Chilean judge sentences murderers of US-American citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi

[In the exposure of the murders, 4 decades ago, of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, the US-spnsored Pinochet coup against Chilean President Salvador Allende, the role of the US and the terrorism master-minded by Henry Kissinger came into public view.  The fact that the murderers were not successfully prosecuted for 41 years is proof that US control  has been effective, even long after the fact.  And now the Chilean prosecution aims to put some of this embarassing history behind them as they sentence two of the murderous perpetrators.  —  Frontlines ed.]

Tlaxcala, 2/23/2015 Translated by  Richard Ferguson, Edited by  Supriyo Chatterjee

Almost 42 years after the events, Special Judge Jorge Zepeda Arancibia sentenced two intelligence officers for the murders of US-Americans Charles Edmond Horman, a 31-year-old journalist, and Frank Randall Teruggi Bombatch, a 24-year-old student, shot in the Estadio Nacional (National Stadium) days into the coup headed by Pinochet.

The 276-page judgment sentences Army intelligence official Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, who serves several other sentences for assassinations, to seven years of prison for the murders,while Air Force officer Rafael Agustín González Berdugo will serve two years of probation as an accomplice to Horman’s homicide. Judge Zepeda’s exhaustive investigations confirmed the direct intervention of the United States in the coup through Operation Unitas, carried out in Valparaíso simultaneously with the offensive, and further revealed the ruthless persecution that the United States ordered the Chilean intelligence services to undertake against American radicals in Chile sympathetic to Salvador Allende, or simply interested in learning at close quarters and living among the peaceful revolutionary process led by the Head of State overthrown by it. In the Estadio Nacional up to 24 detained Americans were registered (Horman and Teruggi weren’t), both men and women, including students, academics, writers and two Maryknoll priests. Charles Horman                                                  Frank Teruggi The instigators of and accessories to this persecution of American citizens were their fellow countryman, Ray Elliots Charles, Marine Captain and chief of the American military mission, supported by the Ambassador Nathaniel Davis. Far from protecting their compatriots, they covered up the murders and detentions of Americans, going as far as providing false information to family members like Edmund Horman, Charles’s father, who moved to Chile in search of his son.

Henry Kissinger and Chile’s 9/11/73

Henry Kissinger and General Agostin Pinochet

13 September 2010. A World to Win News Service.

On 10 September in Geneva Henry Kissinger was greeted by jeers of ″murderer″ from over 100 demonstrators, mainly Chilean, as well as Argentines. The man who made the 11 September 1973 military coup in Chile possible, Kissinger had come to Switzerland to deliver the keynote speech on “Power shifts and security” at a meeting of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

As National Security Adviser and Secretary of State for U.S. Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, the list of Kissinger’s crimes is long. Although awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Vietnam war, he had been a main architect of that war and a long-time advocate of using American troops and airpower to force Vietnam to give in to a political settlement acceptable to the U.S. To achieve that goal, he advocated spreading the war throughout Southeast Asia. He was behind the bombing that destroyed much of Cambodia (a campaign kept secret from an increasingly antiwar public in the U.S.) and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970 that sparked an unprecedented broadening of the antiwar movement.