Orlando Letelier
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Orlando Letelier del Solar (April 13, 1932–September 21, 1976) was a Chilean diplomat and, later, United States-based activist. He was assassinated in Washington, D.C. by Chilean DINA agents working for dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose regime Letelier had opposed. His murder prompted the United States to discontinue its support for Operation Condor, though not all support for the Pinochet government.
Contents [hide]
1 Background
2 Assassination
3 Prosecution
4 Indications of U.S. knowledge
5 See also
6 Bibliography
7 External links
[edit] Background
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. U.S. policy was opposed to the Allende nationalization of foreign mining interests, and the administration of President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger 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.
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.
[edit] Assassination
Letelier was killed by a car bomb explosion on September 21, 1976, in Sheridan Circle, along with his American assistant, Ronni Karpen Moffitt; her husband Michael Moffitt was 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."
[edit] Prosecution
Several people were 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. Townley was convicted in the United States in 1978; Contreras was convicted in Chile in 1993. Pinochet has never been brought to trial for the murders, although Townley has implicated him as being responsible for them.
During his U.S. trial, 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 [1][2]. 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.
[edit] Indications of U.S. knowledge
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 [3].
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]
"We moeten ons bewust zijn van de superioriteit van onze beschaving, met zijn normen en waarden, welvaart voor de mensen, respect voor mensenrechten en godsdienstvrijheid. Dat respect bestaat zeker niet in de Islamitische wereld".