Today in Labor History September 20, 1973: Frank Teruggi, U.S. journalist and member of the IWW, was taken from his home in Chile and assassinated in the National Stadium, after Augusto Pinochet launched a coup against the democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende on September 9, 1973. During the 17 years of dictatorship, over 3,000 Chileans were murdered or disappeared, and over 200,000 were driven into exile. Turuggi’s colleague, U.S. journalist Charles Horman, was executed at the stadium one day earlier, and famed Chilean folk singer, Victor Jara, was tortured and executed there on September 16. Pinochet was responsible for the murder of other Americans, too, like Ronni Moffett, who was killed during the assassination of Chilean economist Orlando Letelier, on the streets of Washington, D.C., on September 26, 1976. This assassination was orchestrated by Operation Condor (1975-1983), a campaign of terror and assassinations by the right-wing dictatorships of South America that was backed and funded by the U.S. Condor, which ended with the fall of the Argentine dictatorship in 1983, was responsible for the assassination of up to 80,000 suspected leftists and the incarceration of over 400,000 political prisoners.
The film “Missing” suggested that Horman was murdered to keep him quiet after he had uncovered proof of U.S. complicity in the Pinochet coup. It was not until the late 1990s, that President Clinton finally released classified documents confirming that the U.S. and CIA had been complicit in the coup, which had been overseen U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. The Pinochet government was advised by the “Chicago Boys,” economists from the University of Chicago, including Milton Friedman, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in economics.
In November 2011, a Chilean judge indicted Ray E. Davis, commander of the U.S. Military Group in Chile during the time of the coup, along with several Chilean military officers, in the murders of Teruggi and Horman. Davis was never arrested and died in a Santiago nursing home in 2013. The Chilean officers were convicted and sentenced to up 15 years and ordered to pay up to $200,000 to the widows of the two U.S. journalists.
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