Court Rules US Military Ordered Murder of Two Americans in Chile

By Pascale Boonefoy, The New York Times

30 January 15

wo former Chilean intelligence officials have been sentenced in the murders of two American citizens shortly after the 1973 coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

Pedro Espinoza, a retired army intelligence officer, was sentenced to seven years in the killings of the Americans, Frank Teruggi and Charles Horman, while Rafael González, who worked for Chilean Air Force intelligence, was sentenced to two years of police supervision as an accomplice in the Horman murder. The 276-page ruling was issued on Jan. 9 but was not made public until Wednesday, after all parties had been notified.

When he was killed, Mr. Horman, 31, a filmmaker and journalist, had been living in Chile with his wife, Joyce, researching a political murder and writing scripts for the state-run Chile Films. Mr. Teruggi, 24, a graduate of the California Institute of Technology, was studying economics and collaborated in a weekly news digest. The Horman case inspired the award-winning 1982 Costa-Gavras film “Missing.”

Chilean intelligence officials considered the men’s activities subversive and ordered their detention, the sentence says. The decision to kill Mr. Horman, it concludes, was made by the Intelligence Department of Chile’s Joint Chiefs of Staff and “carried out by the Military Intelligence Batallion or the Army Intelligence Headquarters.” Mr. Teruggi was taken to the National Stadium in Santiago and was tortured and apparently killed there.

The ruling said both crimes were the result of a “secret investigation” of Americans’ political activities in Chile by the United States Military Group in Santiago, commanded by a Navy captain, Ray E. Davis. The information was passed on to Chilean officials. In 2011, Mr. Davis was indicted, and Chile requested his extradition from the United States, where he was thought to be living. But Mr. Davis had been admitted to a nursing home in Chile, and he died there in 2013.

Mr. Teruggi’s sister, Janis Teruggi Page, said, “Frank, a charitable and peace-loving young man, was the victim of a calculated crime by the Chilean military, but the question of U.S. complicity remains yet to be answered.” Each victim’s family was awarded $325,000 in damages.

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