Boris Weisfeiler Photo courtesy of www.memoriaviva.com
Olga Weisfeiler, who has been fighting to learn the truth of her brother Boris’s disappearance in Chile 25 years ago, this week decried the lack of interest and support given her by U.S. officials.
Despite evidence that Weisfeiler - a University of Pennsylvania mathematics professor vacationing in Chile - was arrested by Augusto Pinochet’s military and brought to a torture center, his case has yet to be declared a human rights violation by Chile’s courts or government.
Ms. Weisfeiler told The Santiago Times over the weekend that within the past four months each of the United States’ foremost three executives – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden, and President Barack Obama – has met with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, yet none expressed concern about the Weisfeiler case to Bachelet.
Ms. Weisfeiler attributed the investigation’s lack of progress to a failure in Chile’s judicial system and has been counting on U.S. aid to discover what happened to her brother, the sole U.S. citizen to disappear in Chile during the Pinochet era. During the 17-year Pinochet regime more than 1,100 individuals were “disappeared” by state security forces fighting leftist “terrorism.”
~snip~ Two years after Weisfeiler’s disappearance, an informant known only as “Daniel” told U.S. embassy officials that he had been a member of a military patrol that arrested Weisfeiler in 1985 and brought him to Colonia Dignidad, a secretive German colony founded in the 1960s by former Nazi Paul Schafer and used as a torture center during the Pinochet era.
4. People who haven't heard, should be aware two OTHER Americans were killed by Pinochet, as well:
From the National Archives, documents recovered through the Freedom of Information Act:
New Information on the Murders of U.S. Citizens Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi by the Chilean Military
On Friday, June 30, 2000, the U.S. government released hundreds of formerly secret CIA, Defense, State, Justice Deparment, and National Security Council records relating to the deaths of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, both of whom were killed by the Chilean military in the days following the 1973 coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. The murders of Horman and Teruggi were later dramatized in the 1982 film Missing. Documents on another American, Boris Weisfiler, who disappeared in Chile in 1985, were also released. Below, the National Security Archive has selected ten documents for inclusion in this Electronic Briefing Book.
Document 1: Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Frank Teruggi," December 14, 1972 Among the hundreds of newly-released records is an FBI report from late-1972 on Teruggi's attendance of a conference of the Committee of Returned {Peace Corp} Volunteers in 1971, and his membership in the "Chicago Area Group on the Liberation of the Americas." This document makes it clear that Teruggi was, at a minimum, under surveillance while in the United States and raises the question as to whether or not this information was shared with the Chilean military.
Document 2: U.S. Embassy Santiago, "{Deleted} Reports on GOC {Government of Chile]}Nearly fourteen years after the coup, an informant seeking political asylum at the U.S. Embassy in Chile offers an account of Horman's death. Horman was picked up in a routine sweep, the informant suggests, and was found in possession of "extremist" materials. He was then taken the National Stadium where he was interrogated and later executed on the orders of Pedro Espinoza. Embassy officials note that his story "corresponds with what we know about the case and the {Chilean government} attempt to cover up their involvement," suggesting that the informant is probably telling the truth.
Document 3: U.S. Department of State to Embassy Santiago, "{Deleted} Reports on Death of Charles Horman," May 14, 1987 In response to the embassy's previous cable (Document 2), Michael Armacost, the under secretary of state for political affairs, questions the credibility of the informant who provided the account of Horman's death. Even if the new information proves to be accurate, Armacost sees no new prosecutorial advantage in the new information. Nevertheless, the State Deparment maintains a "fundamental interest" in investigating the deaths of American citizens abroad and "would consider it a very serious matter if senior officials had been aware of the circumstances of Horman's death and attempted to conceal this information from the and Horman's family." Armacost directs that the informant be interviewed by State Department officials stationed in Uruguay to determine his credibility.
CIA Records The following seven documents represent the totality of the CIA’s contribution to the declassification of records specifically related to the murder of Charles Horman. All the documents are from the CIA liaison office in Washington, D.C., and the release includes no documents from the CIA station in Chile. All of the documents that have been released have been heavily redacted.
The New York Times In America March 12, 2004 By LARRY ROHTER
New Evidence Surfaces in '73 Killing of American in Chile
SANTIAGO, Chile, March 11 - More than 30 years after an American writer and filmmaker was kidnapped by Chilean security forces and killed here, signs of progress in resolving the case, on which the Academy Award-winning movie "Missing" is based, are finally beginning to appear.
Thanks to the efforts of a judge newly assigned to the case, evidence has been unearthed pointing to the involvement of high-ranking military and intelligence officials in the death of Charles Horman, who disappeared shortly after the American-instigated military coup that toppled President Salvador Allende on Sept. 11, 1973. A former intelligence agent has already been indicted, and lawyers representing Mr. Horman's widow say they expect other arrests.
Chilean law establishes a prosecutorial role for judges and allows individuals to file criminal suits. Joyce Horman acted in December 2000, after judges here revoked the immunity of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile's dictator from 1973 to 1990. Other courts declared General Pinochet unfit to stand trial in 2002, but the investigation of Mr. Horman's killing was permitted to continue.
In December, Judge Jorge Zepeda Arancibia, who took over the case early last year, ordered the arrest of Rafael Gonz‡lez Verdugo, a retired military intelligence agent. Mr. Gonz‡lez Verdugo has admitted to having been present during an interrogation of Mr. Horman and to having helped recover his body later from a cemetery wall. He has been charged as an accomplice to the killing and was released on bail last month.
Over the years, Mr. Gonz‡lez Verdugo has claimed in sworn affidavits that a Central Intelligence Agency operative was present at the interrogation, an assertion that was incorporated into the film and led to Congressional hearings and calls for reforms of the C.I.A. But now that he is facing charges, Mr. Gonz‡lez Verdugo has changed his story, saying he lied in the 1970's to gain political asylum and flee Chile.
"Gonz‡lez Verdugo has recently made a series of statements that are not only unfounded but can be shown to be such," said Fabiola Letelier, one of Mrs. Horman's lawyers and sister of Orlando Letelier, the pre-Pinochet Chilean defense minister assassinated in a car bombing in Washington in 1976. "He was a key intelligence operative in the days following the coup, but would now like people to think he was a saint who did nothing."
The case of Frank Teruggi is no less anguishing. Frank and his roommate, David Hathaway, another member of FIN, were picked up after being denounced by their neighbors as "foreign extremists" the evening of September 20. They were taken to the National Stadium, which had been converted to a massive prison. Teruggi was called out for interrogation on September 21; a body thought to be his was brought to the morgue the next day. Although I requested permission from U.S. Consul Purdy to visit the Morgue to identify Teruggi's body, this was quite vociferously denied until October 2. At that point Purdy changed his mind. I was allowed in and identified Teruggi's body in a room that, along with adjoining rooms, must have held 150-200 bodies. We now know that a body identified to the U.S. Consulate as Horman’s was in the morgue on the same day, but even though the Consulate knew I was friends with both men, I was hustled out after identifying Teruggi's body.
Unlike the Horman case, Teruggi's body was quickly sent back to the U.S. But serious questions persist. When I saw Teruggi's body, he had two or three bullet wounds in his chest and a large, open gash on his throat. To me, the nature of the wounds suggested he had been executed. Yet when the official autopsy arrived, it reported 17 bullet wounds, more consistent with the Chilean military’s story that Teruggi, outside after curfew, was machine-gunned by a passing patrol. We also know that the FBI had documents in its files suggesting that Teruggi was helping U.S. military deserters in Germany, a bizarre charge. But if U.S. officials passed this information to the Chilean military, they would have been signing his death warrant.
In the era of gunboat diplomacy, the U.S. regularly invaded Latin American countries ostensibly to protect U.S. citizens and U.S. economic interests. Lyndon Johnson sent the Marines into the Dominican Republic in 1965, after arguing that U.S. lives were in danger. Ronald Reagan sent the Marines into Grenada in 1983, allegedly to protect the lives of U.S. medical students studying on the island. The first President Bush sent combat troops to Panama in 1990, again, to protect U.S. citizens who, it was suggested, were threatened by the Panamanian National Guard. And yet in the case of Chile, the U.S. not only didn’t protect its citizens, and most certainly violated its basic moral obligation to help the families of the dead men, but quite possibly had a hand in their murders.
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