Interviews and Reviews for
Chile in Their Hearts
For further information about events, speaking invitations or anything else, please contact me at jcdinges@gmail.com). Recent and pending speaking events are posted here.
Reviews, Interviews and excerpts:
Times Literary Supplement July 25, 2025
Considering the Chilean coup of 1973
By Benjamin Shull
In 1972, the French-Greek film-maker Costa-Gavras was in Chile to shoot a movie based on a radical Uruguayan group’s real-life kidnapping and killing of a US official. Charles Horman, an American who had recently relocated to Chile, auditioned to play an extra. He didn’t get the part. “I was too young and way too scraggly for anything they had in mind”, he explained to a friend.
Yet Horman was to be the subject of a future Costa-Gavras film, Missing (1982), which dramatized the story of his detainment and murder in Chilean custody after Augusto Pinochet’s coup in September 1973. …Chile in Their Hearts [is] a meticulous and absorbing investigation into the deaths of Horman and Frank Teruggi, another young American in Chile. …
The author’s dissection of the case reads like a riveting true-crime work, played out at the level of high geopolitics. …
Remarkably well sourced and fair, Chile in Their Hearts is a memorable work about a lamentable historical episode.
___________________
Dinges’s “conclusions are triumphs for intellectual honesty.”
U.S. agents have long been accused of complicity in the murder
of two Americans in Chile.
A two-decade investigation suggests the claim is false.
(Full text)
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 way.” 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.”
“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,” writes Mr. Dinges. He faults U.S. officials for failing to investigate the two men’s disappearances promptly, or level with the Horman family, and for acquiescing in the Pinochet regime’s coverup. But more than 100 interviews and two decades of scouring U.S. and Chilean archives, including the mass of CIA and State Department records declassified since the Cold War’s end, “failed to show any U.S. involvement in the deaths of the two Americans.”
A lifelong man of the left who came to Chile at the same time and for similar reasons Horman and Teruggi did, Mr. Dinges, 83, had found the hypothesis of the Costa-Gavras film plausible and “set out to find the evidence to prove it.” His conclusions are triumphs for intellectual honesty.
“It is my conviction that demonstrably erroneous portrayals of past events should not be allowed to stand because they fit a political narrative,” he writes. U.S. officials who long denied the allegations—including Nathaniel Davis, the U.S. ambassador to Chile in 1973, who once sued to clear his name—have their vindication.
The “man who knew too much” theory originated in interviews Rafael González, a defector from Chilean intelligence, gave U.S. journalists in 1976: González claimed to have seen Horman in Chilean military custody, with a U.S. official present, and to have witnessed a Chilean general order his death. As Mr. Dinges shows, the entire story was a fabrication. González concocted it to help him gain asylum abroad. He admitted as much 25 years later, when facing legal jeopardy under Chile’s restored democracy, for having put himself at the scene of the crime. Mr. Dinges skeptically scrutinizes both González’s original story and his retraction—and verifies the latter.
So much for the words on screen just after the opening credits of “Missing”: “This film is based on a true story. The incidents and facts are documented.”
Why did the Chilean military target Horman and Teruggi? Mr. Dinges’s reporting on this point proves especially revelatory. Far from being ingenuous idealists, as “Missing” portrays them, the two had been radicalized by U.S. protest movements in the 1960s. In Chile, they moved in revolutionary leftist circles, with Teruggi especially close to the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, or MIR, a Cuban-backed Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group. Founded in 1965, the MIR showed its contempt for bourgeois democracy by mounting its first armed actions against a reformist Christian Democratic government prior to Allende’s narrow 1970 win.
Under Allende, the MIR played down armed struggle in return for official toleration, but it continued to get support from Cuba and exert leftward pressure on Allende’s fragile multiparty coalition. The MIR helped provoke the coup by orchestrating seizures of factories and land and trying to infiltrate the military. Allende’s indulgence of the group was one of several ways—economic mismanagement was another—in which he contributed to his own downfall.
Teruggi lived with MIR leaders, petitioned for membership and took a pseudonym, “Alejandro.” As coup rumblings increased, Horman spent part of August 1973 in the U.S. raising money for weapons that “could be used in defense of the workers’ movement in Chile,” as Mr. Dinges puts it. The military targeted MIR militants and other leftists for arrest and summary execution in the immediate aftermath of the coup. It seems likely Horman and Teruggi were swept up with them.
It’s at this point that Mr. Dinges stops reconsidering his priors, alas. He praises Horman and Teruggi as “noble” “partisans” who saw Chile as a “model for other poor countries and perhaps even for the United States.” In truth, the Allende government itself was chaotic and provocative; shortly before the coup, Chile’s Chamber of Deputies condemned its constitutional and legal violations by a vote of 81-47.
The Americans’ political affiliations cannot justify their murder. Fellow-traveling with MIR or armed workers, however, was as misguided, in its way, as the Stalinism of the Spanish Civil War’s “internationalists”—to whom Mr. Dinges approvingly compares Horman and Teruggi.
Many Americans have gone abroad to support revolutionary utopias, only to end up disillusioned. Sometimes, erstwhile comrades imprisoned or killed them: William Morgan perished in front of a Cuban firing squad; Lovett-Fort Whiteman vanished into the Soviet gulag; Sidney Rittenberg spent 16 of his 35 years in China in solitary confinement. Which raises a question: What would have become of the internationalists in Chile if their side had prevailed?
Mr. Lane, the author of “The Day Freedom Died” and “Freedom’s Detective,” is a columnist for the Free Press.
Appeared in the July 2, 2025, print edition as ‘The Perils Of Activism’
_____
The WSJ review was picked up or commented upon in several Spanish language publications:
Radio Bio Bio (Chile), July 2: Libro niega complicidad de agentes de EEUU en la muerte de dos estadounidenses durante la dictadura
“En su investigación, Dinges aclara que efectivamente EEUU tiene una ‘responsabilidad indiscutible’ en allanar y apoyar la dictadura de Pinochet ‘sin tener en cuenta los crímenes masivos contra los derechos humanos que cometió’.”
Nueva Revista, July 4. La verdad sobre «Missing»/Desaparecido
“John Dinges, tras veinte años de investigación y más de cien entrevistas, concluye que esa acusación [de la película “Missing”] es falsa: no hubo implicación directa estadounidense en sus muertes. Lo que sí hubo fue negligencia, secretismo y una historia fabricada por un desertor de la inteligencia chilena.”
__________
The Coop Scoop by Marc Cooper, July 1, 2025
Strongly Suggested Summer Reading
“Chile In Their Hearts is the first serious book to examine the killings and is magnificently reported — so it does make great mystery writing, as John is also a talented wordsmith.”
“Dinges’ account … reveals how Chilean military forces had their own agency and how these two Americans fell to the blood frenzy in the first weeks of the military dictatorship. It also details exactly what role U.S. officials played in obstructing the search for their whereabouts and did their best to cover Pinochet’s ass AFTER the murders.”
_________
National Security Archive, May 7, 2025
New Book Revisits Murder of Two U.S. Citizens After Chilean Military Coup
“Archive Publishes Key Documents on Case of Charles Horman and
Frank Teruggi, Executed in National Stadium by Pinochet’s Forces. Author John Dinges Challenges Premise of Oscar-winning Film, Missing, That Horman Was Targeted Because He “Knew Too Much” About U.S. Role”.
_____________
Counterpunch, May 7, 2025
Killed by the Counterrevolutionary Coup: Chile 1973
“Chile in Their Hearts reads like a nuanced crime novel that tells the story of soulless bureaucrats, hopeful revolutionaries and bloodthirsty fascists.”
…an important addition to the history of Chile and the history of socialism and its enemies.”
“Dinges’s investigative work includes helping establish three Chilean journalism organizations devoted to exposing the activities of the Pinochet regime, including a magazine called APSI that operated as an opposition magazine during the most violent years of the dictatorship…In other words, his credentials are sound.”
__________
John Dinges’s Revisionist Account of Missing
Steven Volk, April 29, 2025
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/chile-coup-democracy-historical-memory/
“For many readers of this prodigiously researched volume, Chile in Their Hearts may read like a true-crime novel, as the author examines why the two men were targeted and evaluates each of the possible suspects to their murders…”
“Dinges is quite convincing in criticizing US and Chilean investigators for abandoning clearly promising leads that have long since gone cold.”
__________
Spytalk, April 28, 2025. Excerpt from Chapter 6, “Valparaiso.”
Spytalk writes: “In his new book, Chile in Their Hearts, John Dinges, himself a young journalist in Chile during the coup and its violent aftermath, uncovered circumstances and facts of their cases that contradict the widely accepted version.”
__________________
Foreign Affairs, May/June 2025
Dinges has written widely on Washington’s complicity in the murderous activities of South American military juntas in the 1970s. In Chile, immediately following the ruthless 1973 coup, the military executed two young Americans, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi. The 1982 film Missing, directed by Costa-Gavras, brought global attention to the case and implied U.S. involvement in Horman’s demise.
With his unique credibility on the topic, Dinges eschews ideological presumptions for a dogged, comprehensive investigation of the facts. His courageous findings debunk the conventional wisdom reflected and amplified by Missing: there is no evidence that the U.S. government was involved.
Just why the soldiers targeted Horman and Teruggi remains a mystery; Dinges suggests, in his sensitive portraits of the two committed partisans, that their deep involvement with left-wing politics in Chile may have put them at risk. He also notes that the U.S. embassy in Santiago failed to actively investigate the whereabouts of the two missing American citizens, perhaps bound by then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger’s directives not to criticize Washington’s ally, Chilean leader General Augusto Pinochet.
Foreign Affairs, May/June 2025
___________________
Latin America Daily Brief, April 16, 2025
Chile
- In a new book, journalist John Dinges details findings that the US embassy in Chile conducted a sham investigation of the kidnapping of the two U.S. citizens in 1973, in the wake of the coup against Salvador Allende, and deceived the victims’ families, in their effort to follow Henry Kissinger’s order to defend the new military regime and avoid pressuring it about human rights. (Ciper)
__________________
Connectas, April 8, 2025
El último libro de John Dinges, reputado periodista de investigación, desenterró la verdad tras un crimen de Estado ocurrido hace más de 40 años, durante la dictadura en Chile. Hablamos con él sobre cómo seguir las pistas de un caso que parecía cerrado años atrás.
CIPER, March 27, 2025, Introduction to Chile in Their Hearts, extract published in Spanish. (John Dinges is a co-founder of CIPER, an investigative news site based in Santiago.)
Interview De Fogón en Fogón, Podcast, March 3, 2025 (Spanish).
Chile en el Corazón, (Spanish edition)
Interview De Fogón en Fogón, Podcast with Roberto Sabán, Podcast (Spanish)
on Declassification of JFK documents, March 19, 2025.
Interview about SpyTalk report. Attacks against Cuban Embassy in Washington raise concerns of resurgence of covert action under Trump. Entrevista sobre Atentados en la Embajada de Cuba en Washington, De Fogón en Fogón, Podcast, with Roberto Sabán, March 15, 2025 (Spanish
La Nueva Mirada, March 6, 2025 (Text and photos, Spanish)
Julie Gammack’s Iowa Potluck, February 3, 2025. John Dinges describes the fall of democracy in Chile and the creation of repressive authoritarianism, with its frightening parallels to what is happening in the United States.
Completed Events
—May 2, Private book party, Washington DC
—May 5, 6-8 pm: University of California, Washington Center
1608 Rhode Island Avenue, NW, 1ST floor, Washington, DC
Talk and discussion with students in the University of California resident program.
—May 7, Private book party.
—May 8, 9 am, KPFA 89.3, author interview on Ethelbert Miller show.
—May 15, New York City, private book party.
—May 22, 7 pm, Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary & Garden Arts Bookstore, 2904 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA
—May 25, 10:15-11:45, LASA Congress, San Francisco Marriott Marquis, 780 Mission St, San Francisco, CA
Panel: “The Case of Missing: A New Investigation Shows How Missing, the Most Famous Movie on Chile, Got it Wrong.”
Panelists John Dinges, Columbia University
Marian Schlotterbeck, UC Davis
Steve Volk, Oberlin College
Peter Kornbluh, National Security Archive, Catholic University of Chile
Antonia Fonck, PhD candidate, Catholic University of Chile
—May 25, 6 pm. La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, CA.
—May 27, 6:30 pm, Santa Monica, CA: Diesel bookstore in Brentwood, 225 26th Street Suite 33, Santa Monica, CA. Author in conversation with Suzi Weissman.
—June 12, Celebration of Chile in Their Hearts, Residence of the Ambassador of Chile.