I am an investigative reporter and writer who worked in Latin America for many years as a foreign correspondent. I was in Chile during the revolutionary government of Salvador Allende, witnessed the military coup of 1973 and continued to report during the most violent years of the military dictatorship. In the 1980s, I covered the civil wars in Central America and the U.S. invasion of Panama.
My first job in journalism was at the Des Moines Register & Tribune in my native State of Iowa. Previously I had studied Theology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. To prepare to go to Chile, I obtained a Masters Degree in Latin American Studies at Stanford. On my return from Chile, I worked on the Foreign Desk of the Washington Post. Then I moved to NPR News, where I served as deputy foreign editor and managing editor. In more recent years I taught at Columbia University, as the the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor of International Journalism, currently with emeritus status.
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Chile is my second country. I arrived in Chile in October 1972, among hundreds of foreign observers and participants in president Salvador Allende’s historic attempt to forge a democratic and peaceful road to Socialism. The military coup destroyed that idealistic and revolutionary experiment. I remained in Chile, one of the only American journalists reporting from the inside on the violent first five years of the military dictatorship. Most of my reporting was for The Washington Post, which ran my pieces as an unnamed “special correspondent”, which is a dressed up name for a stringer, a freelance reporter who enjoys a stable “payment by the piece” relationship with the publication. I had a similar arrangement with Time magazine and ABC Radio. A Peru-based newsletter, Latin America Press, bylined my pieces with the pseudonym Ramón Marsano and paid me a small monthly salary. I also filed for a long list of other newspapers and radio networks (BBC and eventually NPR) as well as occasional work for television. It was the beginning of a life-changing engagement with Chile that has lasted my entire career. It was where I met my wife Carolina Kenrick. She was part of it all. A few weeks after we started living together, I did her the dubious favor of getting us both arrested. Our house was raided and we were taken for a day to the notorious Villa Grimaldi. Our son Tomás was born in Santiago in 1977. He is bi-national and currently lives and works in Chile. Sebastián and Camila were born in Washington DC after we returned to the US. Our children grew up knowing Chile was in our blood and in our hearts. My books on Chile form a trilogy covering the most dramatic episodes of that country and its fraught relationship with the United States: Assassination on Embassy Row (on the carbomb killing of Chile’s most prominent dissident leader in Washington DC), The Cóndor Years (on the multinational alliance led by Chile that targeted opponents of all the military governments of the region) and Chile in Their Hearts (on two young Americans, my fellow idealists, who were killed among the many hundreds swept up in the early days of the coup.
Over the course of these four decades in Chile, I participated in the creation of three media organizations: APSI/Actualidad Internacional, launched in 1976 under intense military censorship, became one of the leading news magazines exposing the abuses of the dictatorship and helping to open up the road to democracy. In 2007, in Chile on a Fulbright grant, I had the idea of creating an investigative journalism center that would operate independently of the existing Chilean news organizations. I teamed up with a prominent Chilean journalist; we raised money and created Centro de Investigación e Información Periodística (CIPERChile). More recently, in collaboration with outstanding investigative journalists Jorge Escalante, Pascale Bonnefoy and Maria Olivia Monckeberg, I created another investigative center, ArchivosChile, which used Chile’s new transparency law to obtain documents for a series of groundbreaking investigations exploring the secret documentary record of the military government. ArchivosChile and its English language counterpart The CóndorYears.com present the results of those projects and display our exclusive database documenting the day by day progress of repression after the coup with detailed data on victims. The fundraising arm for these and other projects is the U.S.-based Center for Investigation and Information (CIINFO) of Washington DC, which I direct.
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John Dinges is available to speak on his books and related topics, in Spanish and English. Contact him at jcdinges (at) gmail.com