indefatigable push to uncover the truth without letting sentiments or prevailing theories cloud his investigation. Dinges conducted a thorough review of all the pertinent US and Chilean documents both from the time when the assassinations occurred and later years, when court cases and de-classified documents became available that shed new light on the cases. He also conducted extensive interviews with people who knew the victims, as well as with Chilean and US government and military personnel involved.

Using the information collected, Dinges painstakingly reconstructs the lives of Horman and Teruggi in the months leading up to their murders and afterwards, as the governments of Chile and the US scrambled to first cover up and then distance themselves from the deaths. As the details emerge, the reader gets a front row seat to the horrible human rights abuses committed by the Pinochet regime, how the military were able to act with impunity for so long, and how what happened to the two US citizens was only a small part of a pattern of torture and disappearances that were committed in Chile and across the Southern Cone in the 1970s.

[Currently this book is only available in Spanish, but it should be made available in English so that more US readers can learn about the role the US government played in backing up the Pinochet government as a part of its own Cold War efforts to crush communism at any price.]

[Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I was skeptical of this book because of the bad title and because I was concerned it would try and tell the whole story of the coup through the eyes of two white American socialists. However it didn’t really attempt to do that and still made appropriate reference to the horrors inflicted on Chileans during the coup, so I thought it was a good book, even if the investigative bits dragged at the end. With that said, I’m a white American socialist who just wrote a poorly-titled thesis on Chile so it’s very possible I’m not the best person to make these judgements…

[Norman Brewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

With “Chile in Their Hearts,” John Dinges has further cemented his reputation as an investigative author committed to historical accuracy and journalistic integrity. His new book probes the 1973 deaths of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, idealistic young Americans executed in Chile when the Pinochet coup toppled Salvador Allende’s socialistic and democratic government. Involvement by the U.S., an ally of Pinochet, in Horman and Teruggi’s deaths has long been assumed. Certainly, U.S. officials callously misled the men’s families, feeding that narrative. Dinges sets aside his leftist politics to meticulously follow the facts, concluding that the U.S. role, however blind to Pinochet’s lies, fell short of murder. “Chile in Their Hearts” can be read as an engrossing textbook befitting a professor emeritus at Columbia University, which Dinges is. And it joins his other books – “The Condor Years” and “Assassination on Embassy Row” – to put in focus Pinochet’s dictatorship, a dark era with ominous echoes today.

[Nilda · Rating 4 out of 5]

The introduction to the main subjects and their circunstances were of interest to me because I didn't know much beyond having seen Missing many years ago. But it felt way too many chapters between that and the conclusion. I understand all "t" needed to be crossed... Normally, I prefer this level of detail to be optional reading at the end of a book. And the conclusion is disappointing because it seems we will never know the truth. Even then, I give 4 stars to the clearly solid and balanced research.

[Mark Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Dinges's exhaustive research firmly establishes the real story of the murder of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi in the 1973 coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile. I knew Charlie well and this book, unlike the movie Missing, captures his idealism and passion to make a difference in a way that truly represents him and reminds us of his heartbreaking loss. The book does justice to both men's lives and, at the same time, exposes again America's shameful duplicity and attempted coverup of their murders.

Mark J. Harris

[Jean-Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Chile in the Hearts” sets straight the record of why two U.S. citizens in Chile were abducted and killed by government forces following that country’s 1973 military coup, and the extent to which the U.S. government was or was not involved in their deaths.
Author John Dinges is the leading authority on events in Chile during that era, and its progeny, Operation Condor, a criminal consortium among six countries that engaged in transnational terrorism throughout the region’s dirty wars. Dinges lived in Chile from 1972-1978, the worst years of the Pinochet regime. He knew Frank Teruggi and Charles Horman, the two starry-eyed socialists who went to Chile in the early 1970s to embed themselves in its socialist government. Dinges, acknowledging his leftist politics, expected his research to confirm his belief that Horman and Teruggi were two innocents killed by the Chilean government with complicity by the U.S. government. But Dinges went where the research and the truth led him (spoiler alert), learning that Horman and Teruggi were neither innocents caught in the crosshairs of the coup, killed because Horman in particular knew “too much,” as the Oscar-winning movie “Missing,” claimed. And while the U.S. Embassy’s attitude toward their disappearance was infuriating – it stalled and misdirected the Horman family in learning their son’s fate– it played no role in their deaths.
In an era of autofiction, biographical fiction, historical fiction, dubious or fabricated data, memoirs of unreliable recall, narratives without basis in reality, and outright historical revisionism, Dinges’ indefatigable and meticulous research – perusing tens of thousands of pages of documents over the past decade, and interviewing people who played a role in some way in this story – is rare in an era of books comprised of Google searches.
While “Chile in Their Hearts” may disappoint good liberals with an ending that does not comport with their expectations of events in Allende’s Chile, or its horrific dictatorship, it is also a textbook example of how every story is more complicated than what we want or wish, and how truth, though more complicated than simply a narrative of martyrs and murderers, makes the story of Horman, Teruggi, and Chile richer and, frankly, more interesting.
Finally, Dinges’ research is a lesson in great reporting. Future journalists take note: rather than spending a fortune on J-School, read and re-read this book – especially the endnotes and sources material at the end -- as a primer on what makes good journalism.

[Kathleen Osberger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Trusted investigative journalist John Dinges revisits fifty years of archives, vivifying the aspirations of a large swath of believers in Salvador Allende’s “radiant” promise of democratic socialism. Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, both U.S. citizens, soon land in Santiago to advance Allende’s cause. Days after the 1973 U.S.- funded coup ď état led by General Augusto Pinochet, both men go “missing,” despite having been seen alive in the bowels of the National Soccer Stadium’s torture rooms. Dinges’ unrelenting search for the truth about their deaths is a must read.

Dinges brings Horman’s and Teruggi’s characters and passions to the fore as we fear the military’s coup ď état and Salvador Allende’s fate. Both men were young, influenced by a mix of intellectuals and prophetic thinkers, like Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire, and the voice of the Latin American Catholic Bishops urging an “option for the poor.” Yet the men were not naïve to the build up of tensions and the preparations for the coup. In a startling reveal Dinges learns that Horman raised money for arms (possibly $200-$2,000) to aid the defense of Allende’s loyal industrial workers, readying to fight on the fateful September 11th. If there were weapons to distribute that day, few appeared. Fearing a bloodbath, President Allende nixed their distribution.

“MISSING,” the award-winning 1982 movie by Costa-Gavras, etched into our minds the likely complicity and the laxity of U.S. embassy personnel. Charles Horman’s wife, Joyce, and Charles’ father pressed embassy officials to force Pinochet to deliver him alive. Dinges’ careful eye confirms that Yes, there was a brief window of days after the men were brutally tortured, where U.S. pressure might have forced Pinochet to release them before their deaths.

Had the U.S. government fingered them or colluded in their deaths? There were teasers, among them, why had U.S. Naval Captain Ray Davis, who oversaw the coup’s launch from the port city of Valparaiso, befriended the stranded Horman in Viña del Mar, even driving him back into Santiago after the coup? Or was Horman arrested because he “knew too much”?

No, Dinges concludes. It was the embassy’s trust in Pinochet’s word, given while Horman’s body had already been pressed into a box and cemented into the Stadium’s wall.

-Kathleen Osberger, Author of I Surrender: A Memoir of Chile’s Dictatorship 1975, Orbis Books 2023

[Ron Earnest · Rating 5 out of 5]

On September 11, 1973, a democratically elected government was overthrown by the Chilean armed forces. The United States did not hide its support for the Chilean military's action. Many civilians were arrested, disappeared, or killed, including two American activists. The movie Missing (Jack Lemon, Sissy Spacek) dramatized the indifference or outright complicity of the United States officialdom in the murder of Charles Terruggi and Charles Horman, US citizens. Johns Dinges' masterful and exhaustively researched account, rebuts the theory that the US directly fingered the 2 Americans because 'they knew too much.' There remains the charge that US officials charged with protecting US citizens without regard to their politics, after the fact, covered for the Chilean military's assault on civilians of every nationality. The book also acknowledges that serious, honest officials who did endeavor to speak inconvenient truths.