John Dinges

Last updated
John Dinges
Born (1941-12-08) December 8, 1941 (age 82)
Iowa, U.S.
OccupationJournalist and author
EducationStanford University
GenreNon-fiction
SubjectForeign policy
SpouseCarolina Kenrick
Children3

John Dinges (December 8, 1941 [1] ) is an American journalist. He was special correspondent for Time , Washington Post and ABC Radio in Chile. With a group of Chilean journalists, he cofounded the Chilean magazine APSI . [2] He is the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a position he held from 1996 to 2016, currently with emeritus status.

Contents

Early life and career

John Dinges was born in Iowa. His first job in journalism was at the Des Moines Register and Tribune, followed by a decades long career as a freelance correspondent in Latin America, foreign desk assistant editor at the Washington Post, and managing editor at NPR. He has a Bachelors Degree in English and Philosophy from Loras College and obtained a Masters Degree from Stanford University in Latin American studies. He studied Theology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, for three years, with the intention of becoming a Catholic priest, before switching to journalism. [3]

He worked on the foreign desk of The Washington Post, traveling as a reporter to cover the civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. From 1972 to 1978 Dinges lived in Chile, [4] "one of the few American journalists to live in Chile during its most violent period of military rule". [5] He helped create three Chilean media organizations. The first, APSI/Actualidad Internacional, was founded in 1976, under intense military censorship, and became one of the leading investigative news magazines exposing the abuses of the military. [2]

In 2008 after six-months as a Fulbright visiting professor at Universidad Alberto Hurtado, he created the investigative journalism center, Centro de Investigación e Información Periodística (CIPER), in association with Monica González, a prominent investigative reporter.

In collaboration with investigative journalists Jorge Escalante, Pascale Bonnefoy, María Olivia Mönckeberg and Maria Jose Vilches, he created ArchivosChile, which carried out groundbreaking investigations exploring the secret documentary record of the military government. ArchivosChile was based for several years in the University of Chile's communications school, ICEI.

He is executive director and board chair of the U.S.-based Center for Investigation and Information (CIINFO) of Washington DC. [2] CIINFO was the non-profit fundraising vehicle for ArchivosChile and CIPER, as well as a series of investigative journalism projects, most recently on Operation Condor and military dictatorships in South America.

From 1985 to 1996 he worked at National Public Radio as managing editor, acting senior foreign editor and editorial director. [5]

From 1996 to 2016 he was the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor of International Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, currently emeritus. [5]

In April 2015, John Dinges provided extensive testimony as a witness for Prosecutor Pablo Ouviña during the "Plan Condor" trial in Buenos Aires, Argentina. [6] [7] As a expert on Operation Condor, Dinges is the most frequently cited expert witness in the prosecutor's case due to his significant contributions to the investigation across multiple countries including Chile, Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Brazil, and the United States. His contributions include authoring two notable books - "Assassination on Embassy Row" and "The Condor Years" - conducting interviews with over a dozen police, military agents, and victims, and gathering crucial data from intelligence archives in the region. [8] In May 2016, the verdict of the tribunal, the "Tribunal Oral Federal N°1", declared 15 convictions directly related to the forced disappearance of 106 victims. [9]

Personal life

Dinges married Carolina Kenrick. They have 3 children. Tomas was born in Santiago in 1977 and lives and works in Chile. Sebastián and Camila were born in Washington DC.

Books

Awards

He serves on the advisory boards of Human Rights Watch and the National Security Archive, [12] and is a juror for the Maria Moors Cabot Prizes and the du-Pont Columbia awards.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Orlando Letelier</span> Chilean economist, politician and diplomat (1932–1976)

Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar was a Chilean economist, politician and diplomat during the presidency of Salvador Allende. A refugee from the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, Letelier accepted several academic positions in Washington, D.C. following his exile from Chile. In 1976, agents of Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the Pinochet regime's secret police, assassinated Letelier in Washington in a car bombing. These agents had been working in collaboration with members of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, an anti-Castro militant group.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Operation Condor</span> US-backed repression campaign in South America

Operation Condor was a campaign of political repression involving intelligence operations, coups, and assassinations of left-wing sympathizers, in South America which formally existed from 1975 to 1983. Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Augusto Pinochet's spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers to the Army War Academy on La Alameda, Santiago's central avenue. Officers came from Chile, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, which comprised the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America. The United States and, allegedly, Colombia, Venezuela, and France were also collaborators and financiers of the covert operations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dirty War</span> Argentinian theater of the Cold War, from 1976–1983

The Dirty War is the name used by the military junta or civic-military dictatorship of Argentina for its period of state terrorism in Argentina from 1974 to 1983 as a part of Operation Condor. During this campaign, military and security forces and death squads in the form of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance hunted down any political dissidents and anyone believed to be associated with socialism, left-wing Peronism, or the Montoneros movement.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manuel Contreras</span> Chilean general (1929–2015)

Juan Manuel "Mamo" GuillermoContreras Sepúlveda was a Chilean Army officer and the former head of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), Chile's secret police during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In 1995, he was convicted of the murder of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC, and sentenced to seven years in prison, which he served until 2001. At the time of his death, Contreras was serving 59 unappealable sentences totaling 529 years in prison for kidnapping, forced disappearance, and assassination.

The Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism is located in Pulitzer Hall on the university's Morningside Heights campus in New York City. Founded in 1912 by Joseph Pulitzer, Columbia Journalism School is one of the oldest journalism schools in the world and the only journalism school in the Ivy League. It offers four graduate degree programs.

United States intervention in Chilean politics started during the War of Chilean Independence (1812–1826). The influence of United States in both the economic and the political arenas of Chile has since gradually increased over the last two centuries, and continues to be significant.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Security Archive</span> Advocacy and journalism nonprofit

The National Security Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-governmental, non-profit research and archival institution located on the campus of the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1985 to check rising government secrecy. The National Security Archive is an investigative journalism center, open government advocate, international affairs research institute, and the largest repository of declassified U.S. documents outside the federal government. The National Security Archive has spurred the declassification of more than 15 million pages of government documents by being the leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), filing a total of more than 70,000 FOIA and declassification requests in its over 35+ years of history.

The Maria Moors Cabot Prizes are the oldest international awards in the field of journalism. They are presented each fall by the Trustees of Columbia University to journalists in the Western hemisphere who are viewed as having made a significant contributions to upholding freedom of the press in the Americas and Inter-American understanding. Since 2003, the prize can be awarded to an organization instead of an individual.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Kornbluh</span>

Peter Kornbluh is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive and the director of the Chile Documentation Project and the Cuba Documentation Project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Project FUBELT</span> 1970–1973 CIA operations in Chile to suppress Salvador Allende

Project FUBELT is the codename for the secret Central Intelligence Agency operations that were to prevent Salvador Allende's rise to power before his confirmation and to promote a military coup in Chile. This project came after the circumstantial failure of Track I, which involved making president Eduardo Frei Montalva interfere with the 1970 national election in opposition to Allende.

The Archives of Terror are a collection of documents chronicling some of the illicit activities undertaken by Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner's secret police force. The documents have since been used in attempts to prosecute Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and in several human rights cases in Argentina and Chile. The collection of files proved the existence of Operation Condor - a CIA clandestine campaign of state terror and political repression in countries throughout Latin and South America. The documents were originally found on December 22, 1992, by lawyer and human-rights activist Dr. Martín Almada, and judge José Agustín Fernández, in a police station in Lambaré, a suburb of Paraguayan capital Asunción.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Assassination of Orlando Letelier</span> 1976 car bombing in Washington, D.C., US

On 21 September 1976, Orlando Letelier, a leading opponent of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, was assassinated by car bombing, in Washington, D.C. Letelier, who was living in exile in the United States, was killed along with his colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt, who was in the car with her husband Michael. The assassination was carried out by agents of the Chilean secret police (DINA), and was one among many carried out as part of Operation Condor. Declassified U.S. intelligence documents confirm that Pinochet directly ordered the killing.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aaron Glantz</span> American journalist

Aaron Glantz is a two-time Peabody Award-winning journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist known for producing journalism with impact. Projects he's led have sparked new laws that curtailed the opioid epidemic, improved care for U.S. military veterans, and kept the FBI's international war crimes office open. They have also prompted dozens of Congressional hearings and investigations by the FBI, DEA, and United Nations. His reporting has appeared in nearly every major media outlet, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, NPR, NBC News, ABC News, Reveal and the PBS Newshour, where his investigations have received three national Emmy nominations.

Patricia del Cármen Verdugo Aguirre was a Chilean journalist, writer and human rights activist. She focused much of her investigative reporting on the human rights abuses committed by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. She was a recipient of the National Prize for Journalism and the Maria Moors Cabot Prizes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Daniel Zwerdling</span> American journalist

Daniel Zwerdling is an American investigative journalist who has written for major magazines and newspapers. From 1980 to 2018 he served as an investigative reporter for NPR News, with stints as foreign correspondent and host of Weekend All Things Considered from 1993 to 1999. Zwerdling retired from NPR in 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Agustín Edwards Eastman</span> Chilean newspaper publisher (1927-2017)

Agustín Iván Edmundo Edwards Eastman was a Chilean newspaper publisher, and one of the richest people in Chile. He inherited his family's newspaper company El Mercurio SAP, which publishes Chile's leading national dailies El Mercurio and La Segunda among others, when his father died in 1956. He has been described as a media baron, and is known for his right-wing views. Throughout his time as publisher, he has used El Mercurio SAP's newspapers to influence public opinion in Chile, and he supported the 1973 coup d'état to oust socialist President Salvador Allende.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Project Andrea</span> Pinochets plan to manufacture sarin gas

Project Andrea is the code name of an effort by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to manufacture sarin gas for use as a weapon against its opponents.

Robert William Scherrer was an FBI agent posted in Latin America in the 1970s. Named by journalist John Dinges as an "intelligence centre all by himself", he had extensive sources in the intelligence communities and military across the countries of the Southern Cone, and was one of the agents transmitting information from local intelligence sources to the United States as part of Operation Condor. He later participated in investigations relating to Condor's international killings, and is one of John Dinges' sources. He was the person who, in 1979, revealed the existence of "phase 3" of Operation Condor, the programme of international assassinations.

The Committee of Cooperation for Peace in Chile was a Chilean peace organization founded in October 1973 by an inter-religious group led by the Archdiocese of Santiago in order to support human rights of those persecuted by the regime of General Augusto Pinochet.

References

  1. ↑ "Dinges, John, 1941– – LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies | Library of Congress, from LC Linked Data Service: Authorities and Vocabularies (Library of Congress)".
  2. 1 2 3 "Creation of CIPER and CIINFO: Investigative Journalism Center". John Dinges. Retrieved 15 November 2016.
  3. ↑ "John Dinges". WP. 2018. Retrieved 2020-04-03.
  4. ↑ John Dinges (2017-04-04). "Expats After the Coup". Baffler. Retrieved 2020-04-04.
  5. 1 2 3 "Assassination, Justice And Chile's Presidential Election". NPR Weekend edition. 2009-12-03. Retrieved 2020-04-03.
  6. ↑ Osorio, Carlos (May 6, 2015). "OPERATION CONDOR: National Security Archive Presents Trove of Declassified Documentation in Historic Trial in Argentina". nsarchive.gwu.edu. Retrieved 2023-05-06.
  7. ↑ Osorio, Carlos (May 27, 2016). "Operation Condor Verdict: GUILTY! | National Security Archive". nsarchive.gwu.edu. Retrieved 2023-05-06.
  8. ↑ "Plan Condor | Ministerio Público Fiscal | Procuración General de la Nación". www.mpf.gob.ar. Retrieved 2023-05-06.
  9. ↑ "Plan Cóndor". www.cels.org.ar. Retrieved 2023-05-07.
  10. ↑ "John Dinges discusses his book "Assassination on Embassy Row"". Stud Terkel. 1980-09-06. Retrieved 2020-04-04.
  11. ↑ TheEdgars.com, Edgars database Archived 2019-04-04 at the Wayback Machine
  12. ↑ Kornbluth and Dinges (2004-12-04). "The Case Against Pinochet". nsarchive2.gwu.edu. Retrieved 2020-04-03.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.