bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1987) — Summer 1987 // Été 1987, pp. 40–41
On September 11, 1973 a military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government of President Salvador Allende in Chile. The coup was unlike most in Latin America in that bloody fighting continued for several days and the armed forces pursued real and suspected supporters of the former government with a fierce determination.
Summer came early to Santiago that year. Dolgin and I were taking our evening drink reflecting on the day’s events and the human misery we had encountered. Jarvis, a close friend, working for the Ford Foundation, approached across the hill, sat on the patio, looking more forlorn and ashen than usual. “Will it ever end?”, he asked. “Why, what horror stories have you heard today?”, we asked in return. “Do either of you know an American journalist called Charles Horman? He’s been in Santiago for several months and has not been seen for weeks. His father’s in Chile looking for him.” I was blank. Dolgin thought for a moment and said, “I don’t know him but I heard from a friend today that he’s dead.”
This small seemingly unimportant conversation was to take on rather greater importance in the weeks and years that followed.
Costa-Gavras has produced three films in the last twenty years — Zeta, Estado de Sitio, and Missing — each of which have dramatized political events in three small peripheral countries — Greece, Uruguay, and Chile. Each of the films purports to give an accurate historical account — with a central human story — of a military coup in each of these countries. Each film possesses a verisimilitude which is very persuasive and has convinced many that the depiction and interpretation of the events in the film are accurate.
More serious analysts and observers present at these events have been unwilling to suspend their personal memories and knowledge in the interest of high drama, and remain unimpressed with the accuracy and the only barely disguised Marxism underlying Costa-Gavras’ interpretation of these events.
What happened to Charles Horman and why did Costa-Gavras seize on his story? Those of you who saw the film, Missing, or read the earlier book, will recall the scene in the Ford Foundation offices: the distraught father, Ed Horman, played by Jack Lemmon in one of his most overwrought performances, pleading with Jarvis for more information on who told him his son was dead; Jarvis refusing to reveal Dolgin’s name allowing only that the information came from an English-speaking Embassy. The subsequent scenes where Horman senior searches the back streets of Santiago questioning citizen and soldier alike for information on his son are equally compelling: his pleas to wood the stadium.
All of this was very good and rivetting theatre. Coming as it did in the wake of the Watergate scandal and the Cambodian bombing revelations it added to the canon of perfidy of the Nixon government. More conspiracy, more evil made flesh, more cancer to be rooted out and destroyed. Unfortunately while the film made very good cinema, it made very bad history.
Ed Horman never spoke to prisoners in the national stadium; bodies were never piled like sacks of potatoes in the morgue; and the U.S. government was never involved in Charles Horman’s death or in a conspiracy with the Chilean authorities to cover it up.
I know that the U.S. government knew nothing of Horman’s death or of the whereabouts of his body, until it was informed by Jarvis as a result of the conversation which the latter had with Dolgin and me. Jarvis couldn’t say where his information came from, not because of any real or implied cover-up, but because he had agreed with Dolgin not to in order to protect the latter’s Chilean friend. Costa-Gavras himself knew or ought to have known from the book on which he based his film that the U.S. government knew nothing. It may be true that the U.S. government backed the coup with political support and perhaps funds but it must stretch the credulity of even those – and there are many — who yearn for tales of conspiracies perpetrated by the Nixon government to hold to the thesis that the U.S. government attempted to cover up the circumstance of Horman’s death. Perhaps Costa-Gavras was only using artistic licence to establish a link between U.S. involvement in the coup itself and its knowledge of Horman’s death, but his misuse of the Horman story is dishonourable as it does great injustice to Horman. It perverts the circumstances of his death in the name of a cause for which Horman from all available evidence had no interest. The Chilean military – whatever evils it committed in the name of whatever star it followed — was certainly strong enough to carry out the coup itself, and given the tenderness of U.S. public opinion would hardly have been perverse enough to knowingly kill an American citizen.
How did Charles Horman die? I don’t know, and frankly I don’t think anyone knows. Most likely it was a Chilean soldier who killed him and if so he was almost certainly unaware of Horman’s nationality. The exact circumstances of Charles Horman’s death will then forever remain a mystery. He was but one of thousands caught up in a mindless butchery that was not his struggle. A careless flip comment to a frightened eighteen-year-old conscript with a machine gun would have been enough. Running across the street after curfew taught many innocents an unforgettable lesson. Thousands were arrested, thousands killed either in combat, or in captivity. Horman was but another statistic, another face to be counted when the shooting ended. Is he any more important than the individual Chileans who lost their lives?
Costa-Gavras’ attempt to make the Horman story an arching symbol for the perfidy of the Nixon government and its involvement in the Chilean coup fails. It fails because the U.S. government did not know that Charles Horman was dead until the Embassy was informed by Jarvis, and thereafter the officers in the Embassy moved heaven and earth to discover the whereabouts of his body and have it returned to the United States.
Dolgin and I have been asked many times by U.S. journalists researching the Horman story why we did not inform the U.S. Embassy immediately when we heard of Horman’s death and why we did not obtain more information from the Chilean who had told us of his death. Frankly I cannot remember the precise reasoning behind our decision, perhaps there was none. We were caught up in the middle of a great chaos with great suffering all around and it never occurred to us that the U.S. government wouldn’t know or wouldn’t have been able to find out the whereabouts of one of its own citizens. Our principle concern was to protect the Chilean who had told Dolgin – a man who was in danger of losing his occupation and perhaps his liberty. We did not wish to risk prejudicing further his life or that of his family. Otto’s otto’s service centre
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Telex: 053-4417 There are few lessons for me in the story of the death of Charles Horman, or of his father’s fruitless search, and my marginal involvement in its revelation. Perhaps I had become callous, unmoved by individual sorrow in the face of the prevailing general calamity. I recall another scene from the Embassy office on the morning of the coup. An old man on crutches, one leg missing, was attempting awkwardly to cross the street to skirt the débris and the gun fire from the soldiers firing at the palace. He was thirty yards into his journey when he was shot and fell into the dirt. My thoughts went not to him but to his dog who raced beside him and escaped still living. Perhaps it is only to the living we owe allegiance and with whom we must make common cause, and we ought to allow the dead to lie in peace and to allow their lives to be their only monument.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 5, No. 2 (1987) — Summer 1987 // Été 1987, pp. 40–41. Read the rest of this issue →
