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

Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup by John Dinges (University of California Press, 2025, 285 pages)

It was 1972, and three young men—one accompanied by his wife— arrived separately in Chile from different points in the U.S. Upper Midwest. None had ever been to the slender, mountainous Andean nation. Like some 20,000 other foreigners who’d also recently traveled there, they were chasing a dream: to be part of the social and economic revolution Chileans had embarked on two years earlier by electing Salvador Allende as their first-ever socialist president, the first socialist leader democratically elected in Latin America.

One of those travelers from the heartland was this book’s author, John Dinges. With two years’ experience as a police reporter at the Des Moines Register and Tribune, his journey to Chile launched a career that included reporting on Latin America for the Washington Post and as National Public Radio’s managing editor.

Those other two gringos arriving from the Midwest —Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi—would be the only people from the United States to die in the grisly military coup that toppled Allende on Sept. 11, 1973. They were among some 500 foreigners detained by security forces during the first days of General Augusto Pinochet’s 16-year dictatorship.

The bullet-riddled corpses of Horman, 31, and Teruggi, 24, eventually turned up at the Santiago morgue. Both had been interrogated, then executed, in Chile’s National Stadium. Horman’s ordeal in particular—and his father and widow’s harrowing search for him in the weeks after the coup—would be portrayed years later in “Missing,” a two-hour docudrama by the director Costa-Gavras.

The movie, featuring Jack Lemmon as Horman’s father and Sissy Spacek as his widow, was one of the biggest box office hits of 1982. Its opening credits make a categorical claim: “This film is based on a true story. The incidents and facts are documented.”

The movie portrays Horman—a 1964 summa cum laude Harvard graduate and aspiring documentary filmmaker—as a somewhat naïve and apolitical innocent abroad.  He and a friend visiting from the United States happened to be sightseeing in Valparaiso—the picturesque Chilean port where naval forces launched the 1973 coup—on the very eve of the military uprising. At their hotel, Horman gets to chatting with a U.S Navy contractor who says he’s come down from Panama for an annual U.S.-Chilean naval exercise. Glancing around the room as if to make sure nobody else is listening, he tells Horman, “The Navy sent us down here to do a job and, uh, she’s done.”

One of the top military officers with the U.S. Embassy is also at the hotel. In the movie, this “Captain Tower” offers a ride back to Santiago to the two coup-stranded young Americans, just as in actual events U.S. Navy Captain Ray Davis had done.

Two days later, uniformed army soldiers ransack Horman’s home and take him prisoner. In “Missing,” he then appears tied up in the office of the general in charge of military intelligence, along with a man who appears to be Captain Davis. The general declares Horman “knows too much” and must be eliminated. The clear implication is that Davis has fingered a fellow American for what he’s learned about a U.S. role in the coup. Davis’ character later seems to confirm this, telling Horman’s distraught father, “Your son is a bit of a snoop. He poked his nose into a lot of places he didn’t belong. If you keep on playing with fire, you get burned.”

For years, it had been impossible to independently verify how much truth there was to this key scene in “Missing.” The U.S. State Department had refused to reveal much of what it knew about the Horman and Terrugi executions. But in 1999, nearly a decade after democratic rule was restored in Chile and months after Pinochet had been detained and placed under house arrest in London, many of those U.S. documents were finally declassified.

Based on that new information, the Horman family in 2000 filed murder and kidnapping charges in a Chilean court. Ray Davis, by then retired from the military, was charged in absentia with murder. The court accused Davis of spying on both Horman and Terrugi and passing information about them to Chilean intelligence agents.  He was also charged with doing nothing to prevent their executions, despite being aware their deaths had been ordered. The court declared Horman had been killed because “he knew too much” about U.S. complicity in the 1973 coup.

Author Dinges says that verdict, which followed a 15-year trial, is what inspired Chile in Their Hearts. He had already written two highly acclaimed books — Assassination on Embassy Row and The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents — documenting the Pinochet regime’s nefarious actions abroad. For Dinges, this case was, at least in part, personal. He had first met Charles Horman and his wife, Joyce, at a language school in Mexico, and he’d later gotten to know Frank Terrugi in Santiago. Like them, Dinges witnessed Pinochet’s bloody takeover firsthand; 52 years later, he’s now written a book that upends much of the tale told in “Missing.”

“I had long thought the movie’s theory of the case was highly probable, and I set out to find the evidence to prove it,” Dinges writes in the book’s introduction.

That evidence did not lead to the conclusions he’d expected. “The facts that came to light contradicted major elements of the widely accepted view of Horman as the “man who knew too much” and who was killed with U.S. approval,” Dinges writes. “A careful examination of U.S. documents and Chilean court records failed to show any U.S. involvement in the deaths of the two Americans.”

For Dinges, the only “evidence” of such U.S. involvement comes from a former Chilean intelligence operative who defected two years after the coup and took refuge in Santiago at the Italian embassy. At the behest of his Italian hosts, Rafael González was interviewed there the following year by several American journalists, just as then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was arriving for an international meeting. González told the reporters he’d been present when Charles Horman was brought into the office of General Augusto Lutz, the head of military intelligence. He said another man dressed like an American was there too but remained silent. González claimed he heard General Lutz tell his deputy that Horman had to be executed. “This guy knew too much,” he quoted the general as saying, “and we have another kind of information, so this guy has to disappear.”

In his book, Dinges dismisses that narrative as phony. That’s because as the Chilean courts began investigating the murder charges brought by Horman’s family, González issued a little-noticed five-page retraction. He said he’d completely fabricated the story about U.S. involvement in Horman’s execution. Instead of hearing the phrase “he knew too much” from General Lutz, Gonzalez said he cribbed it from a 1974 London Sunday Times investigative piece that quoted Horman’s father as saying he thought his son was killed because “he knew too much.” Gonzalez said Italian embassy officials had wanted him to concoct a story drawn from the Sunday Times article to undermine official U.S. support for the Pinochet regime.

Dinges readily acknowledges that Gonzalez has a credibility problem. Still, he is convinced for two reasons that the former spy is telling the truth in his retraction. One is that much of what González told the reporters at the Italian embassy did indeed appear to be lifted and reconfigured from the Sunday Times article.  Even more persuasive is the fact that González has continued to insist, against his own interests, that he was present when Horman was hauled into the intelligence chief’s office.  That contention became the basis for the Chilean court’s conviction of him of complicity in Horman’s murder.

Dinges finds no evidence that González was in the intelligence chief’s office when Horman was brought there. But a former U.S. Embassy official confirmed that González did have some involvement in the Horman case, having been assigned by Chilean authorities to assist in shipping Horman’s remains back to the United States six months after his execution.

Dinges writes that the magistrate presiding over the Horman murder trial, which included Terrugi’s case, simply ignored González’ retraction. Instead, Judge Jorge Zepeda, echoing the movie “Missing,” appeared to be guided solely by González’ later-recanted statements to reporters in 1976. Hoping to find more solid proof, Dinges pushed for a year and a half before getting exclusive access to the entire trial record of more than 6,000 pages. “Yet I found no evidence that was in any way conclusive proving the direct or indirect involvement by U.S. actors in the murders,” he writes.

Dinges also challenges the portrayal of both Horman and Terrugi in “Missing” as passive outsiders. He describes both as committed political activists, likening them to the Americans who fought Franco’s fascist forces as part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. (The book’s title is a nod to “Spain in Our Hearts,” Pablo Neruda’s 1936 ode to those internationalist combatants.) Dinges details Horman’s efforts to raise money from friends in the United States to buy weapons for the Chilean resistance, and he describes Terrugi as a student militant who was a liberation theology-inspired disciple of Marx and Lenin.

But just why they were killed, unlike two dozen other Americans detained after the coup, is a question Chile in Their Hearts leaves unanswered. “The idea that they were somehow very different from all the other ones and that somehow the United States singled them out for murder, you would have to present some evidence in order to make the case for that,” Dinges told a recent gathering I attended in Berkeley. “And I did try to find the evidence, and it’s just not there.”

That might be seen as giving U.S. officials a pass for the deaths of Horman and Terrugi. But Dinges does not let those officials off so lightly. He excoriates them, both for their unwillingness to push for answers from Pinochet’s henchmen, and for hiding vital information from the two men’s families.

This book makes no apologies for debunking the story of U.S. complicity made popular by “Missing.” “It is my conviction,” Dinges writes, “that demonstrably erroneous portrayals of past events should not be allowed to stand because they fit a political narrative.” Both as a compelling page-turner and an overdue correction to the historical record, this important and thoroughly documented work amounts to a master class in investigative journalism.

David Welna reported from Chile during most of the 1980s for National Public Radio (NPR). He is the recipient of the Overseas Press Club award and the Latin American Studies Association’s annual award for distinguished coverage of Latin America. He currently lives in Palo Alto, California.

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