Monday, September 21th, marks 50 years since the murder of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and his American secretary Ronni Karpen Moffitt.
Letelier and Ronni were killed by a car bomb planted by agents of the Chilean secret police (DINA) as part of Operation Condor. Letelier, who had been living in exile in the U.S. after Chile’s bloody CIA-supported military coup in 1973, was working at the Washington, DC-based Institute for Policy Studies.
Declassified U.S. intelligence documents indicate that Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet personally ordered the assassination, which was intended to eliminate one of the leading voices of Chilean resistance and disrupt international opposition to his regime.
Orlando Letelier was on his way to work on September 21, 1976. Letelier was driving, while Moffitt was in the front passenger seat, and her husband Michael was in the back behind his wife. As they rounded Sheridan Circle in Embassy Row at 9:35 am EDT, an explosion erupted under the car, lifting it off the ground.
Memorial to Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffit at Sheridan Circle in Washington, DC
When the car came to a halt after colliding with a Volkswagen illegally parked in front of the Irish Embassy, Michael was able to escape from the rear end of the car by crawling out of the back window. He then saw his wife stumbling away from the car and, assuming that she was safe, went to assist Letelier, who was still in the driver seat, barely conscious and appearing to be in great pain. Letelier’s head was rolling back and forth, his eyes moved slightly, and he muttered unintelligibly. Michael tried to remove Letelier from the car, but was unable to do so, despite the fact that much of Letelier’s lower torso was blown away and his legs had been severed.
Both Ronni Moffitt and Orlando Letelier were taken to the George Washington University Medical Center shortly thereafter. At the hospital, it was discovered that Ronni’s larynx and carotid artery had been severed by a piece of flying shrapnel. She drowned in her own blood some 30 minutes after Letelier’s death, while Michael suffered only a minor head wound.
The medical examiner report set the time of Orlando Letelier’s death at 9:50 a.m. and Ronni Karpen Moffitt’s at 10:37 a.m., the cause of death for both listed as explosion-incurred injuries due to a car bomb placed under the car on the driver’s side.
[ SOURCE: CHILE RESISTE ]
