Missing Charlie, 40 years later: finding a modicum of justice in Chile.

• Author: Horman, Joyce
• Position: Charles Horman

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

FORTY YEARS AGO IN SANTIAGO, Chile, my dear, smart, Harvard-educated, independent thinking, loving, trying-to-figure-it-all-out-and-do-the-right-thing journalist/documentary filmmaker husband was stolen from my life, from the lives of his loving parents, and all of his friends. Charles has been described as "an American sacrifice"--one of the many victims of the U.S.-backed coup in Chile on September 11, 1973. The presence, voice, thoughts, and future life of Charles Horman and thousands of others were nonfactors in the calculations of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to bring down the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende.

We loved Charles so very much but even more importantly, we knew he would contribute to the good of the world's future, just as countless Chileans tortured and killed by Augusto Pinochet's murderous squads would have enriched the world had they lived.

In one of the last conversations I had with my beloved husband, we decided that we wanted to go back to New York together and start a family. Nixon, Kissinger, and Pinochet deprived us of that, too, just as they snuffed out the hopes and dreams of their Chilean victims.

Forty years is a long time to wait for even a modicum of justice, but I've endured the decades thanks to some wonderfully courageous people.

Thank you, Ed Horman, for flying into the middle of a military coup d'etat in Chile to search for your only son, and thank you for teaching me to press for answers.

Thank you, Elizabeth Horman, for letting Ed go to Chile, knowing the risks.

Thank you, Terry Simon, who had been with Charles in Vina del Mar on the day of the coup, for braving two weeks looking for Charles with me, and for pursuing the only people who might be able to find and save Charles: the American officials whom you had met in Vina. And thank you for standing by the search for truth for so many years.

Thank you, Steve Volk, for going to the morgue in Santiago to look for Charles and our friend and fellow American citizen Frank Teruggi, so I didn't have to, and for telling the story over the years in ways that students understand.

Thank you, Thomas Hauser, for writing The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice, which included the words of American military personnel who had met Charles in Chile.

Thank you, producers Eddie and Millie Lewis, for speaking to us about doing a movie based on Hauser's book.

Thank you, Costa-Gavras, for making that powerful movie Missing, which opened the minds of so many Americans to their government's wrongdoing and wrong thinking.

Thank you, Jack Lemmon, for so brilliantly playing Edmund Horman.

Thank you, Sissy Spacek, for capturing the hearts of Americans for Charles's story.

After we returned from Chile, d pushed Terry and me to write a diary of what had happened. This was extremely difficult for me. Ed insisted. He led the family to testify before Congress. I also found that difficult, because from my own personal darkness, I...