This interview is also available on podcast platforms and Rumble.

The meddling and infiltration of governments in Latin America by the United States is a huge chapter of its 20th century history. One of the most egregious and blatant examples of intervention was in Chile, where the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende was overthrown by the CIA-backed military coup in 1973.

The ensuing years saw violent repression of student activists, labor leaders, journalists, leftwing politicians and dissidents at the helm of a brutal military dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet. Among the victims of this ruthless crackdown were two American citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi.

Joining host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report is journalist John Dinges who, in his new book Chile in Their Hearts: The Untold Story of Two Americans Who Went Missing After the Coup, dives into their involvement in Chile at a time where grand hope quickly turned into great despair.

Buy my new book “A Genocide Foretold"

Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos, Sofia Menemenlis and Victor Castellanos

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

Transcript

Chris Hedges

In the late 1960s and early 1970s thousands of young people flocked to Chile, many of them fleeing rightwing dictatorships in countries such as Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. Chile’s democracy stood in stark contrast to the police states they came from, ones that engaged in severe political repression, blacklisting, political assassinations, torture and the disappearances ultimately of tens of thousands of student activists, labor leaders, journalists, leftwing politicians and dissidents.

In 1970 the socialist Salvador Allende was elected Chile’s president. His election saw a further influx of leftwing Americans, many part of the anti-war movement in the United States, as well as Europeans, swelling the numbers of foreigners to some 20,000. Being in Chile then, as John Dinges writes, was to experience the most exciting political experiment in Latin America, one that rivaled Fidel Castro’s victory in 1959 in Cuba.

Dinges, who worked as a reporter in Chile from 1972 to 1978, in his book Chile in Their Hearts looks at this period of initial promise and then dark tragedy when Allende was overthrown and killed or committed suicide in a CIA-backed military coup in 1973. He focuses on the lives and execution by the Chilean military of two idealistic young Americans, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi.

Joining me to discuss his book is John Dinges who was a correspondent for The Washington Post and later managing editor of National Public Radio. He is also professor emeritus of Journalism at Columbia University. His other books include Assassination on Embassy Row, Our Man in Panama and The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents.

John, in the beginning of the book, you lay the kind of social climate, cultural, political climate, and I thought that was very important. Frank [Teruggi] came out of a religious background. Charles [Horman] went to Harvard, but one of the things that you, I think correctly, point out is that these were not, as portrayed in the 1982 movie “Missing,” which was based on the murder and disappearance of Charles, these were not political neophytes.

So talk about, you were there, you arrived in Chile, what is it, a year before the coup? And I want you, because both of us went to Latin America, I went a little later, but we both started as seminarians. So talk about the kind of fertile ground and the importance of Chile and the climate at the time.

John Dinges

Well, we went to Chile because we had hope and that’s a religious term as well as a political term. We came out of the 1960s protest movement. I was a journalist. I had left the seminary in 1967. I was studying in Austria and having to avoid the draft and avoid being sent to Vietnam, that really radicalized me.

And as I became a journalist, I began to focus on Latin America. When Allende was elected in 1970, I was working the desk at the newspaper in Iowa, and I wrote the headline. And the headline said, “Marxist Victor.” And it’s a front page story.

Maybe it was my decision, I can’t remember, to put it on the front page, but I was intensely interested in what was going on as a young journalist in Iowa. So Charles Horman is kind of a reflection of what I was going through. Also a journalist, a freelancer. In other words, we had some legitimate journalistic credentials, but at the same time, we weren’t establishment journalists.

We both went down there as freelancers. Neither of us was particularly successful in those years in terms of getting a lot of things published. But we were very interested in documenting what was going on during the Allende government. We thought that what we had failed to accomplish, what the progressive movement had failed to accomplish in the United States in the 1960s, could be recovered and could be successful in Latin America.

The idea that Latin America could be a model for the rest of the continent, maybe even for other countries around the world, by combining democracy and social change was a magnificent idea that made us change our lives to go down there. Thousands of Europeans, Americans, Latin Americans, we flocked to Chile thinking that this could be the future.

Chris Hedges

And let’s talk about what the climate was like. You’ve written three books on Chile. It’s kind of dominated a lot of your own work. I want to talk about that at the end because you stayed on and lived under the [Augusto] Pinochet dictatorship. There are probably some parallels to what we’re undergoing currently in the United States.

But let’s talk about that. I mean, immediately when he’s elected, [Richard] Nixon and [Henry] Kissinger target Allende and they actually are hoping for a military coup. They are assassinating… And we should be clear, Chile had a functioning democracy, was it for decades? I mean, was it 50, 100 years or something?

John Dinges

More than a hundred years.

Chris Hedges

More than a hundred years. So they had a functioning democracy. Allende is elected in a fair election. And what were the kinds of programs he intended to institute and why did he immediately earn the animus of the US government?

John Dinges

Allende’s program was a revolution with vino tinto, with red wine and empanadas. It was a very popular, very populist appeal. It called for a kind of democratic socialism, not like in Europe, certainly not like the communist experiments in Eastern Europe, but a mixed economy, really coming out of the United Nations economic development ideas of the 1950s.

The idea of state intervention to create a manufacturing base in a Latin American country and at the same time to change agriculture away from the large farms that were dominated by large owners, very rich owners who did not farm the land productively. So agrarian reform on the one hand and industrial development on the other hand, these are the two legs of the experiment.

The social part of it, the cultural part was, I think, maybe not more important, but it was the thing that came across to us more immediately. It was literature. It was [Chilean poet and former Senator of the Republic of Chile] Pablo Neruda. It was music. There was a revolution in music, popular music. The country had become very liberal, almost like the counterculture in the United States. Sexual mores, for example