01-07-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘Chile in Their Hearts' Review: The Perils of Activism
The events of 1973 in Chile—the violent military overthrow of Salvador Allende, the country's elected Marxist president, and the establishment of a 17-year dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet—rank among the 20th century's great political dramas. For the political left, the wound opened in Santiago 52 years ago still stings, inflamed by anger at the U.S. for trying to destabilize the Allende government before the coup and supporting Pinochet afterward.
A subplot involves Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, two young Americans who came south to experience the revolution-by-election known as 'the Chilean process.' Soldiers arrested and murdered Horman and Teruggi, then 31 and 24 respectively, shortly after the coup. Many on the left have long believed that pro-coup U.S. officials were complicit in their deaths.
That suspicion reached the wider public via the Oscar-winning 1982 film 'Missing,' directed and co-written by Costa-Gavras, the Greek-French auteur. In the picture, Horman's father, played by Jack Lemmon, goes to Santiago in search of his son, only to realize that his son has been killed and that American diplomats are stonewalling him. The film strongly implies that Horman, a freelance journalist, had discovered U.S. involvement in the coup and had to be killed lest he report it.
In 'Chile in Their Hearts,' John Dinges—a longtime reporter on Latin America for the Washington Post and other news organizations—renders his verdict on the U.S. role: a definitive 'not guilty.'
