On Storytelling and the “Other 9/11”

First lessons in narrative and human rights

A still from the film ‘Missing’ (1982). Copyright is likely owned by Universal Pictures.

Fifty years ago, on September 11, 1973, a U.S.-backed coup d’ėtat in Chile overthrew the democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. The coup transformed Latin America’s long-standing democracy into a brutal dictatorship that lasted nearly two decades under Augusto Pinochet, with social and political ripple effects that continue today.

Pinochet’s regime inflicted countless horrors on Chilean leftists and cultural actors and those who supported them. One of their crimes was to execute Charles Horman, a young American journalist who had uncovered U.S. involvement in the coup. Charles’s wife Joyce, who had been in Santiago with him the day he was disappeared, tirelessly pursued the truth of his murder and accountability for those involved. She filed suit against the Nixon administration and Henry Kissinger. (When the Clinton administration declassified documents in 1998 regarding the ’73 coup, it became evident that Charles’ abduction and murder were known to the US government at the time, possibly even sanctioned.) She collaborated with and supported lawyers, judges, human rights advocates, and families of the disappeared. And she went on to establish the Charles Horman Truth Foundation, an organization dedicated to preserving memory and history around the coup, and to supporting applications of…