WASHINGTON -- U.S. intelligence agents may have been involved in the murder of an American journalist in the chaotic days following the 1973 military coup in Chile, a declassified State Department document suggests. Not so, says the CIA.
After the first document was released Friday -- among a batch of 1,100 government records -- the spy agency quickly released a separate memo from the 1970s stating it had "played no role" in the death of free-lance journalist Charles Horman.Horman's neighbors saw Chilean security forces arrest him at his home about a week after the Sept. 11, 1973, coup, according to his widow, Joyce Horman of New York City. She said he was taken to a stadium where thousands of leftists and suspected leftists were harbored, and she believes he was killed on Sept. 20.
The State Department and CIA documents were made public in Washington on the same day a magistrate in London ruled that former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet -- who overthrew Marxist President Salvador Allende in the coup -- be extradited to Spain to stand trial on charges of torture and human rights offenses.
Following Pinochet's arrest last October in London, President Clinton ordered U.S. government agencies to declassify documents relating to human rights abuses, terrorism and other acts of political violence in Chile between 1968 and 1990. America's actions in Chile before and after Pinochet's ouster of Allende are among the most debated aspects of U.S. policy toward Latin America of the past half century.
Joyce Horman, at a news conference in Washington, read excerpts from a letter State Department officials wrote Aug. 25, 1976, to Harry Shlaudeman, then the top department official responsible for Latin America. The letter was written by the head of the department's office of Chilean affairs, Rudy Fimbres, along with R.S. Driscoll and W.V. Robertson, two other department officials.
"This case remains bothersome. The connotations for the Executive (branch) are not good," the letter said. "In the Hill, academic community, the press and the Horman family the intimations are of negligence on our part, or worse, complicity in Horman's death."