Orlando Letelier

Orlando Letelier
Letelier in 1976
Born	Sergio Orlando Letelier del Solar (1932-04-13)13 April 1932 Temuco, Chile
Died	21 September 1976(1976-09-21) (aged 44) Washington, D.C., United States
Cause of death	Car bomb
Nationality	Chilean
Known for	Letelier case
Spouse(s)	Isabel Margarita Morel
Children	Cristián, José, Francisco, Juan Pablo
Parent(s)	Orlando Letelier Ruiz Inés del Solar

Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar (13 April 1932 – 21 September 1976) 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 exit from Chile. In 1976, agents of Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the Pinochet regime's secret police, assassinated Letelier in Washington via the use of a car bomb. These agents had been working in collaboration with members of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, a U.S.-sponsored, anti-Fidel Castro, militant group.^[1]

Background

Letelier was born in Temuco, Chile, the youngest child of Orlando Letelier Ruiz and Inés del Solar. He studied at the Instituto Nacional and, at the age of sixteen, he was accepted as a cadet of the Chilean Military Academy, where he completed his secondary studies. Later, he abandoned the military life. He did not finish college and never received a university degree. In 1955, he joined the recently formed Copper Office (Departamento del Cobre, now CODELCO), where he worked until 1959 as a research analyst in the copper industry.

In the same year, Letelier married Isabel Margarita Morel Gumucio on December 17, 1955, with whom he had four children: Cristián, José, Francisco, and Juan Pablo.

Later in 1955, Letelier was fired from the Copper Office, ostensibly for supporting Salvador Allende's unsuccessful second presidential campaign. The Letelier family left for Venezuela, where Orlando became a copper consultant for the Finance Ministry.

Political career

When he was in the university, Letelier became a student representative at the University of Chile's Student Union. In 1959, he joined the Chilean Socialist Party (PS). In 1971, President Allende appointed him ambassador to the United States. His specific mission was to try to defend the Chilean nationalization of copper against the previous private ownership favored by the US government.

During 1973, Letelier was recalled to Chile and served successively as minister of Foreign Affairs, Interior and Defense.

In the coup d'état of September 11, 1973, he was the first high-ranking member of the Allende administration to be arrested. He was held for twelve months in different concentration camps suffering severe torture: first at the Tacna Regiment, then at the Military Academy; later he was sent for eight months to a political prison on Dawson Island and from there he was transferred to the basement of the Air Force War Academy, and finally to the concentration camp of Ritoque, until international diplomatic pressure, especially from Diego Arria, then Governor of Distrito Federal of Venezuela, resulted in the sudden release of Letelier on the condition that he immediately leave Chile.

After his release in September 1974, he and his family resettled in Caracas, but then Letelier decided to head for United States, at the proposal of American writer Saul Landau.

In 1975, Letelier moved to Washington D.C. where he became senior fellow of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies, where Landau worked at the time. Letelier became director of the Amsterdam, the Netherlands-based Transnational Institute, and taught at the School of International Service of the American University, in Washington, D.C. Letelier wrote several articles criticizing the "Chicago Boys", a group of South American economists trained at the University of Chicago by Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger who went to their home countries to promote and advise leaders on the benefits of a free-market economy.^[2]

This was used to great effect in Chile where General Pinochet looked to remove a socialist economic system and replace it with a free market economy. Letelier believed that in a resource driven economy such as Chile, allowing markets to operate freely simply guaranteed the shift of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the monopolists and financial speculators.^[2] He soon became the leading voice of the Chilean resistance, preventing several loans (especially from Europe) from being awarded to the Chilean government. On September 10, 1976, he was deprived of his Chilean nationality by decree.

Assassination

Memorial on Sheridan Circle, Washington DC

Letelier was killed by a car bomb explosion on September 21, 1976, in Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C., along with his American co-worker, Ronni Karpen Moffitt.^[3][4]

Moffit's husband, Michael Moffitt, was injured but survived. Several people were prosecuted and convicted for the murder. Among them were Michael Townley, a U.S. expatriate working for DINA, General Manuel Contreras, former head of the DINA, and Brigadier Pedro Espinoza, also formerly of DINA. Townley was convicted in the United States in 1978 and served 62 months in prison for the murder;^[5] he is now free as a participant in the United States Federal Witness Protection Program. Contreras and Espinoza were convicted in Chile in 1993.

General Augusto Pinochet, who died on December 10, 2006, was never brought to trial for the murders, despite evidence implicating him as having ordered them. Following the assassination, the United States cut military aid to Chile, and took a stance of 'unobtrusiveness' within the country.^[6]

Aftermath

Following the death of Pinochet in December 2006, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), for which both Letelier and Moffitt worked, called for the release of all the classified documents related to the Letelier–Moffitt assassination.

According to the IPS, the Clinton administration de-classified more than 16,000 documents related to Chile, but withheld documents related to the Letelier-Moffitt assassination in Washington on the grounds that they were associated with an ongoing investigation. The IPS says that the Clinton administration did re-activate the investigation into the Letelier-Moffitt murders and sent agents to Chile to gather additional evidence that Pinochet had authorized the crime. The former Chilean Secret Police Chief, Manuel Contreras, who, was convicted for his role in the crime in 1993, later pointed the finger at his superiors, claiming that all relevant orders came from Pinochet.

Subsequent disclosures

A US State Department document made available by the National Security Archive on 10 April 2010 reveals that a démarche protesting Pinochet's Operation Condor assassination program was proposed and sent on 23 August 1976 to US diplomatic missions in Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile to be delivered to their host governments but later rescinded on 16 September 1976 by Henry Kissinger, following concerns raised by US ambassadors assigned there of both personal safety and a likely diplomatic contretemps. Five days later, the Letelier assassination took place.^[7]

Documents released in 2015 revealed a CIA report dated April 28, 1978, which showed that the agency by then had knowledge that Pinochet ordered the murders.^[8] The report stated "Contreras told a confidant he authorized the assassination of Letelier on orders from Pinochet."^[8] A State Department document also referred to eight separate CIA reports from around the same date, each sourced to "extremely sensitive informants" who provided evidence of Pinochet's direct involvement in ordering the assassination and in directing the subsequent cover-up.^[8]

During the tenure of Richard Downie at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, a U.S. Southern Command educational institution located at the National Defense University, the alleged (and as yet unproven) role of Jaime Garcia Covarrubias, a Chilean professor who worked in the 1970s for the DINA, in the torture and murder of seven detainees was revealed inside the Center. His alleged role was first brought to Downie's attention in early 2008 by Center Assistant Professor Martin Edwin Andersen, a senior staff member who earlier, as a senior advisor for policy planning at the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, was the first national security whistleblower to receive the U.S. Office of Special Counsel's "Public Servant Award."^[9] In an October 1987 investigative report in The Nation, Andersen broke the story of how, in a June 1976 meeting in the Hotel Carrera in Santiago, Kissinger gave the bloody military junta in neighboring Argentina the "green light" for their own dirty "war." ^[10]

See also

• Chile under Pinochet
• Chilean political scandals
• Espionage
• National Security Archive
• Journalist Robert Novak's involvement in the Orlando Letelier assassination
• State Terrorism
• Terrorism

References

Bibliography

• 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
• Taylor Branch and Eugene M Propper Labyrinth (Viking Press 1983, Penguin Books 1983, ISBN 0-14-006683-7)

External links

• 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 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 (April 18, 2005). "An Exiled Son of Santiago". The Nation. Retrieved December 14, 2012.
• New Docs Show Kissinger Rescinded Warning on Assassinations Days Before Letelier Bombing - video report by Democracy Now!, April 12, 2010
• The Washington Post Remembrance of the Assignation - Video report by the Washington Post 9/18/2016
• Orlando Letelier's article "Economic 'Freedom's' Awful Toll; The 'Chicago Boys' in Chile", TheNation.com, September 21, 2016.