McCain's Private Visit With Chilean Dictator Pinochet Revealed For First Time

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Osvaldo Romo made himself known in working classes' neighborhoods before Pinochet's coup in 1973 as a leftist activist, member of the Partido Socialista Popular and sympathizant of the MIR <1>. Following the coup, he reappeared in these neighborhoods with a military uniform, arresting his friends and contacts. Left-wing circles still debate to know if he suddenly changed political orientation or if he always was a mole for the security services <1>.

Known as Guatón Romo ("Fatso Romo") or Comandante Raúl, he was one of DINA's most important torturers, operating among others centers in Villa Grimaldi <1>. On April 11, 1995, in an interview televised by Univisión, he commented in great detail, and evidently without remorse, on the techniques that had been used. These included the application of electricity to women's nipples and genitals, the use of dogs, and the insertion of rats into women's vaginas <1>.

—Would you do it again? Would you do it the same way?
—Sure, I'd do the same and more. I wouldn't leave anybody alive (...) That was one of DINA's mistakes. I was always arguing with my general: don't leave that person alive, don't let that person go free. There are consequences.
—As for throwing the corpses of the prisoners into the sea...
—I think it could have happened. (...) Throwing them into the crater of a volcano would be better... (...) Who'd go looking for them in a volcano? Nobody.
—On the day you die... what would your epitaph say? "Here lies the hangman, the torturer, the murderer..."
—Logical, logical. I accept that. But for me it was a positive thing. (...) I am at peace with my conscience and my beliefs.

In 1977, Romo was sent to Brazil by his superiors, where he may have participated in death squads according to human rights NGO <1>. During Chile's transition to democracy, Romo, as one of the most important figures of the Pinochet regime, was pursued by prosecutors and localized in Sao Paulo, living with his wife and his five children in June 1992 <1>. Arrested by the Brazilian police, he was extradited to Chile in November 1992 <1>. He was sentenced to ten years in prison for the kidnapping of MIR member Manuel Cortez Joo and five years and a day for the kidnapping of Ofelio Lazo, who was "disappeared" in July of 1974.

Charles Horman
Charles Horman (May 15, 1942 – September 20, 1973), an American journalist, was one of the victims of the coup d'etat led by General Augusto Pinochet in Chile on September 11, 1973. Pinochet rose against the democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and plunged Chile into a brutal military dictatorship which lasted seventeen years.
Horman was born and raised in New York City. He graduated from Harvard University in 1964 and worked for a number of years in the US media. In 1972, he settled temporarily in Chile to work as a freelance writer.

Imprisonment and death
On September 17, 1973, six days after the US-backed military takeover, Horman was seized by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been turned by the military into an ad hoc concentration camp, where prisoners were interrogated, tortured and executed. One month later, Horman's body turned up in a morgue in the Chilean capital. A second American journalist, Frank Terrugi, met with the same fate.

At the time of the military uprising, Horman was in the resort town of Viña del Mar, near the port of Valparaíso, which was a key base for both the Chilean coup plotters and US military and intelligence personnel who were supporting them. While there, he spoke with several US operatives and took notes documenting the role of the United States in overthrowing the Allende government. This discovery led to his secret arrest and and US-sanctioned execution. Efforts by his family to determine his fate were met with resistance and duplicity by US embassy officials in Santiago, who knew he was dead and why he had been killed.

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The most interesting new document on Teruggi--who was arrested nine days after the coup, then tortured and murdered--is an FBI record showing he had come
under surveillance when he attended a 1971 Colorado conference of the Committee of Returned Volunteers. The FBI said the CRV was composed primarily of
former Peace Corps volunteers "who espouse support of Cuba and all Third World revolutionaries."

The newly released CIA records on Teruggi deal largely with the agency's refusal to provide his father with a document mentioning the 24-year-old's name. The CIA
said its release would identify the foreign intelligence service that furnished the information.

Teruggi had arrived in Chile in January 1972 and was a student at the University of Chile in Santiago. According to his father, he was arrested in his house during a
curfew on Sept. 20, 1973, and killed two days later, his throat slashed and his machine-gunned body riddled with 17 bullet wounds. A fellow prisoner at the Chile
stadium said in an affidavit that he was told Teruggi had been beaten so badly that he had to be shot.