An act of international terrorism on the streets of Washington, DC, still reverberates 50 years later.
Flowers adorn the memorial plaque at the site where Orlandlo Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt were killed in Washington, DC, by agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. (Pedro Ugarte / AFP via Getty Images)
It has been 50 years since former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, were assassinated by a car bomb in the capital city of the United States. Ordered by Gen. Augusto Pinochet and implemented by his secret police, the DINA, the bombing took the lives of two extraordinary people on September 21, 1976. The violent act, as US Secretary of State George Shultz would later report to President Ronald Reagan, constituted “perhaps the only clear case of state-supported terrorism that has occurred in Washington, DC.”
That fact has rendered the Letelier-Moffitt case the most infamous and emblematic atrocity of the many heinous human rights crimes committed by the Pinochet regime. The case has stayed in the public eye over the course of five long decades, because the pursuit of accountability—both legal and historical—has never ceased.
Indeed, recent legal efforts against members of the assassination team have renewed international attention to the Letelier-Moffitt case. Just this past July, The New York Times ran a front-page story revealing that Armando Fernandez Larios, one of the original DINA operatives assigned to assassinate Letelier in 1976, had been detained, and then released, by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE). Although he is free for now, Fernandez Larios still faces possible deportation for human rights crimes he committed before coming to the United States in 1987.
Nor is Fernandez Larios the only assassin seized by ICE. Virgilio Paz Romero, one of the violent Cuban exiles who collaborated with DINA—his role was to press the button to detonate the bomb that killed Letelier and Moffitt—has also been detained. He remains at the Krome Detention Center in Miami and is likely to be deported as a criminal immigrant with a verified terrorist background.
Moreover, this past June, the Chilean courts finally concluded a 15-year legal investigation specific to the murder of Ronni Moffitt, whose case had never been adjudicated in Chile. In a final ruling, the human rights magistrate, Paola Plaza, issued 15-year sentences for three officers: Raul Iturriaga, José Holgar, and Pedro Espinoza, DINA’s former deputy director.
Along with former DINA director Col. Manuel Contreras, Espinoza had been convicted for the assassination of Orlando Letelier in a pioneering trial in the early 1990s, after Chile returned to civilian rule. The trial was historic; it broke through the wall of immunity Pinochet had imposed for his human rights violators; because it was nationally televised, the trial exposed countless Chileans to the truth of the terrorist character of the military dictatorship.
But Pinochet himself remained untouchable—until he was arrested in London on October 16, 1998. Few people remember that the Interpol warrant for his detention was issued at Spain’s request under the European Anti-Terrorism Convention; Pinochet was, essentially, arrested for being a terrorist, given his sponsorship of the sinister multinational Murder Inc. known as Operation Condor, and as the mastermind of the Letelier-Moffitt assassination.
Pinochet’s arrest ended his immunity from prosecution—in Chile and elsewhere. In the United States, the Letelier and Moffitt families, human rights advocates, and the Institute for Policy Studies, where Orlando and Ronni worked, pressed the Clinton administration to declassify thousands of still-secret US documents on Pinochet’s human rights atrocities, as well as the Letelier-Moffitt case.
But we also pressed the Clinton White House to prosecute Pinochet as the intellectual author of an act of terrorism on the streets of Washington, DC. In the fall of 1998, I personally accompanied the lawyer for the Letelier and Moffitt families, Samuel Buffone, to a meeting with the National Security Council’s top human rights officer, to present the argument that the United States had the jurisdiction, investigative resources, and evidence to bring a historic case against Pinochet as a perpetrator of international terrorism.
To its credit, the Clinton White House decided to do both; on the president’s orders, over the next two years the administration centralized, reviewed, and released over 23,000 secret documents on the US role in Chile and Pinochet’s human rights violations. The declassified documents on the Letelier-Moffitt case were extraordinarily revealing, although the most important records were withheld from release as potential evidence for a new Department of Justice investigation into Pinochet as the mastermind of the crime.
On February 8, 1999, Attorney General Janet Reno authorized a “major case” investigation, codenamed “CHILBOM.” A special “terrorism task force” of FBI agents and Department of Justice lawyers was established to compile evidence to indict Pinochet. “There are still unsolved aspects of the case,” a recently declassified FBI status report on the investigation noted. “The intellectual authors of the crime are still being sought, and this may lead to the highest levels of the former Chilean government, which at the time of the bombing was led by General Augusto Pinochet.”
Between the reemergence of right-wing red-baiting and Donald Trump’s use of the chilling National Security Presidential Memorandum–7 to criminalize left political organizing, we’re seeing McCarthyism reborn before our eyes.
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According to FBI records obtained through the FOIA by my organization, the National Security Archive, the task force team visited Chile twice in the first half of 2000 and conducted a series of official interrogations, including a formal deposition of Manuel Contreras at Punto Peuco. Back in the United States, the FBI interviewed former US officials, among them Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, an FBI summary of the conversation reported, described a private meeting he had with General Pinochet in Santiago only three months before Letelier was assassinated. “Kissinger recalled Pinochet bringing up Orlando Letelier’s name when he referenced contact which was being made by Christian Democrats and opponents to the Pinochet regime with members of the US Congress,” the FBI recorded. “Kissinger could not recall if Pinochet became angry when speaking of Orlando Letelier.”
Only a few months after Pinochet returned to Chile from more than a year under house arrest in London, the FBI and Department of Justice submitted an evaluation of the evidence against the former Chilean dictator and recommendations for prosecuting him in the United States as a mastermind of international terrorism. But, as William Clinton left office and George W. Bush assumed the presidency in January 2001, the new Bush administration took no actions on those recommendations. “The Letelier case fell into a black hole,” as one US official told Chilean journalist Pascale Bonnefoy in 2002.
Pinochet managed to evade legal justice for his role as mastermind of the assassination. But the Letelier-Moffitt case nevertheless came to haunt his dictatorship—and contribute to its demise. Documents declassified on Chile during the Clinton era, and at the request of the Bachelet government during the Obama administration, provided evidence of Pinochet’s role in ordering the assassination of Orlando Letelier and then orchestrating a major cover-up of his, and DINA’s, role in the car bombing.
In what should be considered the “holy grail” of secret documents on the Letelier case, the CIA reported in a May 1, 1987, intelligence assessment that it had “convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder” of Letelier. The assessment added that Pinochet later “decided to stonewall on the case to hide his involvement…to protect his hold on the presidency.” “We believe that Pinochet may be seeking to protect himself at all costs,” the CIA concluded, “possibly even by eliminating Contreras,” the one man who knew Pinochet had ordered the assassination.
As Secretary Shultz informed President Reagan in a secret memorandum titled “Pinochet and the Letelier-Moffitt Murders: Implications for US Policy,” Pinochet’s actions were “a blatant example of a chief of state’s direct involvement in an act of state terrorism.” He urged the president to abandon US support for Pinochet and aggressively push for a return to civilian rule. “What we now know about Pinochet’s role in these assassinations,” Shultz concluded, “is of the greatest seriousness and adds further impetus to the need to work toward complete democratization of Chile.”
The restoration of Chilean democracy was Orlando Letelier’s overarching objective; his effective pursuit of that goal cost him his life, as well as Ronni Moffitt’s. As the ultimate perpetrator of their deaths, Pinochet never faced judicial accountability. But the fact that his role in the car bombing contributed to terminating US support for his bloodthirsty regime suggests that a different form of justice was served—the justice of history. In the end, Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt did not die in vain.
Peter KornbluhTwitterPeter Kornbluh, a longtime contributor to The Nation on Cuba, is co-author, with William M. LeoGrande, of Back Channel to Cuba: The Hidden History of Negotiations Between Washington and Havana. Kornbluh is also the author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.