Orlando Letelier (13 April 1932-21 September 1976) was a Chilean diplomat and economist who supported President Salvador Allende. After the 1973 Chilean coup d'etat, he was tracked down by Augusto Pinochet's DINA agency and assassinated in Washington DC in 1976.
Biography[]
Letelier smoking a cigarette
Orlando Letelier was born on 13 April 1932 in Temuco, Chile, and he abandoned an early interest in the military. He instead joined the copper industry and worked with the finance ministry of Venezuela after being fired for supporting Salvador Allende's failed 1952 presidential bid. In 1959 he joined the Socialist Party of Chile, and he defended the Chilean naturalization of copper against the privatization by the United States government. However, he later returned to Chile and had some academic posts, and he was made ambassador to the United States under Allende when he was elected as president in 1971. On 11 September 1973 he was the first minister arrested by Augusto Pinochet's army during the 1973 Chilean coup d'etat and was tortured, and in September 1974 he was released. Initially going into exile in Venezuela, he later decided to go into exile in the United States at the suggestion of American professor Saul Landau. He taught at the School of International Service of the American University in Washington DC and became the leading voice of the resistance to Pinochet, preventing European loans from being given to the military regime.
At 9:30 AM on 21 September 1976, Pinochet's DINA intelligence agency's assassin Michael Townley detonated a car bomb while Letelier, his coworker Ronni Karpen Moffitt, and her husband Michael Moffitt were inside of it in Washington DC's Sheridan Circle. Letelier and Ronni were both killed in the explosion while Michael was wounded, and in 1978 Townley was sentenced to 62 months in prison. Pinochet was discovered to have directly ordered his assassination in US intelligence documents.