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

How does a mother of four sons heal her family after such a catastrophe? Isabel told me at her home in Santiago that her philosophy of parenting was threefold: first, to have "cool hands" to relieve fevers and make nightmares go away; second, a "burning heart" to love one's children "no matter what because they are immigrants who come to your heart"; and third, "open arms to release them." She soldiered on, pursuing Pinochet and Condor, raising her sons admirably by all accounts. When one of the DINA conspirators in her husband's assassination pleaded guilty in a Washington proceeding, he asked Isabel if he might be forgiven. She did so spontaneously, she said, since he had acknowledged his role and was accepting punishment. It was a revealing Catholic act on her part, leading a surprised Marcus Raskin to comment that he "always knew you were a Buddhist." When I asked the Leteliers at dinner about their approach to forgiveness, Francisco offered only that "thirty years of action has made forgiveness more possible."

Shortly after his father's murder. Francisco began painting murals with the Orlando Letelier Muralist Brigade, formed with solidarity committees around the United States. He enrolled at the California College of Arts and Crafts, then at the University of California, Berkeley, and concentrated in ethnic studies. He traveled as a muralist to Nicaragua in 1980.

Then he returned to Chile in 1983, living with his brother Juan Pablo. They participated in clandestine demonstrations that were repressed by the police. An exhibit of Francisco's artistic work on the disappeared, sponsored by the French Institute, was shut down. Then he became very sick with hepatitis and decided to return to the US for health reasons and graduate school.

The years 1985 to 1988 found him in the fine arts program at UCLA, traveling to Nicaragua with muralists, doing the art for Jackson Browne's World in Motion. album and working on murals with incarcerated youth in LA County. Then his exile's inner life took a strange turn. He married and had a son with a woman whose background shadowed his own. Monica Mercedes Pérez Jiménez was the beautiful daughter of Marita Lorenz, a former lover of Fidel Castro at the beginning of the Cuban revolution, who later turned into a CIA agent. Several years after the affair with Fidel ended, the agency sent Marita back to Havana to seduce the Cuban leader and murder him. As the story is passed down, Fidel willingly met his old flame, looked directly at her and said, "So they've sent you here to kill me." Whether the line reawakened Marita's passion is unclear, but it terminated the assassination plot. That was only the mother's side of Monica's world. Her farther was the dictator of Venezuela, Marcos Pérez Jiménez. Whatever was pulling Francisco, whose father was killed by anti-Castro Cubans under Chilean direction, toward this daughter of a dictator's CIA wife with a love/hate relationship with Fidel Castro, it finally waned. But not before the couple birthed a child, Matias Orlando, in 1991, on the very same day that Francisco was inaugurating a mural, coincidentally called Inheritance, with incarcerated gang members in LA County.

In the following decade Francisco continued with murals, ranging from a 1997 showing in Santiago's contemporary art museum to a giant "ring of peace" done with artists from Belfast's divided East and West neighborhoods. Two attempts to move back to Chile were bogged down by unresolved custody issues over Matias. In 1997 Francisco became a permanent resident of Venice, working on murals and beginning to write articles for the Los Angeles Times. and elsewhere after Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998. His American roots were deepened by the birth of a second son, Salvador Nahuel, with Kayren Pace in Santa Monica. By my personal observation, both the sons are lively, handsome inheritors of the Letelier heritage.

Francisco lives today on the same property as his brother Christian, "the most First World of my sons," says Isabel. Christian is a marine biologist with an intenational law degree, a handsome Hollywood extra and a volunteer with Heal the Bay. Another brother, Jose--"a good student, very political," says Isabel--lives on remote Easter Island engaged in eco-tourism. Juan Pablo, with a wife and three children, remains in Chile.

Judy Baca, the famed Chicano artist and director of an art center in Venice, has observed the arc of Francisco's work since the 1980s. In her first memory, he was very politicized, but she adds, "Candidly, I thought Francisco was kind of torn" about the artistic direction he wanted to take, perhaps fatigued by the permanent need to be Orlando's son. He became "all buffed out, turning everybody's head," but also more deeply spiritual and indigenous. Her agency sponsored Francisco's mural on the bakery wall in Venice. Last year, Baca noticed, Francisco was producing, in her estimation, his "most impressive, remarkable" pieces, including an exhibit featuring the poncho his father wore on Dawson Island combined with declassified documents damning George H.W. Bush as CIA director.

Faviola Letelier, Orlando's sister, is lovingly seen by her nephews as the most militant member of the family. Now in her early 70s, for decades she has been a dogged human rights lawyer on behalf of her brother and other victims of Pinochet. Her erect carriage, piercing eyes and long, narrow face carry suggestions of nobility, and of what Orlando might have looked like as a grandfather. After a two-hour bus ride to the coast, I found her in a small getaway cottage near a beach that resembled Venice, California, circa the 1930s. As we strolled along the shore, her keen mind downloaded endless findings in her thirty-year campaign against Pinochet. She has been sorting the evidence, for example, that "their first idea was to kill Orlando and others with sarin gas," a chemical project pursued by Chile's army in the 1970s. I have come, however, to ask her about exiles, her broadest passion. Affidavit by affidavit, she has been filing class-action suits demanding that the Chilean Goverment offer reparations for the "loss of identity" and "psychological rupture" inflicted by forced emigration. She hopes that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will soon recognize exile as a human rights violation deserving compensation.

As we looked across the ocean at our feet, she said mournfully that "exile violates the project of life. The Greeks and Romans said it was worse than death."

Two days later, suddenly back on Venice Beach, alongside the same Pacific currents, I stopped for a closer look at Francisco's nearby mural. It features a tall, beautiful sea goddess whose umbilical cord circles the earth. The mural is beginning to decay, however, because the building is slated for removal as part of Venice's ongoing gentrification. The city may not preserve the mural for another reason, since Francisco's work is associated with the local neighborhood council, which, according to an internal City Hall memo, has "gone rouge." I have to recover the faded verses from Francisco, who e-mails them from Santiago where he has finished climbing a mountain peak in the wilds of Punto Arenas with Juan Pablo. The poem is called "Santiago Son, Becoming the Circle."

Look at us
So fine and wild.
Rare and undiscovered tribe,
Later on they'll talk about the way we moved,
They will.
And we will be examples of a way
So others may create a safe place within the heart
We leave behind.
Let us make a place
Where children become the mystic travelers.

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