2 Sentenced in Murders in Chile Coup

[Judi Lynn]

2 Sentenced in Murders in Chile Coup
By PASCALE BONNEFOY
JAN. 28, 2015

SANTIAGO, Chile — Two 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

More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/world/americas/2-sentenced-in-murders-in-chile-coup.html?_r=0

[leveymg]

1. Once again, the one who revealed the truth about CIA gets punished. This from 2/13/2000 NYT:

U.S. Victims of Chile's Coup: The Uncensored File
By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO
Published: February 13, 2000
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/13/world/us-victims-of-chile-s-coup-the-uncensored-file.html?pagewanted=2


Twenty-six years ago, as the forces of Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Socialist government of Salvador Allende, two American supporters of President Allende were killed in Chile under circumstances that stirred suspicions of C.I.A. involvement.

American officials categorically denied any role in the young men's deaths, which were dramatized in the 1982 movie ''Missing.''

Compelled by the Freedom of Information Act, the government in 1980 released the results of classified internal investigations, heavily censored in black ink, that appeared to clear the American and Chilean governments of any responsibility. . .

Captain Davis, now 74 and retired, said in a recent interview that he had nothing to do with the deaths and he appeared offended by the resurgence of questions about the killings. . .

It was not until 1976 that the State Department took a critical look at the killings. The move was prompted by a disaffected Chilean intelligence officer, Rafael Gonzalez, who told reporters that he had witnessed Mr. Horman being held prisoner by Chile's chief of intelligence.

Mr. Gonzalez quoted the intelligence chief as saying Mr. Horman ''had to disappear'' because he ''knew too much,'' and said a man he presumed was American was in the room.

Mr. Gonzalez also described a ''cozy relationship'' between American and Chilean intelligence services to destabilize the Allende government, and said that American operatives had even given their Chilean counterparts lists of suspected leftists to be rounded up in the first days of a military takeover.

(In its hearings, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found that the C.I.A. had in fact compiled arrest lists but said it had no evidence that they were passed to the Chileans. Those lists are among the documents the C.I.A. has not released.)

[Judi Lynn]

2. You've got it. It's sickening seeing it revealed the CIA had its own arrest list,

and impossible to buy their claim they had no intention of getting these people eliminated, as in the last paragraph of the excerpt.

They have operated utterly freely from the first. I wonder if they have any educated guesses over how many human lives they have destroyed all over the world.

So strange knowing that Captain Davis, up to his gnarly eyebrows in this torture/death business, spontaneously decided he thought it would be peachy keen to simply stay in Chile for the rest of his life and never return to the country he had shared with his victims and their families.

This info, is chilling, and excellent. Wouldn't it be great if we could expect this level of professionalism from the N.Y. Times as a standard practice?