Charles Horman was one of two North Americans who were caught in the wave of executions which followed the overthrow of the Salvador Allende government in September 1973. This volume attempts to make some sense out of the circumstances surrounding that death.
The thirty-one-year-old Horman and a traveling companion were caught in Valparaiso at the time of the coup and the book suggests that they came into contact with some U.S. officials who talked too freely about the U.S. role in the coup. Hence Horman was marked for execution and the United States Embassy did little to prevent this. The alternative, and less conspiratorial, thesis would be that Horman was incriminated (in the eyes of the DINA) by some research he was doing on the assassination of General Rene Schneider. Thus he got caught in the ruthless net that extended to so many Chileans suspected of being political. But even this interpretation does little to exonerate some individuals in the U.S. Embassy who were clearly unwilling to fully press the search for Horman. Although it is impossible to know what “really” happened, by the end of this book author Thomas Hauser has made a rather convincing case for his thesis.
What will be frightening to scholars who do research in Latin America is how little Horman had done to provoke his killing. Regardless of which thesis one uses to account for his death, Horman clearly got caught in a chain of circumstances that eventually resulted in his disappearance and execution. It was a chain that could have grabbed almost any scholar who was in Chile at the time.
