Missing is a true story tracing the fate of young American journalist Charles Horman assassinated in Chile in 1973 just after the overthrow of the country's Socialist president Salvador Allende, after discovering evidence of the United States' involvement in the bloody military coup. Horman was arrested by the US-led Chilean armed forces and never again seen alive by his family. American operatives seem to have played a major role in his brutal murder.
Charles Horman was an American, a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker who had traveled to Chile in the early 1970s to explore a country undergoing significant changes under its Socialist president, Salvador Allende. In the course of his research he seems to have uncovered information about CIA involvement in a plot to overthrow Allende. The coup took place, with Gen. Augusto Pinochet taking over as dictator and ordering the mass arrest of thousands of dissidents and suspected opponents. Charles Horman was one of these people, dragged from his home as the American embassy refused him help. His wife Joyce, who was with him in Chile, and his family never saw him alive again. Chilean security police murdered him, though they never admitted it. Horman's father, Ed, a patriotic American businessman, traveled to Santiago, where officials of the American embassy, led by the ambassador himself, offered to help him search for the son he believed had simply disappeared.