The Assassination Of Orlando Letelier

Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, was assassinated on September 21, 1976, by a bomb under the driver's seat of the... more

by Cora Wandel

Title

The Assassination Of Orlando Letelier

Artist

Cora Wandel

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Photograph

Description

Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, was assassinated on September 21, 1976, by a bomb under the driver's seat of the car he drove that morning in Washington, D.C. Ronni Moffitt, his assistant, who sat next to him in the car, was also killed. Moffitt's husband, a passenger in the back seat, survived the explosion. The bomb went off as Letelier drove around Sheridan Circle in downtown Washington. This memorial to Letelier and Moffitt is near the curb in front of the Embassy of Ireland, and is the closest point off of the roadway to where the deadly explosion occurred.

In 1973, a military coup in Chile brought dictator Augusto Pinochet to power, and ousted the country's president, Salvador Allende. Two years earlier, in 1971, Allende had appointed Letelier ambassador to the United States. Letelier had proven his loyalty to Allende with his strong, outspoken advocacy of the president's policies, and his support for democracy in his native Chile. With Pinochet's violent overthrow of Allende's government, Letelier was arrested as a political enemy of the new state, and was subjected to severe torture in various concentration camps over the next year. He was eventually exiled to the United States, where in lived in Washington, D.C. When Letelier left Chile, officers of the new regime made it clear to him that Pinochet's "arm is long" and that he would not tolerate activities against his government, a message to Letelier that living in the United States would not guarantee his safety. Despite this warning, from abroad Letelier quickly became the leading voice against the Pinochet regime through his provocative writings, speeches, testimony before Congress and lobbying of major democratic countries, which greatly undermined Pinochet's dictatorship and Chile's standing in the world.

On that fateful morning in September, 1976, Letelier was assassinated. Michael Townley, a United States expatriate living in Chile who had once worked for the CIA, and a supporter of the Pinochet regime, was charged with and confessed to organizing the assassination. Townley hired five men who were experts in making bombs and booby-trapping cars, and they were eventually charged for the murder of Letelier. The men's names are Jose Dionisio Suarez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Diaz, and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sompoll. Because Pinochet refused to extradite Suarez and Romero to the United States, only three of the five men Townley had recruited stood trial in Washington. All three were found guilty of murder, with Diaz and Guillermo Novo Sompoll receiving life sentences, and Ignacio Novo Sompoll getting eighty years. As for Townley, the ring-leader of the operation, he was released into the Witness Protection Program because of his cooperation with federal prosecutors that led to the arrest and conviction of three of the five men who made the bomb and carried out the assassination.

Pinochet was never charged in the murder of Letelier, even though it is widely believed that his "long arm" led to it.

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June 8th, 2014