John Dinges
On 9/11, 1973 Chilean coup d'茅tat
John Dinges Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor of International Journalism Emeritus, Columbia University
John Dinges latest book is (UC Press, pub date April 29). It is the third in a trilogy on the dictatorships in South America.
Why read about those events now? Dinges' pitch for relevance is that the book is about the rise of authoritarianism, the collapse of democracy, and the death of the two young Americans in Chile. And it is about the quandary of being young in tumultuous times and wanting to do something. He was there. What he experienced in South America was a far more violent process than what we have so far in America, but first hand accounts of what it is really like to see a dictatorship up close are important to understand our current moment.
Frank and Charlie were killed by the military a days after the September 11, 1973, coup; Dinges was arrested several times and his house was raided twice-- not comparable to Frank and Charlie鈥檚 tragedy, but an illustration of the arbitrariness of the repression and the powerlessness of all of them in that situation.
He stayed on for 5 more years as a correspondent and have written some of the most definitive accounts of the Latin American dictatorships-- what Jon Lee Anderson of The New Yorker calls his "trilogy"-- investigating the assassination of Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier in Washington DC, the cross border killings of Operation Condor (in Europe, the U.S. and Latin America) and now the iconic case of the two murdered Americans, which became the movie Missing (with Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek, 1982). The movie captures the terror of the moment, but gets the two Americans death and life seriously wrong. John Dinges' book is the definitive investigation to solve the murders and correct the historical record about the U.S. role.
Most moving, however, is the story of these two young idealists who, as Dinges did, journeyed to Chile hoping to witness a revolution in democracy that would defeat poverty. The title, Chile in Their Hearts, "bespeaks my own nearly lifelong connection to Chile and my commitment to writing about the abuses of dictatorship", wrote John Dinges.
Dinges has specialized knowledge on all aspects of the coup鈥攖he US role and advance intelligence, what happened in the stadium and the mass killings, the presence of interrogators from other countries, etc. He uses the Horman-Teruggi case to tell the story of the coup in an accessible way. The movie Missing does that too, and effectively conveys the atmosphere of terror. But it is inaccurate in the way it portrays Frank and Charlie personally and politically, and it erroneously suggests the US Embassy may have had a role in killing them, an accusation that made sense in the passions of the 1973 moment. But his meticulous investigation of that issue shows definitively that the theory does not hold water. His investigation is based on Chilean court evidence that recently became available, hundreds of U.S. declassified records, and exclusive first hand accounts.
En espa帽ol:
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