Orlando Letelier

Orlando Letelier
Letelier in 1976
Minister of National Defense of Chile
In office 23 August 1973 – 11 September 1973
President	Salvador Allende
Preceded by	Carlos Prats
Succeeded by	Patricio Carvajal
Minister of the Interior of Chile
In office 9 August 1973 – 23 August 1973
President	Salvador Allende
Preceded by	Carlos Briones
Succeeded by	Carlos Briones
Foreign Affairs Minister
In office 22 May 1973 – 9 August 1973
President	Salvador Allende
Preceded by	Clodomiro Almeyda
Succeeded by	Clodomiro Almeyda
Ambassador of Chile to the United States
In office January 1971 – May 1973
President	Salvador Allende
Personal details
Born	Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar (1932-04-13)13 April 1932 Temuco, Chile
Died	21 September 1976(1976-09-21) (aged 44) Washington, D.C., US
Cause of death	Assassination by car bomb
Party	Socialist Party of Chile
Spouse	Isabel Margarita Morel Gumucio ​ ​ (m. 1955)​
Children	4, including Juan Pablo Letelier
Education	University of Chile
Occupation	Economist diplomat politician
Signature

Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar (13 April 1932 – 21 September 1976) was a Chilean economist, lawyer, and diplomat who served in the cabinet of President Salvador Allende. A member of the Socialist Party of Chile, Letelier was Chile's ambassador to the United States and later, in rapid succession, foreign minister, interior minister, and defense minister during the final months of Allende's Popular Unity government. After the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, he was arrested, tortured, and held for a year in military prison camps before being stripped of his citizenship and forced into exile.

In Washington, D.C., Letelier became one of the most prominent international critics of the Pinochet dictatorship, working at the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute and lobbying against loans and economic support for the regime. On 21 September 1976, agents of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the Chilean secret police, killed him with a car bomb in Washington's Sheridan Circle; his American colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt was killed in the same attack. The bombing, carried out with the help of anti-Castro Cuban exiles linked to the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), was among the first acts of state-sponsored terrorism committed on U.S. soil and became a defining episode of Chile's Operation Condor. Declassified U.S. intelligence has since concluded that General Augusto Pinochet personally ordered the killing, though he was never tried for it.

Early life and education

Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar was born in Temuco, in south-central Chile, the youngest child of Orlando Letelier Ruiz and Inés del Solar Rosenberg. Although born in Temuco, he spent much of his childhood in Santiago with his sisters, Mariana and Fabiola Letelier. He studied at the Liceo Lastarria and later at the Instituto Nacional in Santiago. At 16, he was accepted as a cadet at the Chilean Military Academy, where he completed his secondary education, before leaving military life in 1949 to sit the university entrance examination. He went on to study at the University of Chile's law school, where he also served as a teaching assistant in political economy and economic policy and took specialized coursework in commercial law, and graduated in 1954 with degrees in law and economics.

In 1955, he joined the recently formed Copper Office (Departamento del Cobre, the forerunner of CODELCO), where he worked until 1959 as a research analyst in the copper industry. On 17 December 1955, he married Isabel Margarita Morel Gumucio; the couple had four children, Cristián, José, Francisco, and Juan Pablo, the last of whom later became a Chilean senator.

In 1959, Letelier was dismissed from the Copper Office amid an internal restructuring; Senator Allende publicly described the firing as political retaliation for Letelier's support of Allende's unsuccessful 1952 presidential campaign and his recent admission to the Socialist Party. The Letelier family left for Venezuela, where he became a copper consultant to the Finance Ministry. He subsequently joined the newly created Inter-American Development Bank from its founding, eventually becoming a senior economist and director of its loan division, and served as a United Nations consultant involved in the creation of the Asian Development Bank.

Political career

Letelier (middle) and Salvador Allende

While at university, Letelier had been a student representative of the Independent University Group in the University of Chile's student federation (FECH), a post he held until 1952. He joined the Chilean Socialist Party in 1959. In January 1971, President Allende, drawing on Letelier's international standing and his intimate knowledge of the copper industry, appointed him ambassador to the United States. His central task was to defend the Chilean nationalization of copper, approved unanimously by Chile's National Congress in July 1971, which had displaced the private-ownership model long favored by the U.S. government. In this role he met on several occasions with President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.

In 1973, Letelier was recalled to Santiago and served successively as Foreign Minister (22 May – 9 August), Interior Minister (9–23 August), and Defense Minister (23 August – 11 September). He was Allende's last defense minister; during his short tenure, General Augusto Pinochet—who became army commander-in-chief the same day Letelier took over the defense portfolio—grew close to him.

Coup, imprisonment, and torture

In the 1973 Chilean coup d'état of 11 September 1973, Letelier was arrested by soldiers as he arrived at the Ministry of National Defense, making him the first senior member of the Allende government detained by the military. He was held for twelve months in a succession of camps and prisons and subjected to severe torture: first at the Tacna Artillery Regiment, then at the Military Academy. He spent eight months as a political prisoner on Dawson Island in the Strait of Magellan alongside other former ministers, including José Tohá, Clodomiro Almeyda, Edgardo Enríquez, and Luis Corvalán. He was later moved to the basement of the Air Force War Academy and finally to a camp at Ritoque, north of Valparaíso. Following international diplomatic pressure—especially from Diego Arria, then governor of the Federal District of Venezuela—he was released in September 1974 on condition that he leave Chile immediately.

Exile

After his release, Letelier and his family moved to Caracas, Venezuela, but relocated to the United States on the advice of American writer Saul Landau. In 1975 he settled in Washington, D.C., where he became a senior fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-leaning foreign-policy think tank with which Landau was also affiliated. He also became director of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute and taught at the School of International Service of American University.

Letelier wrote and lectured extensively against the "Chicago Boys," a group of Latin American economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger who returned home to promote free-market policy. He argued that in a resource-dependent economy like Chile's, unrestrained markets simply redirected wealth from workers and the middle class toward monopolists and financial speculators. He soon became the most prominent voice of the Chilean exile opposition, lobbying the U.S. Congress and European governments and helping to block several loans—particularly from Europe—sought by the military government to shore up the Chilean economy. His activism angered the dictatorship, and on 10 September 1976, Pinochet's government formally stripped him of his Chilean citizenship. In response, Letelier said he had been deprived of his dignity as a Chilean, but insisted he remained Chilean by birth and would die Chilean, adding that his persecutors had been born, lived, and would be remembered only as traitors.

Assassination

Main article: Assassination of Orlando Letelier

Memorial on Sheridan Circle, Washington, D.C.

On the morning of 21 September 1976, Letelier picked up his IPS colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt and her husband, Michael, who needed a ride to work after car trouble. Letelier drove along Massachusetts Avenue and, as the car entered Sheridan Circle, a remotely detonated bomb hidden beneath the driver's seat exploded, hurling the vehicle into a parked car outside the Irish embassy. Michael Moffitt escaped through the rear window; Letelier, whose lower body had been shattered by the blast, died in the wreckage, while Ronni Moffitt, struck by a metal fragment that severed her carotid artery, died of blood loss shortly afterward at a hospital. An autopsy recorded the causes of Letelier's death as exsanguination, traumatic amputation of the lower extremities, and blast injuries. Michael Moffitt survived with only minor injuries.

Investigation and prosecutions

Identifying the bombers

The Federal Bureau of Investigation traced the bombing to Michael Townley, a U.S.-born naturalized Chilean who worked for DINA and had previously had contact with the CIA. Townley and a Chilean accomplice, Armando Fernández Larios, had obtained U.S. entry visas in Paraguay with the help of the U.S. ambassador there, George Landau, after Paraguayan intelligence indicated the men intended to meet with a U.S. general on business the CIA would recognize. When Landau grew suspicious and cabled Washington for confirmation, the visas were revoked by the State Department in early August 1976; the DINA operatives nonetheless entered the United States using false Chilean diplomatic passports under the same names. Landau's retained visa applications later helped investigators document DINA's involvement.

In 1978, Chile agreed to extradite Townley, who confessed to building the bomb and told investigators the assassination had been ordered by DINA chief Manuel Contreras. According to journalist Jean-Guy Allard, Townley recruited the operatives who planted the device after consultations with leaders of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), an anti-Castro Cuban militant umbrella group that the FBI has described as a terrorist organization, including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. The men ultimately chosen to carry out the bombing were Cuban-American exiles José Dionisio Suárez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Díaz, and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll. According to the Miami Herald, Posada Carriles also took part in the meeting that settled on Letelier's murder and, weeks later, the bombing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455.

Trials

Townley pleaded guilty in the United States in 1978 to a single count of conspiracy in exchange for a ten-year sentence and admission to the Witness Protection Program; he ultimately served 62 months. Guillermo Novo Sampoll and Alvin Ross Díaz went to trial in January 1979 and were convicted on all charges, including murder and conspiracy to murder a foreign official, and sentenced to life imprisonment; Ignacio Novo Sampoll was convicted of perjury for lying to a grand jury. On appeal, the convictions of Guillermo Novo and Ross Díaz were overturned on an evidentiary issue, and both men were acquitted at a 1981 retrial, while Ignacio Novo's perjury conviction was likewise later overturned. Suárez and Paz Romero remained fugitives for roughly fifteen years before being captured and pleading guilty in the early 1990s, each serving less than twelve years. Fernández Larios fled to the United States in 1987 and, under a plea agreement, pleaded guilty as an accessory after the fact in exchange for a reduced sentence.

In Chile, Manuel Contreras and his deputy, Brigadier Pedro Espinoza, were convicted by a Chilean court in November 1993 of masterminding the assassination and were sentenced to seven and six years' imprisonment respectively; their sentences were upheld on appeal in 1995. Pinochet, who died on 10 December 2006, was never brought to trial for the killings.

The briefcase

During the FBI investigation, documents from a briefcase in Letelier's possession were copied and leaked to journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak and to columnist Jack Anderson before being returned to his widow. Evans and Novak, along with British journalist Robert Moss, characterized the material as showing Letelier in contact for a decade with Eastern Bloc intelligence services, coordinating with exiled Popular Unity leaders based in East Berlin, and receiving a monthly stipend from the Cuban government via Beatriz Allende, the daughter of Salvador Allende, who was married to Cuban intelligence official Luis Fernández Oña.

Historians John Dinges and Saul Landau, co-authors of Assassination on Embassy Row, wrote that the leaks—channeled largely through columnists with close ties to the FBI and CIA—distorted the content of Letelier's papers and amounted to a smear campaign intended to portray him falsely as a Soviet or Cuban agent, diverting attention from DINA and its Cuban-exile collaborators while the murder investigation was still active. The conservative press-monitoring group Accuracy in Media took the opposite position, accusing major newspapers of suppressing evidence that Letelier had been a Cuban agent. Letelier's widow, Isabel, rejected the underlying allegations in a November 1980 letter to The New York Times, writing that funds her husband received had originated in the West and that Cuba had served only as an intermediary.

U.S. government awareness and response

A U.S. State Department document released by the National Security Archive in 2010 shows that a démarche warning Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay against carrying out Operation Condor assassinations abroad was drafted and approved for transmission on 23 August 1976, but was rescinded by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on 16 September 1976 after regional U.S. ambassadors raised concerns about their own safety and possible diplomatic friction. Five days later, Letelier was killed. Historian John Dinges has written that documents released in the late 1990s show the CIA had learned of the assassination plot roughly two months before it occurred but did not act to stop it. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the United States cut military aid to Chile and adopted a more distant public posture toward the Pinochet government.

A secret CIA assessment prepared in 1987 and summarized for President Ronald Reagan by Secretary of State George Shultz concluded there was "convincing evidence" that Pinochet had personally ordered Contreras to carry out the murders, and that Pinochet had subsequently worked to obstruct the U.S. investigation, at one point reportedly considering having Contreras himself killed to protect the cover-up. The Shultz memorandum, along with thousands of related records, remained classified for years; the Clinton administration declassified more than 16,000 U.S. government documents on Chile but withheld those specifically concerning the Letelier-Moffitt case, citing the ongoing investigation, and reportedly reopened the inquiry and sent agents to Chile to gather further evidence of Pinochet's role. The assessment was finally released in October 2015, shortly before Secretary of State John Kerry's visit to Santiago, and was described by National Security Archive analyst Peter Kornbluh as definitive confirmation of Pinochet's direct responsibility.

Subsequent disclosures

Documents released in October 2015 included a CIA report dated 28 April 1978 stating that Contreras had told a confidant he had authorized the assassination on Pinochet's orders, and a State Department cable referencing several additional CIA reports from "extremely sensitive informants" pointing to Pinochet's direct role in ordering both the killing and the subsequent cover-up. However, letters written by Townley himself and published by the National Security Archive in November 2023 offered a somewhat different account, implicating Contreras and his deputy, Pedro Espinoza, more directly in issuing the operational order than Pinochet. In a March 1976 letter, Townley wrote that he had received the order to kill Letelier from Espinoza and later described how he recruited the Cuban-American operatives after entering the United States on forged Paraguayan visas. In a separate March 1978 confession, he wrote that he bore responsibility for his actions but had carried them out on Contreras's orders and suggested his foreign nationality was being used to shield the Chilean government.

A 1991 U.S. Department of Justice affidavit by attorney Eric B. Marcy, drawing on confession letters obtained from Townley's wife, writer Mariana Callejas, between 1982 and 1990, concluded that although the Pinochet government ran a cover-up operation known as "Operación Mascarada," the people from whom Townley was actually seeking protection were Contreras and Espinoza. The full set of Townley confession letters was published by the National Security Archive on 22 November 2023. In one letter, addressed to Contreras as "Don Manuel," Townley suggested Contreras had not told Pinochet the full truth about the case.

Legacy

Diego Arria again intervened after Letelier's death, arranging for the body to be flown to Caracas for burial, since Pinochet refused to allow interment in Chile. Chilean citizenship was restored to Letelier during the country's transition to democracy under President Patricio Aylwin, and his remains were repatriated to Chile in 1994.

A memorial to Letelier and Moffitt, designed by D.C. urban planner Ned Echeverria, was unveiled at Sheridan Circle on 20 September 1981; it consists of a granite base topped by a bronze plaque bearing bas-relief portraits of the two victims. A statue of Letelier was later erected in 2018 near the Chilean ambassador's residence, and IPS holds an annual commemorative service at the site each September. Since 1978, IPS has also presented the annual Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award to individuals and organizations advancing human rights in the Americas, in memory of its two slain colleagues.

In culture

The years leading up to Letelier's death and the bombing that ended his life in Washington are a central theme of the novel 1976 by Uruguayan author Jorge Majfud.

See also

• Journalist Robert Novak's involvement in the Orlando Letelier assassination
• List of political scandals in Chile
• Military dictatorship of Chile (1973–1990)
• National Security Archive
• State terrorism
• Terrorism in the United States

General and cited references

• Dinges, John, and Landau, Saul. Assassination on Embassy Row (London, 1981) ISBN 0-07-016998-5, (McGraw-Hill, 1981)
• Dinges, John. The Condor Years (The New Press: 2004) ISBN 1-56584-764-4
• Hitchens, Christopher, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso Books: 2001) ISBN 1-85984-631-9
• Branch, Taylor and Propper, Eugene M. Labyrinth (Viking Press 1983, Penguin Books 1983, ISBN 0-14-006683-7)
• Varas, Florencia and Orrego, Claudio. El caso Letelier (Editorial Aconcagua, Santiago, 1980)

External links

• Orlando Letelier's article "The 'Chicago Boys' in Chile: Economic Freedom's Awful Toll"; TheNation.com, 28 August 1976 / 21 September 2016
• Orlando Letelier Archive held by the Transnational Institute
• MIPT Terrorism Knowledge Base Nine legal documents from the trials of Letelier's assassins; includes trial transcripts
• Institute for Policy Studies, where Letelier and Moffitt worked at the time, gives circumstances surrounding bombing
• John Dinges was a correspondent for The Washington Post in South America from 1975 to 1983, author of The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (The New Press 2004) and with Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (Pantheon Books 1980), (Asesinato en Washington, Lasser 1980, Planeta 1990)
• Biography at Memoria Chilena
• Tom Hayden (18 April 2005). "An Exiled Son of Santiago". The Nation. Retrieved 14 December 2012.
• New Docs Show Kissinger Rescinded Warning on Assassinations Days Before Letelier Bombing – video report by Democracy Now!, 12 April 2010
• Remembrance of the Assassination – Video report by The Washington Post, 18 September 2016