For 30 years, the predominant theory surrounding the execution of Horman and Teruggi was that the order was given by General
Augusto Lutz during his period as head of the Directorate of Army Intelligence (Spanish: Dirección de Inteligencia del Ejército or DINE), also known as the Army Intelligence Service (Spanish: Servicio de Inteligencia Militar, or SIM). In 2003, judge
Juan Guzmán was removed from the case after which it was assigned to judge Jorge Zepeda. Zepeda's opinion represented a break with the previous investigation. His view was that Department II (Intelligence) of the General Staff of the National Defense (Spanish: Estado Mayor de la Defensa Nacional, or EMDN) would have been the organization responsible for Horman's death. This theory has been questioned from various standpoints.
Augusto Lutz Since the 1970s, the Lutz-Herrera family has insisted that Lutz could not have been involved in the murder of opponents of the Chilean dictatorship, given his opposition to the Pinochet regime. They claim that his death was precisely caused by his opposition to Pinochet and
DINA. Researchers, including
Patricia Verdugo (
Interferencia secreta), Ignacio González Camus (
El día que murió Allende),
Mónica González (
La conjura: los mil y un días del golpe), and Ascanio Cavallo, Manuel Salazar, and Óscar Sepúlveda (
La historia oculta del régimen militar), who have examined the coup d'état conspiracy, argue that General Lutz was not assigned any role in it. After the coup, Lutz interceded on behalf of various detainees, as well as others he had helped to free. Lutz did not last more than a month as Director of Army Intelligence; by the following year, he was found dead in mysterious circumstances. Judge Zepeda's ruling noted that "the decision to execute Charles Horman, a foreign detainee, was made by Department II of the EMDN."
Pedro Espinoza Judge Zepeda named Pedro Espinoza, DINA's Vice-Director, as the individual responsible for ordering the execution of Charles Horman; however, critics said no evidence was provided to show that the murder had been committed at the National Stadium or that Espinoza was there at the time of the murder. None of the thousands of detainees held at the stadium gave testimony (in this or in other cases) stating that they had seen or heard about Espinoza being there; many said they had seen Jorge Espinoza, the Army colonel in charge of the stadium.
Peter Kornbluh, a researcher linked to the Horman Foundation and the director of the
National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project, has stated that "the details of his death and why he was killed are still murky" and that although the judge quoted several declassified documents in his ruling, “none of them tie Davis or Espinoza to the crimes”, adding that, "the judge will have to present concrete evidence". Even
Punto Final, a newspaper linked to the
Revolutionary Left Movement (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario, MIR), regretted that in his ruling, Zepeda did not reveal the exact role that Espinoza played in the murders of Horman and
Frank Teruggi or what his functions had been at the time. The weekly newspaper
El Siglo, the official organ of the Central Committee of the
Chilean Communist Party, called the judgment a disaster and implied that Pedro Espinoza's imputation was a smoke screen designed to cover up the search for the truth. “Judge Zepeda's ruling provides no justice to the victims, nor does it provide the truth to their relatives and to the community". On December 30, 2011, a Court of Appeals upheld the ruling, with the dissenting judge stating that no link had been shown to connect Espinoza to the crime. In January 2015, Espinoza was sentenced to serve seven years for Hormann's murder. Due to the accuracy of González's reports, the head of the EMDN's intelligence service scheduled an appointment with the Undersecretary of the Interior, Daniel Vergara, in December 1972, where he pointed out that if certain key changes were not made to improve the country's economic situation, such as removing
Pedro Vuskovic from Corfo and replacing him with
José Cademartori, there would be a coup d'état in September 1973”. On September 11, at
Moneda Palace, Gen. Javier Palacios gave Rafael González a direct order to execute Allende's press secretary, journalist Carlos Jorquera. However, González refused. Jorquera has recounted that "a military man recognized me but didn't obey the order to kill me then and there. I owe him my life [...] Years later, when Aylwin won, we met. We gave each other a big embrace and until today he remains one of my best friends: this man is the former member of the General Staff of the National Defence, Rafael González, who was later dismissed from his institution and had to go into exile". After the coup, Gen. Palacios was appointed Vice President of Corfo. In retaliation for having disobeyed the order to execute Jorquera, González was dismissed from his government posting in Corfo. In his memoirs, former senator
Alberto Jerez Horta recounts that despite the dire human rights circumstances surrounding him, González continued to save the lives of people who were persecuted by the dictatorship: “Rafael himself made sure that files on Guillermo Sáez Pardo, Juan Ibáñez Elgueta, Héctor Ortega Fuentes and Carlos Morales Salazar were incinerated in the boiler at the Air Force Hospital, thereby saving them from danger". In April 1974, Vice-Admiral
Patricio Carvajal dismissed Rafael González from the EMDN, accusing him of having informed the Interior Minister, Gen. Óscar Bonilla, about the serious human rights violations taking place in Regimiento Tejas Verdes, San Antonio, under commanding officer Col.
Manuel Contreras, chief of the newly created
DINA. In April 1974, González was reassigned to the Chilean Air Force (
FACH) and remained inactive; he did not take part in any repressive activities. Pinochet assigned Gen. Herman Brady to Bonilla's posting in the Ministry of Defense. While investigating a complaint of embezzlement at the FACH, Rafael González was fired without explanation by FACH on September 2, 1975, marking an end to his career as an intelligence agent. Tipped off by the Vice-Director of the Intelligence Service (SICAR), Col. Pablo Navarrete, that an order had been given by the newly created Air Force Directorate of Intelligence (DIFA) to eliminate him, González sought political asylum at the Italian Chancery with the help of Octavio Abarca, a former Regional Secretary of the Chilean Community Party. However, due to opposition from General
Gustavo Leigh and Col Contreras, his application to leave Chile for Italy was not approved until three years later when DINA was dismantled and Leigh sacked as Commander in Chief of FACH. While at the Italian Chancery, González revealed to CBS and
Washington Post journalists that he had seen Charles Horman inside the Ministry of Defense building one week after the coup. This became the starting point of the investigation into Horman's death, for American and Chilean authorities could no longer claim ignorance of the facts. Granted asylum in Spain in 1978, González was contacted by former socialist senator
Erich Schnake on behalf of Charles Horman's father, Edmund, who invited him to the United States to provide testimony in a lawsuit against Henry Kissinger, the CIA and the
U.S. State Department. Following the prosecutions in the Horman case, Rafael González created a blog ("Justicia para Horman, justicia para González") where he recounted his professional career as an intelligence agent (1954-1975) and commented on Judge Jorge Zepeda's rulings, calling them a judicial farce that denied justice to the Horman family, left the real culprits unpunished and impugned him in a crime in which he was not involved. Despite his, González was one of only two to be convicted for a crime related to Hormann's murder and was sentenced in January 2015 to two years of police supervision after it was determined that he was an accomplice.
Patricio Carvajal During the trial, several high-ranking officers of the Chilean Navy, whose names had been kept in the dark for decades, were mentioned in connection to the death of the American journalist. They were: Vice Admiral
Patricio Carvajal, Corvette Captain Raúl Monsalve and Navy Captain Ariel González. In their statements, the latter two (Carvajal committed suicide in 1994) claimed they were innocent and accused the Chilean Army of being involved. Prior to the coup, Carvajal had been the Chief of the EMDN. In that capacity, he had ordered an investigation of the “foreign radicals” working for Chile Films, Charles Horman's company, between May and June 1973. In all likelihood, that order was given to the Chief of Department II of EMDN, Ariel González. On March 21, 1974, Carvajal ordered Rafael González to assist the U.S. Vice-consul in Chile, James Anderson, in the search for Charles Horman's remains for repatriation to the United States. Gonzalez has stated that by ordering him to “look for them”, they could lay blame on him afterwards and cover up the American and Chilean personnel involved in the murder since Chilean and American authorities already knew the whereabouts of Horman's remains: they had lain in a corner of the General Cemetery (Cementerio General) since October 18, 1973, one month after Horman's death. This was the day the U.S. Consul General Frederick Purdy officially informed Horman's father (Edmund) and widow (Joyce) while they were declaring a "missing person report" with Police Inspector Mario Rojas Chávez at the headquarters of the Investigations Police (Policía de Investigaciones). In April 1977, Carvajal was decorated by dictator
Francisco Franco. Following Spain's return to democracy, Carvajal served for two consecutive terms (1988-1989 and 1989–1993) as a member of the Supreme Tribunal of the right-wing party
Independent Democratic Union (Spanish: UDI).
James Anderson James Anderson was a CIA agent who operated under cover as a U.S. Vice-consul. Together with John S. Hall, another CIA agent who posed under cover as a Consular Associate, they pretended to assist the Horman family in their quest for the truth. Anderson pleaded complete ignorance about Horman when he told
The Washington Post on September 17, 2000, that neither the U.S. Consulate nor the CIA were even aware that Horman and Teruggi were in Chile until they were reported missing.
Ariel González A captain in the Chilean Navy, he played a key role in the coup conspiracy by falsely informing the Admiralty on September 9 that the army had confirmed its participation in the coup; accompanied by Admiral Sergio Huidobro, he convinced Pinochet to join the coup by threatening to lead the marine forces from Valparaíso to the capital himself if the former did not do so. After the coup and as chief of EMDN intelligence, he organized the enforcement of “new interrogation techniques” (torture) in cooperation with Brazilian intelligence agents. Researcher Jonathan Haslam notes that according to the son-in-law of Gen.
William Westmoreland (commanding officer of American forces in Vietnam between 1964 and 1968),
Vernon Walters (Deputy Director of CIA between 1972 and 1976) operated in Chile through Ariel González. In the thirteen years in which Zepeda presided over the judicial inquiry on Charles Horman's murder, González was never interrogated by the judge and assigned no responsibility for the crime.
Raúl Monsalve On September 11, 1973, Corvette Captain Raúl Monsalve was posted at the General Staff of the Navy (Spanish: Estado Mayor General de la Armada, or EMGA) as a liaison officer with the U.S. Military Group (almost all of whom were U.S. Navy officers linked to the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA). The head of the U.S. group was Captain Ray Davis. Monsalve had been working for years as a liaison with the CIA, to the extent that the U.S. Embassy described him in a report as the "most pro-American" officer of the Chilean Navy, as revealed by research carried out by Universidad Arcis and published in the journal
Estudios Político Militares: Programa de Estudios Fuerzas Armadas y Sociedad. After the coup, Monsalve maintained contact with the CIA. His name appears in
Colonia Dignidad's archive of files written and compiled by Gerd Seewald, a collaborator of the notorious sect leader and child sex offender
Paul Schäfer; on some occasions, Monsalve visited Albert Schreiber (a leader in Schafer's sect); on others, as on November 31, 1975, he was accompanied by American intelligence agents. Monsalve also participated in the persecution and extermination of dissidents, according to Juan R. Muñoz Alarcón, the so-called "hooded man of the National Stadium" who declared in testimony before the
Vicariate of Solidarity (Vicaría de la Solidaridad) that he had worked for Monsalve and that Monsalve had taken him to the stadium. Monsalve has also been identified by subordinates in the Navy intelligence as the officer who gave the order to arrest and eliminate Arnoldo Camú, the security chief of the Unidad Popular party, an incident that took place around the time Horman was arrested and murdered. When Charles Horman asked Ray Davis if he would take him and his friend Terry Simon to Santiago on September 15, 1973, Davis reportedly contacted Monsalve to provide "safe passage"; he also briefed him on Horman's political background. Neither Raúl Monsalve nor Ariel González were questioned by Jorge Zepeda during the judge's investigation; subsequently, they were not charged as authors, accomplices or accessories after the fact. Critics have said this is a particularly striking omission in the case of Ariel González, since Zepeda himself ruled that Department II (Intelligence) of EMDN, of which Gonzalez was the head, was the unit responsible for planning and carrying out Charles Horman's death.
Ray E. Davis Shortly after the September 11 coup, Charles Horman and Terry Simon had asked Ray Davis to provide safe passage to Santiago. Davis subsequently contacted his cohort in the Chilean Navy, Raúl Monsalve, a move that served only to alert authorities to Horman's whereabouts. To the detriment of the case, Davis was never deposed before Judge Zepeda. Eight years after having prosecuted Rafael González, Zepeda sought an order for U.S. authorities to extradite Davis in 2011. The Chilean Supreme Court subsequently approved the extradition request in October 2012. However, a year later, a report in the Associated Press revealed that Davis had in fact been secretly living in Chile all along and had died there on April 30, 2013, aged 88. This prompted criticism from Joyce Horman, who called it an "extraordinarily frustrating" turn of events, while Peter Kornbluh pointed out how unbelievable it was that Zepeda was “working to get Davis extradited and he was literally less than a couple of miles down the road".
Jorge Zepeda Arancibia Jorge Zepeda's handling of the investigation has come under severe criticism over the years. and suggesting on the other that Horman had indeed died there. Another criticism is his decision not to summon for questioning Chilean Army Major Carlos Meirelles Muller, who had been in charge of the Foreign Aliens section of the detention camp. As one critic noted, "Regardless of whether Horman was or was not kept under arrest at the Stadium and whether the major in question did or did not have influence over the fate of foreign detainees, the least one could have expected was an interrogation of the person who was formally in charge of them. Such an inquest is now impossible; Meirelles died in 2011". With regard to Frank Teruggi, the other American killed after the coup, Zepeda wrongly associated his activities in Chile with those of Horman's Chile Films, despite the fact that Teruggi and Horman had never met. Zepeda's rulings in other cases involving human rights abuses committed during the Pinochet regime have proved controversial. In a December 4, 2015, verdict on the death of former Minister of the Interior and Minister of Defense José Toha due to torture, Zepeda sentenced two Chilean Air Force officers, Ramón Cáceres Jorquera and Sergio Contreras Mejías, to three years. However, he allowed the men to serve their terms outside of prison. Zepeda's most controversial rulings relate to human rights violations, including torture and killing, committed in
Colonia Dignidad. Agrupación de Familiares de Ejecutados Políticos (Association of Relatives of People Executed for Political Reasons) has stated that Zepeda refused to make public Colonia Dignidad's files for years due to "reasons of National Security". According to Colectivo Londres 38, these documents remained under judicial seal for nine years, with no reason given as to why. This "contributed to the concealing of information about how repression took place, restricted further knowledge of the truth about the crimes and paved the way for persistent impunity." In the case of Colonia Dignidad, the president of the Agrupación de Familiares de Ejecutados Políticos, Alicia Lira, declared that "as an association, we have a negative opinion about judge Zepeda, because he has hampered the judicial process” Hernán Fernández, a defense attorney representing the victims of Colonia Dignidad resident and convicted child sex offender
Paul Schäfer, declared in an interview with La Nación in 2006 that judge Zepeda "gave guaranteed impunity to the delinquents" when he quashed the prosecution of Colonia Dignidad's leaders by illegal association, the original felony from which all others were derived. This "enabled many leaders to flee to Germany, from where they cannot be extradited according to the constitution of that country." Colonia Dignidad is the same cult that was visited by Corvette Captain Raúl Monsalve, to whom Zepeda also granted impunity. Amidst mounting criticism from victims' groups, Zepeda informed them in late 2013 that he would consider releasing information in the files. However, misleading signals were sent about the number of files involved, their relevance, and the existence (or not) of an intelligence report on the file cards, prompting journalist Luis Narváez to complain that "everything [about it was] confusing." Following a campaign organized by Londres 38 and other human rights groups, and pressure from representatives of the Chilean Congress, Zepeda finally released 407 files to the relatives of executed and disappeared detainees in 2014. This left more than 38,000 others under seal. Critics speculated that the remaining files could contain information about those who provided support for Colonia Dignidad, from congressional representatives, judges, companies, state services, police, armed forces, and many others who conducted business with the colony, buying and reselling its products, including arms, ammunition and dangerous chemicals, and involving themselves in illegal adoptions and money laundering. Zepeda had also denied a request by the National Human Rights Institute (Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos, or INDH) to obtain a copy of a report on the files the judge had himself ordered the Police Intelligence (Jipol) to conduct in 2005. Once the police had begun to make progress on the report, they were ordered to stop; all parties in the various Colonia Dignidad trials taking place at the time, including their lawyers, were denied access to it. INDH sought a court order to reverse Zepeda's decision. Following a public outcry, the press began an investigation into the files. 45,612 were discovered in total, all of which were handed over to human rights groups In 2014, Asociación por la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos Colonia Dignidad, Casa de la Conferencia de Wannsee (Alemania) and Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos (Chile) organized the First International Seminar on Colonia Dignidad entitled "Colonia Dignidad: dialogues on truth, justice and memory". This led to the publication in 2015 of the book
Colonia Dignidad: verdad, justicia y memoria. The book documents the crimes committed in Colonia Dignidad and their decades-long cover up by the judicial system and other branches of the state. In the chapter "The files of Colonia Dignidad: difficulties of access, quality of sources of information and future projections", journalist Luis Narváez presents a detailed account of Zepeda's interventions in the Colonia Dignidad cases, describing his modus operandi as "secretive", always with the same court clerk and the same pair of Jipol staff members: Inspectors Jaime Carbone and Alberto Torres, both of them retired police officers. Although several of Colonia Dignidad cases have been closed, Zepeda has kept notebooks containing relevant parts of the investigations secret. According to Narváez, Zepeda's reaction to the discovery of the files, which had been made by two police officers in 2005, shocked everyone: "he ordered the two officers to be detained at the police station under suspicion of obstruction of justice" and prevented the squad investigating human rights violations from analyzing the files. Instead, he ordered them to be taken to the central office of Jipol, where Carbone and Torres worked. In 2007, Narváez formally requested access to the files; Zepeda refused the request. Later, once the case had been closed, Narváez requested access to the dossier; this was also denied. As late as 2015, "the documentation [was] still inside the Jipol's vault". In addition to denying information to lawyers, the press and victims' relatives, Zepeda has also been resistant to having the files' contents available to other judges. When Supreme Court President Sergio Muñoz proposed the creation of a software system that would allow all judges to look up the dossiers, thereby optimizing resources, saving time and avoiding unnecessary duplication, Zepeda vehemently opposed the plan, arguing that it "threatened each tribunal's independence." The participants also released a petition: In 2015, Zepeda was appointed President of the Court of Appeals. In March 2016, he absolved all those accused of the death and enforced disappearance in 1985 of American mathematician
Boris Weisfeiler in Colonia Dignidad and applied the statute of limitation on the grounds that it was not a human rights crime. According to Boris's sister Olga, Zepeda had refused to investigate the connection between Colonia Dignidad and her brother's death. She complained that “the judge cunningly deceived us and the U.S. Embassy with his 'complete' investigation”. This was in reference to Zepeda having stated initially that he had received and read a Spanish translation of the documents the U.S. Embassy in Chile and Olga Weisfeiler had submitted as part of the proceeding. Later, he revealed that they had not in fact been translated, so he had not been able to read them. As a result, Zepeda informed the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (the Valech Commission) that the Weisfeiler case did not qualify as a human rights case; subsequently, the Commission did not include it in its final report. In March 2016, however, as justification for applying the statute of limitations and absolving all those accused, Zepeda claimed that it was the Valech Commission that had refused to categorize it as a human rights case. In response, the U.S. Government, through its Ambassador in Chile, Mike Hammer, issued a press release stating that "the recent court ruling absolving the eight accused parties over a statute of limitations is a frustrating setback" but that the U.S. Embassy in Chile would go on supporting the Weisfeiler family in its search for truth and justice. Boris Weisfeiler made remarkable contributions to the theory of algebraic groups and enjoyed a well-deserved reputation in his field. In response to Zepeda's ruling, the Mathematical Society of Chile (Somachi) issued a public statement criticizing the verdict and called for a reopening of the case. They were joined by the American Mathematical Society and the Committee of Concerned Scientists. == See also ==