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Judge investigating US role in 1973 coup considers forcing former secretary of state to give evidence
Jonathan Franklin in Santiago and Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Guardian Wednesday June 12, 2002
Henry Kissinger may face extradition proceedings in connection with the role of the United States in the 1973 military coup in Chile.
The former US secretary of state is wanted for questioning as a witness in the investigation into the events surrounding the overthrow of the socialist president, Salvador Allende, by General Augusto Pinochet.
It focuses on CIA involvement in the coup, whether US officials passed lists of leftwing Americans in Chile to the military and whether the US embassy failed to assist Americans deemed sympathetic to the deposed government.
Chile's Judge Juan Guzman is so frustrated by the lack of cooperation by Mr Kissinger that he is now considering an extradition request to force him to come to Chile and testify in connection with the death of the American film-maker and journalist Charles Horman, who was killed by the military days after the coup.
Horman's story was told in the 1982 Costa-Gavras film, Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.
Judge Guzman is investigating whether US officials passed the names of suspected leftwing Americans to Chilean military authorities. Declassified documents have now revealed that such a list existed. Sergio Corvalan, a Chilean lawyer, said that he could not divulge the "dozens" of names on the list.
At the time of his death, Horman was investigating the murder of Rene Schneider, the chief of staff in the Chilean army whose support for Allende and the constitution was seen as an obstacle to the coup.
The CIA had been involved with groups plotting Schneider's murder, providing them with weapons and advice, according to a CIA internal inquiry in 2000. It found that the agency had withdrawn its support for the plotters before the murder but had paid them $35,000 afterwards "to maintain the goodwill of the group".
At the time of his murder, Schneider had five young children, who filed suit in a Washington DC court last year against Mr Kissinger and other top officials in the Nixon administration. They are seeking $3m (£2.15m) in damages.
Horman's wife, Joyce, suspects that he was targeted because he unwittingly stumbled upon a gathering of US military personnel in Chile in the days before the coup.
The American journalist Marc Cooper and the British journalist Christopher Hitchens have been in Santiago during the past month to give evidence in the investigation of America's role.
Cooper, who was Allende's translator at the time of the coup and now writes for the Nation and LA Weekly, knew Horman and gave sworn testimony last month.
Cooper said: "Guzman says that if the US doesn't act soon on his request to gather testimony from Kissinger and other US officials, he'll have no choice but to file for their extradition to Chile."
Cooper, who wrote the book Pinochet and Me about his time in Chile, said that the Nixon government had been more interested in supporting General Pinochet than in investigating the deaths of its citizens at the hands of the Chilean military.
This is not the first attempt to interview Mr Kissinger about the turbulent period in Latin America.
During a visit to London in April, judges in Spain and France unsuccessfully tried to question him about America's role in Operation Condor, which has been described as a coordinated hit squad organised from Chile and including six South American nations aimed at dealing with leftwing opposition groups.
Several declassified documents which have emerged over the past two years have shown an increasingly visible American hand in Operation Condor.
Hitchens gave evidence on the Operation Condor case which he researched for his book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, published last year.
In Santiago, Hitchens said: "Today Henry Kissinger is a frightened man. He is very afraid of the exposure that awaits him."
Mr Kissinger's lawyer William Rodgers, said that such questions should properly be directed to the US state department and not to Mr Kissinger.
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