March 28, 2002

By LARRY ROHTER

SANTIAGO, Chile - With a trial of Gen. Augusto Pinochet
increasingly unlikely here, victims of the Chilean
military's 17-year dictatorship are now pressing legal
actions in both Chilean and American courts against Henry
A. Kissinger and other Nixon administration officials who
supported plots to overthrow Salvador Allende Gossens, the
Socialist president, in the early 1970's.

In perhaps the most prominent of the cases, an
investigating judge here has formally asked Mr. Kissinger,
a former national security adviser and secretary of state,
and Nathaniel Davis, the American ambassador to Chile at
the time, to respond to questions about the killing of an
American citizen, Charles Horman, after the deadly military
coup that brought General Pinochet to power on Sept. 11,
1973.

General Pinochet, now 85, ruled Chile until 1990. He was
arrested in London in 1998 on a Spanish warrant charging
him with human rights violations. After 16 months in
custody, General Pinochet was released by Britain because
of his declining health. Although he was arrested in
Santiago in 2000, he was ruled mentally incompetent to
stand trial.

The death of Mr. Horman, a filmmaker and journalist, was
the subject of the 1982 movie "Missing." A civil suit that
his widow, Joyce Horman, filed in the United States was
withdrawn after she could not obtain access to relevant
American government documents. But the initiation of legal
action here against General Pinochet and the
declassification of some American documents led her to file
a new suit here 15 months ago.

Last fall, after gaining approval from Chile's Supreme
Court, Judge Juan Guzmán, who is also handling the Pinochet
case, submitted 17 questions in the Horman case to American
authorities. An American Embassy official here confirmed
that the document, known as a letter rogatory, has been
received in Washington, but said it has not yet been
answered and that he did not know if or when there would be
a response.

"We're pressing the case in Chile because this is the first
opportunity we have had to see if there is still some real
evidence there," Mrs. Horman said by telephone from New
York. "But the letters rogatory seem to be in a paralyzed
state."

William Rogers, Mr. Kissinger's lawyer, said in a letter
that because the investigations in Chile and elsewhere
related to Mr. Kissinger "in his capacity as secretary of
state," the Department of State should respond to the
issues that have been raised. He added that Mr. Kissinger
is willing to "contribute what he can from his memory of
those distant events," but did not say how or where that
would occur.

Relatives of Gen. René Schneider, commander of the Chilean
Armed Forces when he was assassinated in Oct. 1970 by other
military officers, have taken a different approach than
Mrs. Horman. Alleging summary execution, assault and civil
rights violations, they filed a $3 million civil suit in
Washington last fall against Mr. Kissinger, Richard M.
Helms, the former director of the Central Intelligence
Agency, and other Nixon-era officials who, according to
declassified United States documents, were involved in
plotting a military coup to keep Mr. Allende from power.

In his books, Mr. Kissinger has acknowledged that he
initially followed Mr. Nixon's orders in Sept. 1970 to
organize a coup, but he also says that he ordered the
effort shut down a month later. The government documents,
however, indicate that the C.I.A. continued to encourage a
coup here and also provided money to military officers who
had been jailed for General Schneider's death.

"My father was neither for or against Allende, but a
constitutionalist who believed that the winner of the
election should take office," René Schneider Jr. said.
"That made him an obstacle to Mr. Kissinger and the Nixon
government, and so they conspired with generals here to
carry out the attack on my father and to plot a coup
attempt."

In another action, human rights lawyers here have filed a
criminal complaint against Mr. Kissinger and other American
officials, accusing them of helping organize the covert
regional program of political repression called Operation
Condor. As part of that plan, right-wing military
dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile,
Paraguay and Uruguay coordinated efforts throughout the
1970's to kidnap and kill hundreds of their exiled
political opponents.

Argentina has also begun an investigation into American
support for and involvement in Operation Condor. A judge
there, Rodolfo Cancioba Corral, has said he regards Mr.
Kissinger as a potential "defendant or suspect." But
lawyers say it is virtually impossible for a foreign court
to compel former American officials to answer a summons.

During a visit by Mr. Kissinger to France last year, for
instance, a judge there sent police officers to his Paris
hotel to serve him with a request to answer questions about
American involvement in the Chilean coup, in which French
citizens also disappeared. But Mr. Kissinger refused to
respond to the subpoena, referred the matter to the State
Department, and flew on to Italy.

"I think it is clear that Kissinger is now one of many,
many officials who have to think twice before they travel,"
said Bruce Broomhall, director of the international justice
program at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. "It will
be surprising to many that an American secretary of state
is among that group, but times have certainly changed" as a
result of the Pinochet case, he said.

The uproar appears to have forced Mr. Kissinger to cancel a
trip to Brazil. He was scheduled to make a speech and
receive a government medal in São Paulo on March 13, but
withdrew after leftist groups there said they would
demonstrate against him and also called on judges and
prosecutors to detain him for questioning about Operation
Condor.

A spokeswoman for Kissinger Associates in New York
attributed the change of plans to a "scheduling conflict."
But the organizer of the event, Rabbi Henry Sobel of the
Congregacão Israelita Paulista, said "the situation had
become politically uncomfortable" both for Mr. Kissinger
and local Jewish community leaders who had invited him.

"I spoke with him many times on the telephone and made it
very clear to him what was happening behind the scenes, and
he was very sensitive to that," Rabbi Sobel said in a
telephone interview. "This was a way to avoid any problems