The Assassination of Orlando Letelier and the Politics of Silence

[Judi Lynn]

1. The Murder of Orlando Letelier

The Murder of Orlando Letelier


40 years ago today, the US-backed Pinochet government assassinated a leftist dissident on the streets of Washington, DC.


by Branko Marcetic





9.21.16


Branko Marcetic is a journalist from Auckland, New Zealand.


Ask most Americans about terrorist attacks committed by foreigners on US soil and there’s more than a good chance they’ll point to the September 11, 2001 bombings of the World Trade Center, or the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. At a push, they might even point to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which, while not a case of terrorism, was until September 11 the worst foreign attack on US soil in the country’s history.

Few are likely to talk about the time an ostensibly friendly government — one partially installed by the United States in an act of covert regime change, no less — murdered one of its own dissidents in a car bombing in the heart of the nation’s capital, killing a US citizen in the process. Yet forty years ago today, that’s precisely what happened when Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean diplomat and outspoken critic of the Pinochet dictatorship which had come to rule the country, and his two coworkers prepared to travel to work.

On a rainy fall morning on September 21, 1976, as Letelier’s car traveled down the block of 2300 Massachusetts Avenue, just past Sheridan Circle and along Washington, DC’s Embassy Row, a plastic explosive attached to the underside of the vehicle detonated, killing Letelier and one of his occupants, twenty-five-year-old Ronni Moffitt. Passers-by watched as the flaming wreck crashed into a nearby Volkswagen, and Michael Moffit, Ronni’s husband, crawled out of the back. They had been married only 113 days.

As became clear in the succeeding years, the incident was a clear-cut case of state-sponsored terrorism carried out in the beating heart of American power. Yet whether due to intentional obfuscation by sections of the US national security state, or because of other factors, justice was largely dodged by the true perpetrators of the attack, who presided at the highest levels of Chile’s government.

More:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/orlando-letelier-pinochet-nixon-kissinger/