The Assassination of Orlando Letelier and the Politics of Silence

[Judi Lynn]

The Assassination of Orlando Letelier and the Politics of Silence

Jon Schwarz
Sep. 21 2016, 5:16 p.m.

Forty years ago last night, agents working for the Chilean secret service attached plastic explosives to the bottom of Orlando Letelier’s Chevrolet as it sat in the driveway of his family’s home in Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.

A few blocks away across Massachusetts Avenue my family’s Pinto sat in our driveway unmolested. Our whole neighborhood, including my mother and father and sister and me, slept through everything.

Forty years ago this morning, the Chilean agents followed Letelier as he drove himself into Washington, down Massachusetts to the think tank where he worked. The bomb went off as Letelier went around Sheridan Circle, ripping off most of the lower half of his body. He died shortly afterward, as did Ronni Moffitt, a 25-year-old American who’d been in the car with him. A second passenger, Moffitt’s husband Michael, survived.

Letelier’s murder was ordered by the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who’d overthrown the country’s democratically elected president Salvador Allende three years before in a military coup. Letelier, who had been Allende’s defense minister, was arrested during the coup and tortured for a year until Pinochet bowed to international pressure and released him. But in Washington, Letelier became the leading international voice of the opposition to Pinochet, who decided he had to be eliminated.

More:
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/21/the-assassination-of-orlando-letelier-and-the-politics-of-silence/

Good Reads:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016167319

[Judi Lynn]

1. The Murder of Orlando Letelier

The Murder of Orlando Letelier


40 years ago today, the US-backed Pinochet government assassinated a leftist dissident on the streets of Washington, DC.


by Branko Marcetic





9.21.16


Branko Marcetic is a journalist from Auckland, New Zealand.


Ask most Americans about terrorist attacks committed by foreigners on US soil and there’s more than a good chance they’ll point to the September 11, 2001 bombings of the World Trade Center, or the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. At a push, they might even point to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which, while not a case of terrorism, was until September 11 the worst foreign attack on US soil in the country’s history.

Few are likely to talk about the time an ostensibly friendly government — one partially installed by the United States in an act of covert regime change, no less — murdered one of its own dissidents in a car bombing in the heart of the nation’s capital, killing a US citizen in the process. Yet forty years ago today, that’s precisely what happened when Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean diplomat and outspoken critic of the Pinochet dictatorship which had come to rule the country, and his two coworkers prepared to travel to work.

On a rainy fall morning on September 21, 1976, as Letelier’s car traveled down the block of 2300 Massachusetts Avenue, just past Sheridan Circle and along Washington, DC’s Embassy Row, a plastic explosive attached to the underside of the vehicle detonated, killing Letelier and one of his occupants, twenty-five-year-old Ronni Moffitt. Passers-by watched as the flaming wreck crashed into a nearby Volkswagen, and Michael Moffit, Ronni’s husband, crawled out of the back. They had been married only 113 days.

As became clear in the succeeding years, the incident was a clear-cut case of state-sponsored terrorism carried out in the beating heart of American power. Yet whether due to intentional obfuscation by sections of the US national security state, or because of other factors, justice was largely dodged by the true perpetrators of the attack, who presided at the highest levels of Chile’s government.

More:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/09/orlando-letelier-pinochet-nixon-kissinger/

[Judi Lynn]

2. The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll

This article, reprinted by The Nation, was written by Orlando Letelier who was assassinated 40 years ago:





The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll

Repression for the majorities and “economic freedom” for small privileged groups are two sides of the same coin.


By Orlando Letelier

Yesterday 7:00 am

 It would seem to be a common-sensical sort of observation that economic policies are conditioned by and at the same time modify the social and political situation where they are put into practice. Economic policies, therefore, are introduced in order to alter social structures.

If I dwell on these considerations, therefore, it is because the necessary connection between economic policy and its sociopolitical setting appears to be absent from many analyses of the current situation in Chile. To put it briefly, the violation of human rights, the system of institutionalized brutality, the drastic control and suppression of every form of meaningful dissent is discussed (and often condemned) as a phenomenon only indirectly linked, or indeed entirely, unrelated, to the classical unrestrained “free market” policies that have been enforced by the military junta. This failure to connect has been particularly characteristic of private and public financial institutions, which have publicly praised and supported the economic policies adopted by the Pinochet government, while regretting the “bad international image” the junta has gained from its “incomprehensible” persistence in torturing, jailing and persecuting all its critics. A recent World Bank decision to grant a $33 million loan to the junta was justified by its President, Robert McNamara, as based on purely “technical” criteria, implying no particular relationship to the present political and social conditions in the country. The same line of justification has been followed by American private banks which, in the words of a spokesman for a business consulting firm, “have been falling all over one another to make loans.” But probably no one has expressed this attitude better than the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury. After a visit to Chile, during which he discussed human rights violations by the military government, William Simon congratulated Pinochet for bringing “economic freedom” to the Chilean people. This particularly convenient concept of a social system in which “economic freedom” and political terror coexist without touching each other, allows these financial spokesmen to support their concept of “freedom” while exercising their verbal muscles in defense of human rights.

The usefulness of the distinction has been particularly appreciated by those who have generated the economic policies now being carried out in Chile. In Newsweek of June 14, Milton Friedman, who is the intellectual architect and unofficial adviser for the team of economists  now running the Chilean economy, stated: “In spite of my profound disagreement with the authoritarian political system of Chile, I do not consider it as evil for an econ­omist to render technical economic advice to the Chilean Government, any more than I would regard it as evil for a physician to give technical medical advice to the Chilean Government to help end a medical plague.”

It is curious that the man who wrote a book, Capitalism and Freedom, to drive home the argument that only classical economic liberalism can support political democracy can now so easily disentangle economics from politics when the economic theories he advocates coincide with an absolute restriction of every type of democratic freedom. One would logically expect that if those who curtail private enterprise are held responsible for the effects of their measures in the political sphere, those who impose unrestrained “economic freedom” would also be held responsible when the imposition of this policy is inevitably accompanied by massive repression, hunger, unemployment and the permanence of a brutal police state.

The Economic Prescription & Chile’s Reality

The economic plan now being carried out in Chile realizes an historic aspiration of a group of Chilean economists, most of them trained at Chicago University by Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger. Deeply involved in the preparation of the coup, the “Chicago boys,” as they are known in Chile, convinced the generals that they were prepared to supplement the brutality, which the military possessed, with the intellectual assets it lacked. The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has disclosed that “CIA collaborators” helped plan the economic measures that Chile’s junta enacted imme­diately after seizing power. Committee witnesses maintain that some of the “Chicago boys” received CIA funds for such research efforts as a 300-page economic blueprint that was given to military leaders before the coup. It is therefore understandable that after seizing power they were, as The Wall Street Journal put it, “champing to be unleashed” on the Chilean economy. Their first approach to the situation was gradual; only after a year of relative confusion did they decide to implement without major modification the theoretical model they had been taught at Chicago. The occasion merited a visit to Chile by Mr. Friedman himself who, along with his associate, Professor Harberger, made a series of well-publicized appearances to promote a “shock treatment” for the Chilean economy—something that Friedman emphatically described as “the only medicine. Absolutely. There is no other. There is no other long-term solution.”

More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-chicago-boys-in-chile-economic-freedoms-awful-toll/

[Judi Lynn]

3. Washington Knew Pinochet Ordered an Act of Terrorism on US Soil—but Did Nothing About It

Washington Knew Pinochet Ordered an Act of Terrorism on US Soil—but Did Nothing About It

Obama now has an opportunity to commemorate his victims by releasing the still-secret documents that hold the Chilean dictator accountable.


By Peter KornbluhTwitter

Yesterday 7:00 am

 On the evening of January 21, 1987, the CIA’s deputy director for covert operations, Clair George, sent a secure pouch to the State Department filled with “top secret” intelligence cables from the agency’s station in Chile. The reports contained details from “extremely sensitive informants” on “the cover up directed by General Pinochet” of the September 21, 1976, assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 25-year-old colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington, DC.

 The documents were intended to help the State Department prepare a debriefing of Armando Fernández Larios, one of the officers of the Chilean secret police, or DINA, who had been sent to Washington to conduct surveillance on Letelier before his assassination, and who now wanted to confess and come to the United States. The CIA cables were so sensitive, according to Francis McNeil, the State Department official who received them, that “the CIA asked that they be summarized” rather than forwarded to Brazil, where the debriefing was scheduled to take place.

 Eight months later, when the CIA prepared an intelligence review on the Letelier-Moffitt case—at the request of Secretary of State George Shultz, McNeil believes—the agency reviewed the same documents and others. Quoting the CIA review, Shultz reported to President Reagan that the CIA had “convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murders,” and that “Pinochet decided to stonewall on the US investigation to hide his involvement.” As Shultz concluded, “the CIA has never before drawn and presented its conclusions that such strong evidence exists of his leadership role in this act of terrorism.”

Shultz’s dramatic memo to Reagan was among the more than 280 documents declassified by the Obama administration last October as a special diplomatic gesture to the Chilean government of President Michelle Bachelet. Forty years after this act of state-sponsored terrorism in the streets of Washington, the historiography had finally, if not fully, arrived at Pinochet’s doorstep.

More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/washington-knew-pinochet-ordered-an-act-of-terrorism-on-us-soil-but-did-nothing-about-it/