Air University Review,
July-August 1983The movie Missing is about the disappearance of an American, Charlie Horman, in Chile shortly after the military coup of 11 September 1973, which overthrew the Socialist government of President Salvador Allende. It is based on a true incident, but there is a disconcerting failure of the moviemakers to tell the whole truth.
Jack Lemmon portrays the father of Charlie Horman, and Sissy Spacek plays his wife. The son disappears in Santiago, and the father flies down from New York to help his daughter-in-law search for him. As the story unfolds, it appears that the missing American dabbled in leftist politics during the last months of the Allende regime. When it fell and the Chilean Army rounded up thousands of leftists and sympathizers for interrogation, prison, or execution, the American was caught in the dragnet. Lemmon is gradually persuaded that United States officials were involved in the complicity to eliminate his son. The initial friendly relationship between Lemmon and American diplomats turns into an embittered set of encounters. Lemmon accuses the diplomats of not only sympathizing with the brutal behavior of the Chilean Army but of actively fomenting the coup through various police training arrangements and other activities. The father ultimately accuses the official U.S. establishment of cosigning the death warrant for his son on the premise that the Chileans would not have killed an American citizen without the active collusion of an American official, whether from State, Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, or acting in some other covert capacity.
The Chileans eventually reveal that Charlie Horman was executed in the National Stadium. His father returns to the United States and sues the Department of State, Henry Kissinger, and other high officials for criminal negligence. The suit failed; the movie ends; but not the questions or the messages.
Indeed, there are many questions and messages in this movie: There was Jack Lemmon’s portrayal of a middle-class American frustrated by the very bureaucrats he supports through his hard-earned tax dollars, as the old lament goes. It is perhaps a legitimate gripe but one strangely out of place in Chile under siege.
During the coup, Chile was an ugly country, riven by deep polit~ca1 passions where partisans fought each other without quarter. Allende’s brand of communism had reduced Chile to near economic impotence since his election in 1970; and the reaction of the Army, representing the majority of Chileans, was violent as they rooted out and extirpated the Communists. Allende’s leftist supporters in the fields, factories, schools, and universities were prepared for this final confrontation, and the outcome was tragically predictable. Lemmon, the innocent American, stepped into this ugliness and was appalled by the apparent wantonness of the shooting, killing, and cruelty.
But the movie failed to display both sides of this violence. All we see are soldiers, tanks, caroming jeeps with stuttering machine guns, swaggering officers, jackbooted commandos. What Missing fails to show are the factories manned by thousands of armed workers, the brutal fighting in the streets precipitated by bands of leftist and rightist goons, the bitter rhetoric of the politicians. There can be no doubt that the Chilean Army behaved brutally. That it was but a symptom of the greater problems of Chile is, simply left out of Missing. Jack Lemmon’s righteous indignation is a human reaction to violence, but the movie isolates the army and the violence. Thus, only a part of this truth is revealed.
American complicity in the coup is alleged in a rather crude fashion. If one is to believe the simplistic exchange between Charlie Horman and an unidentified American official in Valparaiso, some Americans came down from Panama to "do a job," and it got done. Next stop was Bolivia—and this makes a travesty of the truth. If some Americans were involved in coup plotting and in the active support—moral or otherwise—of the Chilean military, then let the proof be offered. Even if it were true, to imply that the Chilean coup of 11 September 1973 was the work of Americans is to display a massive ignorance of Chilean realities and to indulge fatuously in the belief of the powers of Americans to influence matters with such a high hand in that part of the world. The overthrow of Allende was a Chilean affair. Americans and their influence and monies were used or conscripted by both sides, but they did not make the coup or "do a job."
One of the lessons of modern times has been a realization of the limits of American power. Vietnam, Tehran, Nicaragua, the soft and tender portions of the world fairly jump out at us as defeats of American policy or as failures of American power to be projected. Missing is ironically set in a country that we count as one of our "victories," a socialist government upended by middle and right-wing forces. But it was not "our" victory. It was a turn in Chilean history—victory or defeat is to be viewed from one’s political perspective—determined largely by Chilean dynamics. This is not to underestimate the effects of international coercion in Chile before, during, and immediately after Allende’s overthrow. The official United States position was basically hostile to Allende, and the pressures put on Chile, such as largely cutting off the f1ow of international credits, was considerable. When Allende turned to the Communist bloc for assistance, he received only a cold shoulder. Cuba was one experiment that the Soviet Union could ill afford again. It cost too much to maintain a socialist/communist beachhead in the Caribbean that had failed to expand its revo1ution. Chile thus did not receive the support of her ideological supporters when she most needed it.
The one scene I found most poignant and revealing featured a pair of chickens whose presence was figurative rather than literal. A young Chilean socialist is explaining to an American friend what Allende’s revolutionary regime has meant to Chile.
"If you have two cars, now you share one with your deprived brother," the Chilean explained. He continued, "and if you have two chickens, you share one with a friend who was hungry."
The sad truth of Chile under Allende was that by 1973 there were no more chickens to share. Socialist economics reduced Chile to bread lines, meatless days, and chickenless shops. Those scenes are not in Missing, thus crippling its statement for peace and sanity and order by distorting the truth and reducing the film to a political diatribe We can better be served by the truth than by dogma, of the left or the right.
Department of History
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa
Contributor
Lawrence A. Clayton
(B.A., Duke University; M.A. and Ph.D., Tulane University) is Director, Latin American Studies Program and Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He has served as Executive Secretary and Chairman of the Andean Studies Committee and as a member of Centro de Investigaciones Históricas, Ecuador. Dr. Clayton has published numerous articles on Latin America and will be a Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Costa Rica, August-December 1983.Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor