Frank Teruggi would have been 65 years old this year, had he not been brutally murdered by the Chilean military at the age of 24 in the days following the coup on September 11, 1973.
Forty-one years ago, a military dictatorship took control of the nation of Chile after just three years of rule by the democratically elected popular president Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens. Allende’s election in 1970 was a thorn in the side of U.S. policymakers.
“I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people," Then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger declared. "The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”
And then-President Richard Nixon, in recently released Whitehouse tapes, repeats more than once: “We’re going to give Allende the hook.”
On the morning of September 11, after months of preparation, including a failed earlier coup attempt in June of 1973 (referred to as the “Tanquetazo” or “Tancazo”), troops moved in and took control of the Presidential Palace, La Moneda, where President Allende died of a gunshot in his office.
General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte was installed as dictator of Chile for the next seventeen years. In October 1998, General Pinochet was placed under house arrest in London based on charges of human rights violations, but he died in December 2006, never having been convicted of the crimes of which he was accused. The Chilean government today officially estimates 3,095 people were killed during the coup and its repressive aftermath, and currently some 700 former military officials face trial and 70 have been imprisoned in connection with their role in crimes against humanity.
United States government support of the coup is now widely acknowledged, being first documented in hearings led by Senator Frank Church (Democrat of Idaho) in 1976, and later confirmed in a September, 2000 U.S. Intelligence Community report which said the CIA “actively supported the military Junta after the overthrow of Allende."
Among the thousands of Chileans and Allende supporters from other countries who died, were two U.S. citizens - Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi. The story of Charles Horman’s disappearance and death, and his family’s search for answers, received national attention through the award-winning film Missing directed by Costa-Gavras and starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. Frank Teruggi’s story has received less public attention, but his life and work deserve to be remembered.
Frank Randall Teruggi, called “Randy” by his family since his father was also named Frank, was first of three children of two second-generation immigrants (from Italy and Slovenia), Frank and Johanna (known as “Jennie”).
“Our family was a working-class household. My mother never finished education beyond eighth grade. She came from a really poor coal mining town in Pennsylvania. My father came from an equally [poor], company coal mining town in southern Illinois.” said Janis Teruggi Page, Frank’s younger sister, now a lecturer at American University.
The young Frank developed a strong sense of social justice from his family, and a keen interest in the world around him. “I think, although they weren't very political at all, I just think their sensibility sort of came out, sort of leaked out, as far as their care for the underdog and sense of ethics,” said Janis. For the young Teruggis (Frank, Janis, and a younger brother John), learning and knowledge were very important in the home as well as at school: “We were a very literate household, even though my mother hadn't attended high school. There were always four newspapers in the house - my father would come home from work (he was a typesetter, a member of the Typesetter's Union, and very proud of it), he would come home from his commute back from downtown Chicago to suburban Des Plaines and read the newspaper for most of the evening.”
Frank Jr. was a thoughtful boy who had a typical suburban childhood in the 1950s and 1960s, Janis recalls “He was involved with the [Boy]Scouts. I guess today you'd call him a nerd. But he had an extremely high intellect. Really advanced for his age, and [he] found more reward, I guess, not with active sports but more intellectual activities.” It was his early exposure to Liberation theology in high school at Notre Dame Academy that first sparked his interest in Latin America. Janis remembers “from conversations with him, very old memories of conversations with him, that, through deciding to specialize in Spanish and to not only study the language, but study the culture and the history and the politics . . . I think that was the beginning of his interest in South America.”
In 1967, Frank got a scholarship to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he developed his interest in ham radio and studied Social Science. Today CalTech offers an annual award that honors the spirit of Frank's life, especially "in the areas of Latin American Studies, radical politics, creative radio programming, and other activities aimed at improving the living conditions of the less fortunate."
He also became involved in the growing opposition to the war in Vietnam, founding the first SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) chapter on campus. A February 13, 1968 article in the Pasadena Star-News shows Frank as a freshman picketing the Dow Chemical recruiters who had come to campus. Similar protests against Dow and the company's role in the production of Napalm were being held in campuses across the country.
When summer vacation came in 1968, Frank returned home to Des Plaines, Illinois, and began working with CADRE (Chicago Area Draft Resistors). He participated in a large peace march on Hiroshima Day that August with a group of students, professors, and clergy members costumed as victims of war, and later that month, participated in demonstrations outside the Democratic National Convention. Shortly after the convention, he participated in a guerrilla theater performance at a North suburban art fair calling attention to police brutality in the suppression of the protests at the convention. Frank and another actor were arrested for disturbing the peace (although apparently no record of this arrest was found when the FBI checked Frank’s file with the Chicago Police in December, 1972).
Shepherd Bliss was a seminary student at University of Chicago Divinity School. He remembers working with Frank: “My relationship to Frank started in Chicago. We worked in a group called the Rapid Transit Guerrilla Communications, which was a street theatre group and we did a lot of work on the subway. Basically anti-war work. And, we were very active with the Nixon counter-inauguration, and the 1968 National Democratic Convention, Frank and I and the whole group”
In the fall, Frank went back to college - this time at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and later transferred to UC-Berkeley where he became involved in the Free Speech Movement. In the basement of the communal house where he lived, Frank would listen to a radio receiver to monitor the police scanner and track arrests of activists, his sister recalls.
At Berkeley, and later when he moved back to Chicago and got a job at the Post Office, Frank was involved in political organizing and Latin America solidarity work. His goal was to raise funds to travel to Chile and study Political Economy at the University of Chile, Shepherd Bliss remembers. “I went to Berkeley to recruit him to work with us. We had a group called CAGLA, Chicago Area Group on Latin America. When I decided to go to Chile, I met with [Frank’s family], and, I committed myself to his family, because Frank was a very non-violent activist, theatre person, artist, young, enthusiastic, so I committed myself to his family to sort of look after him. I wasn't a lot older than he was, but I was a little bit older.”
When Frank arrived in Chile in January 1972 he rapidly connected with a group of US activists that had formed FIN “Fuente de Información Norteamericana” or North American Information Source. FIN members described their project 40 years later in the program book of the Charles Horman Truth Foundation’s Tribute to Justice dinner as “a small group of progressive young North Americans drawn to Chile to witness, study and live el proceso chileno, We we created FIN to inform Chileans about how the U.S. government and corporations were using their power to suppress popular movements in Chile and around the world.”
Steven Volk was studying for a doctorate in history at Columbia University when Salvador Allende was elected; he now teaches Latin American history and museum studies at Oberlin College. Volk first met Frank through FIN.
“We would often meet in the evenings to discuss putting together what turned out to be these newsletters that we composed. . . . We would decide on a series of articles which were usually taken from the progressive press, or sometimes from the mainstream press in the United States...get together to decide which would be good ones to translate and then bring to a Chilean public.”
Mishy Lesser, who is now the learning director of the Co-exist Learning Project, remembers being the youngest member of FIN. "This whole crowd of Americans who were there, most of them were graduate students, and I was kind of the runt of the litter," she says. " I was a second year undergrad at a Quaker college that created an opportunity for fostering global citizens, and for people like me who were very drawn to experiential learning. And, so, I chose to go to Latin America after my first year at Friends World College, because for me the burning question at that time was, ‘Why do so many people in the world hate my country?'”
It was Lesser who first discovered that their phone was being tapped: “I was in the FIN office. There were others there. I don't recall if I was there for a meeting. Sometimes I would go there because I needed to use the phone. I was making a call somewhere to see if there was going to be an afternoon meeting that I was supposed to attend, and I dialed the number of the place and rather than the people who were supposed to answer picking it up, what I heard on the other end of the line was [a voice saying] ‘U.S. Embassy’! So, the tapping was so primitive in those days, and FIN's office was geographically not that far from the US embassy...and, somehow, the wires got crossed. And I knew the voice of the receptionist at the US embassy, because, when I first arrived in Santiago, I used to get my mail. . . . I used to get letters from my family to the Embassy general postal address.”
Frank continued his anti-war activity while in Chile as well. He appears next to Mishy Lesser in a January 21, 1973 photo in El Mercurio, the Chilean national newspaper that was later shown to have been receiving covert U.S. funding to act as a promoter of the coup. On the day after Nixon’s second inauguration, Frank and other U.S. activists had marched in Santiago calling for the U.S. to sign on to peace accords in Paris with the North Vietnamese to bring an end to the war. Frank was a prolific writer during this time, sending reports back to family and various left publications.
Steve Volk, who is now a history professor at Oberlin, became great friends with Frank “He was a really nice guy. I mean he was very genial, he always joked a lot, had a lot of good humor, [and] worked hard - [he] never shirked the kinds of things that he had to do. At the same time he was perfectly committed to seeing this process through. And, at times it led him into places that proved to be quite dangerous, including..there was the other [attempted coup]...this was called the “Tancazo” on June 29th of 1973 in which one brigade of the army launched a sort of presumptive coup and was quickly put down, and he went to the center of the city and ended up being lightly grazed by a bullet in his foot. I think most of us stayed away from that. He kind of was drawn to seeing in particular, and in person, what was going on and that gives some sense of who he was.”
When the coup happened, anyone who had been involved in support of the Allende government was a potential target for arrest.
“We were, all of us, I believe, sort of operating within the framework of laws that existed up until September 11, 1973 at which point everything changed," says Volk.
"In the immediate days after the coup there was a curfew, we couldn't go outside. Not everybody had a phone. I didn't have a phone, for example. But in the days in which we finally could sort of regain contact with people in FIN, we began to set up a simple system of trying to check in with each other to make sure that we were okay."
Volk learned from Joyce Horman that her husband had been disappeared.
"We basically established this network in which one person [in FIN] would call another person, and they would call a third person, and if there was no answer on the phone then we would call back after curfew lifted in the morning, and then if there was still no answer, then we would report a disappearance to the U.S. Embassy," he recalls. "And so we had a kind of process for keeping in touch with each other. That's one method whereby we learned of the arrest of both Frank and David." David came by Volk's apartment shortly after he was released from the national stadium, Volk recalls. He told Volk he had told me that he and Frank had been arrested by soldiers who took them to the national stadium, which was a large holding place for prisoners.
"They spent the night there, sort of huddled together, and that at one point Frank had been called away for interrogation. He didn't return, and David didn't see him again.”
Mishy Lesser remembers that day of the coup: “It was my first glimpse of how terror overtakes people, because people were swarming . . . there were just two little grocery stores on our street, and people who had been through political unrest before, unlike me, born in New York City. (Born in a country that doesn't even have a word for coup d'etat - we borrow it from the French.) I watched as everybody was trembling . . . and there was a frenzy to try to grab food, because everybody but me knew what was coming, which was a curfew and military raids and you wouldn't be able to go out on the street.”
Adam Schesch, another US activist who was living and studying in Chile at the time, says: “We were actually seized on the third day, on the afternoon of the 14th. . . . We heard the campaign on the radio and neighbors talking about the campaign against foreigners, and I made a call to the embassy, and the embassy official, whoever it was that answered the phone said, no, there was no danger, they had no plans, they knew nothing about anyone getting hurt, and there was no violence and so on. I mean they, as far as they were concerned the whole thing was a Sunday picnic. And there were other people who . . . attempted to call the embassy to find out . . . in particular people who felt threatened, what would the embassy do to protect them. And I do know for a fact that there were Americans who ended up fleeing to other embassies that were more sympathetic.”
Mishy Lesser went out of the central city to seek safety and then, “about seven or ten days after the coup, I was able to make a phone call. And I called Jill Hamburg. She was the only one of us who had a phone. She was so glad to hear from me . . . they thought that I had been arrested as well. They were very worried. And she told me that Frank and Charlie and Davey had disappeared. That they'd been taken. And that's how I found out about it.”
Evidence gathered by the National Security Archive and published by Peter Kornbluh in his comprehensive volume “The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability” now confirms that Frank and his roommate, another FIN member, David Hathaway, were taken from their home at 9:00pm on September 20, questioned at a nearby Carabineros station and then delivered to the national stadium, which had become a holding tank, torture chamber and execution site for thousands of activists and others simply caught up in the frenzy of coup.
The world renowned activist musician Victor Jara was killed in another nearby basketball stadium on September 15. In his last poem, smuggled out of the stadium, he wrote: “There are five thousand of us here/in this small part of the city./We are five thousand./I wonder how many we are in all/in the cities and in the whole country?” (Estadio Chile, 1973).
Adam Schesch and his wife at the time Patricia Garrett were denounced on the radio as pro-communist. They spent close to ten days in the stadium. “We were denounced by people in our neighborhood. They had obviously figured out that we were sympathetic to the popular unity or pro-Popular Unity," Schesh says. He did not know that Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were also in the stadium while he was there.
"I got into a holding room where there were several Jesuit priests and Protestant ministers and Americans who were working autonomously, independently with different government agencies, and teaching at some of the universities in Santiago. So there were a lot of Americans who were considered progressive or dangerous by the junta. They were rounded up, along with a whole pile of other foreigners.”
Schesch has testified publicly many times about what he saw in the stadium. The memory is still very strong for him: “It was a horror show. I've said to people the only thing that I in my whole life could compare it to was horror movies from Hollywood about Dante's inferno. It was a hellhole. The soldiers were on drugs to be kept awake, and . . . there was an insanity to the whole thing. There was a gross brutality.”
Chilean journalist Pascale Bonnefoy Miralles, who has covered the Teruggi case for a number of years, quotes in her book “Terrorismo de Estadio” from the affidavit of a Belgian named André Van Lancker, also tortured in the Stadium. He was told by other detainees that they had seen Frank during an interrogation in the stadium. They saw him beaten and tortured with electric shocks, then killed by a machine gun. The torturers realized they had gone “too far,” she reports, and were afraid of having problems with the U.S. government, so they kept Frank’s name off the lists of prisoners. His body was later left in a public street, where it was discovered the following day, September 21 just after 9 p.m., and brought to the morgue.
For days, the Teruggi family did not know what had happened to their son. Steve Brown who covered the story extensively for the Daily Herald Suburban newspapers in Chicago remembers interviewing Frank Teruggi, Sr., who was trying to get more information and help from the U.S. government: “He was . . . disappointed that a government he respected . . . that there wasn't more attention being given to this thing.”
It was Steve Volk who eventually identified Frank’s body in the morgue.
“David [Hathaway (Frank’s roomate)] was released the next day [September 26 according to U.S. Embassy records] from the National Stadium and given twenty-four hours to leave the country, to pack up his things and leave. He also was taken to the morgue to see whether Frank was there, and as he reported to me he was in no shape to really identify anyone, and he asked me whether I would go to the morgue and see whether Frank's body was there."
Volk went to the U.S. Consulate's office and tried to talk to the consul Frederick Purdy.
"A messenger sort of went from the front of the office where I was standing to the back where Purdy had his office, and I heard him shout through his door, ‘I don't give a damn what Volk wants, he's not going to the morgue.’" says Volk. "And then the guy came back and said, ‘No, we can't arrange this for you.’ What I was looking for was basically a salvoconducto, a sort of safe conduct which would mean I wouldn't have any trouble if I went to the morgue as an individual citizen."
Volk went back to his apartment, he says, where he found a note slipped under the door from James Anderson, an official at the consulate. The note said someone would pick up Volk the next morning and take him to the morgue.
"They did that, and it was at that point, and after about maybe twenty to thirty, thirty-five minutes of looking at the bodies that were there that I discovered Frank's body.”
A confidential diplomatic cable, released by Wikileaks, sent September 26 at 3 p.m. from the US Embassy in Santiago to the Secretary of State in Washington, DC and signed by Ambassador Nathaniel Davis requests contact information for Frank’s next-of-kin and states that the “body must be taken out of Chile in 48 hours.”
The family was finally notified on October 3, but the body was not shipped home until about two weeks latter. The Des Plaines Herald reported that the family was billed $850 in shipping fees to get Frank’s body back, and these had to be paid in advance.
Frank Randall Teruggi was buried in a cemetery in Des Plaines, Illinois. Frank’s sister Janis recalls that she “and his closest friends each placed a red rose on his casket. There were large bouquets of red roses at his wake and funeral. Afterwards my parents took them to the Carmelite Monastery in Des Plaines and the nuns dried the petals and made a rosary from them, which I now have.”
According to newspaper reports at the time, more than 100 friends and family members attended, and the late South African exiled activist poet Dennis Brutus wrote this poem on the occasion:
FOR FRANK TERUGGI
(Killed in Chile, Buried in Chicago)
A simple rose
a single candle
a black coffin
a few mourners
weeping;
for the unsung brave
who sing in the dark
who defy the colonels
and who know
a new world stirs.
(published in UFAHAMU: A Journal of African Studies, volume 4, issue 2, 1973)
Frank’s death remains painful to the people who were close to him.
Frank Teruggi Sr. spent years seeking answers. Reporter Steve Brown remembers: “you know, he just wanted to find his kid. He just wanted to see what could be done, and then when it was . . . when the body was found, he was very frustrated there wasn't much information. But I think Mr. Teruggi had faith in the government and trust in the government. And the frustration that not more could be found.”
Frank Teruggi Sr. joined a delegation that went to Chile from February 16 to 23, 1974. The group was called The Chicago Commission of Inquiry into the Status of Human Rights in Chile. It included U.E. Vice President Ernie DeMaio, Chicago Alder Anna Langford, and the Reverend James Reed as well as Joanne Fox Przeworski who had recently worked as a doctoral student in Chile.
They visited the embassy where, according to Fox-Przeworski, “It was a whitewash kind of a meeting, explaining that the embassy couldn’t really do anything for us, that they were trying by all means to help the Teruggi family, etc. . . . We later learned that they did know much more than they were telling us.”
The Commission’s report was excerpted and printed in the New York Review of Books on May 30, 1974. Point eleven in the “Summary of Findings” states: “The Embassy of the United States seems to have made no serious efforts to protect the American citizens present in Chile during and after the military takeover.”
During the trip, Frank Teruggi, Sr. met with Ambassador David Popper, who had been assigned to Chile after the coup. A declassified report of their February 18 conversation includes an exchange where Frank Teruggi, Sr. says to Ambassador Popper: “It is difficult for [my] family to understand how the U.S. Government can be helping the Government of Chile when they don’t even answer our questions.”
Steve Brown remembers, “When Frank went missing and all that, I think the Embassy and the State Department were trying to put all the blame on the Chilean officials and the uprising and the government. And then . . . when the trip was held, they came back frustrated and sensing that, rather than there being a lack of information, that the U.S. government didn't really care about the whole thing. It wasn't a high priority.”
Joanne Fox Pzreworski remembers: “[Frank Teruggi Sr.] was a very gentle, persistent, extremely kind man who was literally baffled by [the thought that] his own government could have been implicated in the death of his son, an American. Frank had served in the [U.S. Army] during World War II so he had a patriotic view of what the government does on behalf of what it perceives as its own interests. So this was a real eye-opener for him, and a major, major not even disappointment—a disillusionment.”
Janis Teruggi, too, remembers her father’s disappointment. “I can remember just a complete dejection and sadness when he returned," she says. "Afterwards he just took to a long, long period of letter writing. That was his tool. That was the way he felt was the appropriate way to seek justice.”
A State Department document dated April 1, 2000 states: “Though the Teruggi case received less press coverage than the Horman case, the family has also sought a full accounting of the circumstances leading to Frank Teruggi’s death. Frank Teruggi, Senior, traveled to Chile to try to discover the facts. He never learned those facts and remained bitter until his death in 1995 about the murder of his son by Chilean security forces and a perceived lack of USG [U.S. Government] assistance with the case.”
It would be years before any new information would come out. Then, during the Clinton Administration, and following in the wake of Pinochet’s 1998 arrest in London, beginning February 13, 2000, a huge number of documents were made public, including some memos that may lead to an understanding of why Frank was targeted.
Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive explains: “He [Pinochet] was arrested at a time that we had a set of officials in office in Washington under Bill Clinton who had opposed the coup when they were younger, who stood for human rights and who saw the opportunity to do a major declassification of secret documents."
Kornbluh pushed for the release of 23,000 new documents covering the CIA's role in Chile that were declassified by a Special Presidential Discretionary Release.
Most damning of these is an FBI memo dated October 25, 1972 (eleven months before his arrest) that gave Frank Teruggi’s street address in Santiago. If this document had been shared with Chilean security forces, it certainly would have made him easy to locate.
The document suggested that Frank was corresponding with a GI resister in Germany who was also being watched by the FBI, Kornbluh explains.
“The FBI kind of stumbled onto Frank Teruggi in kind of an odd way," says Kornbluh. "The FBI and the CIA were monitoring the anti-Vietnam War protesters and activists in Germany who were kind of pushing for U.S. servicemen to go AWOL from their base in [Heidelberg] Germany and to come out publicly against the war. And, they were monitoring a particular individual in Munich and he got a letter from Frank Teruggi when Frank was in Chicago and working with an antiwar coalition there. And the FBI started to track Teruggi, and opened a file on him in which they labeled him a subversive in 1972."
One FBI document contained Teruggi's address in Chile where he had recently moved—the same address where he was actually living when he was arrested over a year later.
"The judge seemed to feel that these documents were reflective of efforts by the US government to keep track of... Teruggi,” Kornbluh says.
Steve Volk is less certain of the reason for Frank’s arrest: “The case of Frank also poses many questions. Very recent information suggests that he, too, could have been picked up on the basis of information...this very bizarre information that was collected by the FBI that suggested he was involved aiding soldiers that were trying to escape the Vietnam War by deserting the army in Germany. And there's one document in his file, a bit redacted, but which does seem to point to the fact that he was involved in this process of helping deserters. When I read that . . . it was the first I ever heard of that. It seemed somewhat disconnected from anything else, and I've never been able to really find any backed-up information on that, but there was a possibility that he was picked up for that reason.”
Roger Burbach, now director of CENSA - The Center for the Study of the Americas, was in Chile working on his doctoral dissertation. Burbach had worked with Frank in Chicago in 1971 organizing an Anti-Imperialist Conference held there. They would meet again in Santiago, both working with FIN. Burbach thinks that the bullet wound Frank received during the Tancazo protest may have played a part as well.
“The bullet wound he had suffered back in June was probably incriminating, amplifying his dossier with the [CIA]," he writes in a not yet published autobiography.
Since the release of the documents pertaining to Teruggi and Charles Horman, new court cases were filed to try and get answers. Charles Horman's widow asked the Chilean government to investigate her husband's death in 2000. Three years ago, Judge Jorge Zepeda, a Chilean special investigative judge, indicted three people in connection with the deaths of Horman and Teruggi. One of the indicted men was a U.S. Naval Captain, Ray Davis, who is has since died. The other two are Chilean intelligence officers, Rafael González and, Brigadier General [Pedro] Espinoza. Just this year, on June 30, 2014, the judge stated in a conviction that the case will go forward. The two men will likely appeal.
“This is a major step forward in this long saga." says Kornbluh "It's a forty-year saga since they were killed, and a fourteen-year saga of legal efforts to find out who killed them and why.”
The judge’s ruling stated that the murders of Horman and Teruggi were part of “a secret United States information-gathering operation carried out by the U.S. Milgroup in Chile on the political activities of American citizens in the United States and in Chile.” Sergio Corvalán, a human rights lawyer working for the Horman and Teruggi families on the case told reporter Pascale Bonnefoy of The New York Times that he felt the ruling confirmed what the families had long believed— that Chilean military officers would not have acted against them on their own. They must have had an OK from U.S. officials.
Janis Teruggi Page is glad to see the decision, but is not sure of the next steps.
“Joyce [Horman] and I are both waiting to get a clear understanding of the evidence against the United States government," she says.
“I should say that we haven't seen the evidence that links the Americans, Ray Davis and others, to the Chileans who undertook these executions," says Kornbluh, "but the judge's ruling strongly implies that he has such information, and on that basis is convicting these officials."
Kornbluh is waiting for the judge to make the documents and affidavits in the case available in court.
After forty-one years, it is not clear what resolution is possible, but many hope for the full story to come out.
“The issue that, of course, burns at all of us who cared about these two people . . . what we want is the truth," says Volk. "And there are people who do know the truth, and this has not been forthcoming for over four decades.”
“Nobody's been ever sent to jail for the murder of these two Americans," says Kornbluh, "and almost nobody's been sent to jail . . . for almost any of the executions of probably 300 to 350 people in the National Stadium in the days following the coup. [These were] murders by execution, which were carefully planned, with people carefully identified and carefully vetted. . . . All of this, at the time when the U.S. is actively embracing Pinochet. Those executions have really never been fully aired, and the people that committed them held fully accountable.”
“My hope is that someday there will be a government in our country that is courageous enough to accept responsibility and be accountable for all of the atrocities, including this, that we have committed, in the name of protecting our freedoms and our country and our way of life," says Mishy Lesser.
"I would hope that some day there would be an enlightened group of leaders who would actually not pretend that we didn't do it...maybe there will be justice in Chile with the Chileans who were involved with the murders. You know, would I love Henry Kissinger to be on trial? Yes, I would love it if Henry Kissinger could be tried. Maybe that's the short answer to your question.”
—Norman Stockwell is a freelance journalist based in Madison, Wisconsin and served as Operations Cooordinator at WORT-FM Community Radio. His 1998 article on Madisonians who experienced the coup in Chile can be found here: <http://host.madison.com/archives/topics/sept-11/madisonians-recall-struggle-of-living-in-pinochet-s-chile/article_a2a089dc-1ae8-11e3-acfb-0019bb2963f4.html>. In 1970 and 1971, he lived in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood, a few blocks from Frank Teruggi, but they did not know each other.