Chilean judge requests extradition of u.s. Military official in "missing" case

[Magda Hassan]

CHILEAN JUDGE REQUESTS EXTRADITION OF U.S. MILITARY OFFICIAL IN "MISSING" CASE Capt. Ray Davis Indicted in Chile for alleged role in murder of Charles Horman, Frank Teruggi Declassified U.S. Documents Used Extensively in Court Indictment Archive Posts Documents cited in Indictment, including FBI Intelligence Reports Containing Teruggi's Address in Chile For further information: Peter Kornbluh, 202 374 7281/ peter.kornbluh@gmail.com http://www.nsarchive.org Washington, D.C., November 30, 2011 - Thirty-eight years after the military coup in Chile, a Chilean judge has formally indicted the former head of the U.S. Military Group, Captain Ray Davis, and a Chilean intelligence officer, Pedro Espinoza for the murders of two American citizens in September 1973. The judge, Jorge Zepeda, said he would ask the Chilean Supreme Court to authorize an extradition request for Davis as an "accessory" to the murders of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi. Both Horman and Teruggi were seized separately at their homes in Santiago by Chilean soldiers and subsequently executed while in detention. Their murders, and the seeming indifference of U.S. officials, were immortalized in the Oscar-award winning movie "Missing" which focused on the search by Horman's wife and father for him in the weeks following the U.S.-supported coup. The indictment accused the U.S. MilGroup of passing intelligence to the Chilean military on the "subversive" activities of Teruggi that contributed to his arrest; it stated that Davis "was in a position" to stop the executions "given his coordination with Chilean agents" but did not do so. In his indictment, Judge Zepeda cited a number of declassified U.S. government documents as the basic foundation for the casealthough none of them tie Davis or Espinoza to the crimes. "These documents are providing the blocks for building a case in these famous killings," said Peter Kornbluh who directs the Chile Documentation Project at the Archive, "but they do not provide a smoking gun." To successfully advance court proceedings as well as a successful extradition request, according to Kornbluh, the judge will have to present concrete evidence of communications between U.S. and Chilean military officers regarding Horman and Teruggi prior to their detentions and their deaths. " The Archive today posted a number of the documents cited in the indictment, including key FBI memos that contained Frank Teruggi's Santiago address, as well as other records relevant to the Horman and Teruggi case. The documents derive from an indexed collection: Chile and the United States: U.S. Policy toward Democracy, Dictatorship, and Human Rights, 1970-1990. The collection, just published this week by the Archive and Proquest, contains over 180 documents on the Horman and Teruggi case.