Letelier, Orlando (1932–1976)

Orlando Letelier was a Chilean diplomat who was closely identified with the democratically elected Marxist regime of Salvador Allende. He is best known in the United States for the manner of his death: Three years after the overthrow of the Allende regime, he was killed in Washington by Chilean intelligence officials as part of a hemisphere-wide effort to erase the remnants of the Allende regime and to silence its critics abroad.

Orlando Letelier was by all accounts an urbane, cultured person. One of his first brushes with politics was his forced resignation from a research position with a large Chilean copper company after his support for Allende's Communist Party was revealed in 1958. He took his family into exile in Venezuela, and then to Washington, where he worked for the Inter-American Development Bank and studied at American University in the 1960s. His time abroad both radicalized him and bolstered his credentials as an international representative for Chile. When Allende was elected in 1970, Letelier returned to Chile and was subsequently named the Chilean ambassador to the United States. He became an articulate advocate for the Allende government's policies of redistributing wealth and reducing economic dependency. But he was working from the difficult position of defending a democratically elected Marxist government increasingly under siege from domestic opponents and the Richard Nixon administration. In 1972, Allende promoted Letelier to foreign minister and then, briefly, to defense minister. Letelier was unable, from this position, to head off growing dissatisfaction with [Page 849]Allende's rule in the military: Defections within the traditionally constitutionalist and democratic armed forces were crucial to Allende's demise.

Salvador Allende was overthrown by the Chilean military, led by Augusto Pinochet, on September 11, 1973. (Many Chileans now refer to it as “our” 9/11.) The Pinochet regime murdered hundreds of Chileans, imprisoned thousands, and placed an oppressive clamp on Latin America's most enduring democracy. Letelier was arrested and secretly taken to a prison off the Chilean coast. International pressure led to his release in 1974. Soon after that, Letelier returned to Washington and took up a high-profile position as a kind of anti-Pinochet ambassador with the Institute for Policy Studies. He at once became an obvious target for the Pinochet regime's efforts to stifle dissent. Orlando Letelier, along with his assistant Ronni Karpen Moffitt, was killed by a car bomb on September 21, 1976, on Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C. His murder was perhaps the most audacious single act in the Chilean-led multinational effort, known as Operation Condor, to stamp out opposition to dictatorship in South America. Recently declassified documents show that U.S. intelligence knew of the operation as early as 1974 and also had specific information about the plot against Letelier 2 months before his murder, but failed to act. Such an audacious act of political violence did prompt the United States to indict and convict five conspirators in 1978, although higher-level Chilean officials involved in the plot were never extradited to face trial. Letelier and Moffitt's employer, the Institute for Policy Studies, has created an annual human rights award in their names. Letelier's son, Juan Pablo, is a congressman and a leading figure in the Chilean Socialist Party.

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