"Everywhere, begin the remembering."
(from a mural by Francisco Letelier, Venice, California)

As the crisis intensified, in 1972 Orlando Letelier was called back by the beleaguered Allende to serve, it turned out briefly, as minister of foreign relations, then defense. In the latter role, he supervised Augusto Pinochet, then head of the army. The young Francisco, back again in Santiago, was just finishing eighth grade. He vividly recalls Pinochet standing "in my father's study, the Andes visible in the windows behind him. I remember that he looked strangely disconcerted."

When the tanks, troops and bombs were finally unleashed against Allende's offices on September 11, 1973 (a day that one US military adviser called "our D-Day" and Chile's "day of destiny"), Orlando Letelier was arrested at his own defense ministry. With others, he was immediately dispatched to Dawson Island, a frozen enclave hundreds of miles off the southern Chilean coast. A light poncho was his protection from the cold. While Francisco and his brother had "adolescent nightmares" about their father who never came home, Isabel made daily rounds to ministries to advocate for her husband's release. She even met Pinochet, and remembers him suddenly exploding in rage during her brief appeal for Orlando's return.

At the time of his father's deportation, Francisco was living in the shadow of Huelen Hill, the spot where the city of Santiago was founded. Eight times the Mapuche Indians destroyed the Spanish foothold at the site, and though never conquered, they were driven back across the Bio-Bio river. As a boy Francisco would climb the hill and imagine the Mapuche warriors and the mixed-blood Chileans who came after them. Orlando and Isabel once sat near that hill and imagined having their children. After the coup Francisco continued to wander the old fortifications and try to "imagine my nation." Years later he wrote a poetic vision of a new gathering on Huelen Hill, a reverse colonization in which all the far-flung exiles of the Americas would come home to

Take the streets
Help the lost children
Hidden on corners
Hold the children
Make the world
Everywhere begin the remembering
Of places we will make our monuments.

While his father was missing, Francisco remembers watching Chilean bodies floating in Santiago's central river and experiencing the impact of the military takeover in his school. Eventually, without telling his mother, he stopped attending classes. "For her, it was 'well, at least the kids are still going to school.' That thought still gave her some peace of mind. So I would stay home when she was out or just go over to my grandmother's. It was a little easier for us than it was for our mother because we were still discovering the world for ourselves at this point. Our mother's world, though, had been completely destroyed." After one year of this surreal existence, vigorous Venezuelan diplomacy resulted in the sudden release of Letelier from Dawson Island on the condition that he immediately leave Chile. The family once again began resettling in Caracas, but then Orlando Letelier decided to head for Washington, at the proposal of an American writer, Saul Landau. In 1975 Letelier took a position with the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), where Landau worked at the time, and plunged into writing, speaking and lobbying the US Congress and European governments against the Pinochet regime. He soon became the leading voice of the Chilean resistance. According to John Dinges, who has been following the case for thirty years, Orlando "was on the short list of possible presidents in a post-dictatorial Chile."

On June 8, 1976, Henry Kissinger met with Pinochet in Santiago and, according to a declassified document, told the Chilean dictator that "we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here. I think that the previous government was headed toward communism. We wish your government well." While Kissinger gingerly expressed hope that Pinochet would take cosmetic steps to deflect Congressional pressures over human rights violations, he reinforced Pinochet's paranoia, telling him that "my evaluation is that you are victim of all left-wing groups around the world." Pinochet's director of secret police, General Contreras, would give formal orders that very month to prepare Orlando Letelier's assassination. Now, over tea with Kissinger, the dictator probed twice about Letelier, complaining that Letelier was providing "false information" all over Washington. Kissinger said nothing in defense of Letelier, and offered general support for the dictator's government. "In my opinion, Kissinger at least unwittingly gave Pinochet the green light to kill Orlando Letelier," says Landau, now a professor in Southern California.

Three months later, on September 18, Michael Townley planted a plastic explosive on the underside of the car in the Letelier driveway in Bethesda, Maryland. Francisco was asleep just a few feet away. "Everyone in my family used the car. I had driven it to my school prom.... Any one of us could have turned the key."

On that morning, Landau's wife, Rebecca, who worked for several congressmen on human rights issues, was among the first to witness the wreckage as she drove to work along Embassy Row. As Landau remembers, "She called me and said she'd just witnessed the most horrible accident in her life, pieces of clothes, blood, car parts everywhere in the street. A minute later we learned it was Orlando. There was hysteria at the IPS." Landau, then 40 years old, was left in charge while IPS founders Marcus Raskin and the late Richard Barnet went to the hospital with Isabel. There they learned that Ronni Karpen was injured as well, bleeding from a severed carotid artery. Landau says he "had no idea what to do, so I said, 'Lock the doors'" to the IPS building. The FBI, which at the time was being sued for harassment and surveillance of the IPS, soon arrived, accompanied by dogs. When the agents asked who was responsible and were told "DINA," they resp onded, "Could you spell that name?" Landau remembers seeing Francisco and one of his brothers that day, "glazed teenagers, no idea what had happened, so incredibly traumatized, between grief and incomprehension."

Landau suggested Raskin and Barnet call a news conference to announce that Isabel would take Orlando's place. They agreed. She would remain at IPS working on the Letelier-Moffitt case and human rights issues until the early 1990s, when she finally returned to Santiago.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.