Orlando Letelier
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Orlando Letelier (1932 April 13 - 1976 September 21), a former member of the Chilean government was assassinated in Washington, D.C., by Chilean DINA agents in 1976. His murder prompted the United States to discontinue its support for Operation Condor.
In 1971, Letelier was appointed ambassador to the United States by Salvador Allende, the socialist president of Chile. In 1973, Letelier served as Foreign Minister, and then Defense Minister. Then U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger during the administration of President Nixon engaged in an effort to overthrow the democratically elected government of Chile, which led to the Chilean coup of 1973 that brought Pinochet to power. The Nixon administration firmly backed Pinochet's military dictatorship.
Washington, D.C., September 21, 1976 : Letelier's assassination
After the coup, Letelier was arrested by the Chilean government and tortured. He was sent to a political prison in Tierra del Fuego. After his release, in 1974, he moved to Washington where he worked with the Institute for Policy Studies. With his American assistant, Ronnie Moffitt, he was killed by a car bomb explosion on September 21, 1976, in Sheridan Circle; her husband, who was with them, was severely injured but survived. In an op-ed published December 17, 2004, in the Los Angeles Times, Francisco Letelier, the son of Orlando Letelier, wrote that the assassination of his father was part of Operation Condor, described as "an intelligence-sharing network used by six South American dictators of that era to eliminate dissidents." Noting that Pinochet, who had just been placed under house arrest in Chile, has been accused of being a participant in Operation Condor, Francisco Letelier declared: "My father's murder was part of Condor."
Prosecution and release of new documents in late 1990s
Several people were eventually prosecuted and convicted for the murder. Among them were Michael Townley, a DINA U.S. expatriate who had worked before for the CIA; General Manuel Contreras, former head of the DINA; and Brigadier Pedro Espinoza Bravo, also formerly of DINA. Pinochet has never been brought to trial for the murders, although Townley has implicated him as being responsible for them.
Michael Townley confessed that he had hired five anti-Castro Cubans exiles to booby-trap Letelier's car. According to Jean-Guy Allard, after consultations with the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU) leadership, including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, those elected to carry out the murder were Cuban-Americans José Dionisio "Bloodbath" Suárez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Díaz and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll [link][link]. According to the Miami Herald, Luis Posada Carriles was at this meeting that decided on Letelier's death and also about the Cubana bombing two weeks later.
Later-released CIA documents show that the CIA was closely linked with Contreras up to, and even after, the assassination of Letelier. Townley and Armando Fernández, who was also implicated in the murder, were given visas by Robert White, the United States ambassador to Paraguay, at the urging of the Paraguayan government despite having false Paraguayan passports.
According to John Dinges, documents released in 1999 and 2000 establish that "the CIA had inside intelligence about the assassination alliance at least two months before Letelier was killed but failed to act to stop the plans". It also knew about an Uruguay attempt to kill US Congressman Edward Koch, which then-CIA director George H.W. Bush warned him about only after Orlando Letelier's murder [link].
Kenneth Maxwell points out that U.S. policymakers were aware not only of Operation Condor in general, but in particular "...that a Chilean assassination team had been planning to enter the United States." A month before the Letelier assassination, Kissinger ordered "... that the Latin American rulers involved be informed that the 'assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad ... would create a most serious moral and political problem.'" Maxwell wrote in his review of Peter Kornbluh's book, "This demarche was apparently not delivered: the U.S. embassy in Santiago demurred on the ground that to deliver such a strong rebuke would upset the dictator," and that on September 20, 1976, the day before Letelier and his assistant Ronni Moffitt were killed, "the State Department instructed the ambassadors 'to take no further action' with regard to the Condor scheme." [Maxwell, 2004, 18]
See also
Bibliography
Dinges, John John Dinges, and Landau, Saul Saul Landau. Assassination on Embassy Row. (London, 1981) ISBN 0070169985, (McGraw-Hill, 1981)
Dinges, John. The Condor Years. (The New Press: 2004) ISBN 1565847644
Hitchens, Christopher, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, (Verso: 2001) ISBN 1859846319
Taylor Branch and Eugene M Propper "Labyrinth" (Viking Press 1983, Penguin Books1983 ISBN 0140066837)
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 1980), (Asesinato en Washington, Lasser 1980, Planeta 1990)
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