Henry Kissinger may face extradition proceedings in connection with the role of the United States in the 1973 military coup in Chile.
The former US secretary of state is wanted for questioning as a witness in the investigation into the events surrounding the overthrow of the socialist president, Salvador Allende, by General Augusto Pinochet.
The investigation focuses on CIA involvement in the coup, whether US officials passed lists of left-wing Americans in Chile to the military and whether the US embassy failed to assist Americans deemed sympathetic to the deposed government.
Chile’s Judge Juan Guzman is so frustrated by the lack of cooperation by Kissinger that he is now considering an extradition request to force him to come to Chile and testify in connection with the death of the American filmmaker and journalist Charles Horman, who was killed by the military days after the coup.
Horman’s story was told in the 1982 Costa-Gavras film, Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek.
Guzman is investigating whether US officials passed the names of suspected left-wing Americans to Chilean military authorities. Declassified documents have now revealed that such a list existed. Sergio Corvalan, a Chilean lawyer, said that he could not divulge the “dozens” of names on the list.
This is not the first attempt to interview Kissinger about the turbulent period in Latin America.
During a visit to London in April, judges in Spain and France unsuccessfully tried to question him about the US’s role in Operation Condor, which has been described as a coordinated hit squad organised from Chile and including six South American nations aimed at dealing with leftwing opposition groups.
Several declassified documents that have emerged over the past two years have shown an increasingly visible American hand in Operation Condor.