John C. Dinges

John Dinges is an investigative reporter and writer with decades of experience covering Latin America. He served as a foreign correspondent during some of the region’s most tumultuous periods, including the government of Salvador Allende in Chile, the 1973 military coup, and the violent early years of the Pinochet dictatorship. In the 1980s, he reported on the civil wars in Central America and the U.S. invasion of Panama.

A native of Iowa, Dinges began his journalism career at the Des Moines Register & Tribune. He previously studied theology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and later earned a Master’s degree in Latin American Studies from Stanford University in preparation for his reporting in Chile. After returning to the United States, he worked on the Foreign Desk of The Washington Post before moving to NPR News, where he served as deputy foreign editor and managing editor. In more recent years, he taught at Columbia University as the Godfrey Lowell Cabot Professor of International Journalism. He now holds emeritus status.

Chile has played a central role in Dinges’s life and career. He arrived in the country in October 1972 as one of many international observers drawn to Allende’s effort to build a democratic path to socialism. Following the coup, he remained in Chile as one of the few American journalists reporting from within the country during the regime’s violent first five years. Much of his reporting appeared in The Washington Post under the designation “special correspondent,” and he also filed stories for Time magazine, ABC Radio, BBC, NPR, and others. Writing under the pseudonym Ramón Marsano, he contributed regularly to Latin America Press, a Peru-based newsletter.

Chile was also where he met his wife, Carolina Kenrick, who shared in the personal and political trials of the time. The couple were arrested during a raid on their home and briefly detained at the notorious Villa Grimaldi. Their son, Tomás, was born in Santiago in 1977 and now lives and works in Chile. Their younger children, Sebastián and Camila, were born in Washington, D.C. The family has always felt a deep connection to Chile, a country that remains close to their hearts.

Dinges is the author of a trilogy of books chronicling key episodes in Chilean history and its complex relationship with the United States:

• Assassination on Embassy Row, about the car-bomb murder of Chilean opposition leader Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.;
• The Cóndor Years, detailing the multinational military intelligence alliance that targeted political opponents across South America;
• and Chile in Their Hearts, which tells the story of two idealistic young Americans who were among the many killed in the aftermath of the coup.

Over the years, Dinges has co-founded and supported multiple independent media organizations in Chile. In 1976, during a time of severe censorship, he helped launch APSI/Actualidad Internacional, which became a leading news magazine in the struggle against dictatorship. In 2007, while in Chile on a Fulbright grant, he co-founded the Centro de Investigación e Información Periodística (CIPERChile), an investigative journalism center independent of existing media outlets. More recently, with journalists Jorge Escalante, Pascale Bonnefoy, and María Olivia Mönckeberg, he created ArchivosChile, a project that uses Chile’s transparency law to uncover government documents and produce in-depth investigations into the dictatorship’s secret records. The English-language companion site, TheCondorYears.com, shares the team’s findings and hosts an exclusive, detailed database tracking state repression after the 1973 coup.

Dinges also directs the U.S.-based Center for Investigation and Information (CIINFO), which supports these and related projects.

Updated June 16, 2025