Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar (13 April 1932 – 21 September 1976) was a Chilean economist, lawyer, and diplomat who served in the cabinet of President Salvador Allende. A member of the Socialist Party of Chile, Letelier was Chile's ambassador to the United States and later, in rapid succession, foreign minister, interior minister, and defense minister during the final months of Allende's Popular Unity government. After the 1973 Chilean coup d'état, he was arrested, tortured, and held for a year in military prison camps before being stripped of his citizenship and forced into exile.
In Washington, D.C., Letelier became one of the most prominent international critics of the Pinochet dictatorship, working at the Institute for Policy Studies and the Transnational Institute and lobbying against loans and economic support for the regime. On 21 September 1976, agents of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the Chilean secret police, killed him with a car bomb in Washington's Sheridan Circle; his American colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt was killed in the same attack. The bombing, carried out with the help of anti-Castro Cuban exiles linked to the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), was among the first acts of state-sponsored terrorism committed on U.S. soil and became a defining episode of Chile's Operation Condor. Declassified U.S. intelligence has since concluded that General Augusto Pinochet personally ordered the killing, though he was never tried for it.
Early life and education Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar was born in Temuco, in south-central Chile, the youngest child of Orlando Letelier Ruiz and Inés del Solar Rosenberg. Although born in Temuco, he spent much of his childhood in Santiago with his sisters, Mariana and Fabiola Letelier. He studied at the Liceo Lastarria and later at the Instituto Nacional in Santiago. At 16, he was accepted as a cadet at the Chilean Military Academy, where he completed his secondary education, before leaving military life in 1949 to sit the university entrance examination. He went on to study at the University of Chile's law school, where he also served as a teaching assistant in political economy and economic policy and took specialized coursework in commercial law, and graduated in 1954 with degrees in law and economics.
In 1955, he joined the recently formed Copper Office (Departamento del Cobre, the forerunner of CODELCO), where he worked until 1959 as a research analyst in the copper industry. On 17 December 1955, he married Isabel Margarita Morel Gumucio; the couple had four children, Cristián, José, Francisco, and Juan Pablo, the last of whom later became a Chilean senator.
In 1959, Letelier was dismissed from the Copper Office amid an internal restructuring; Senator Allende publicly described the firing as political retaliation for Letelier's support of Allende's unsuccessful 1952 presidential campaign and his recent admission to the Socialist Party. The Letelier family left for Venezuela, where he became a copper consultant to the Finance Ministry. He subsequently joined the newly created Inter-American Development Bank from its founding, eventually becoming a senior economist and director of its loan division, and served as a United Nations consultant involved in the creation of the Asian Development Bank.
Political career
While at university, Letelier had been a student representative of the Independent University Group in the University of Chile's student federation (FECH), a post he held until 1952. He joined the Chilean Socialist Party in 1959. In January 1971, President Allende, drawing on Letelier's international standing and his intimate knowledge of the copper industry, appointed him ambassador to the United States. His central task was to defend the Chilean nationalization of copper, approved unanimously by Chile's National Congress in July 1971, which had displaced the private-ownership model long favored by the U.S. government. In this role he met on several occasions with President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
In 1973, Letelier was recalled to Santiago and served successively as Foreign Minister (22 May – 9 August), Interior Minister (9–23 August), and Defense Minister (23 August – 11 September). He was Allende's last defense minister; during his short tenure, General Augusto Pinochet—who became army commander-in-chief the same day Letelier took over the defense portfolio—grew close to him.
Coup, imprisonment, and torture In the 1973 Chilean coup d'état of 11 September 1973, Letelier was arrested by soldiers as he arrived at the Ministry of National Defense, making him the first senior member of the Allende government detained by the military. He was held for twelve months in a succession of camps and prisons and subjected to severe torture: first at the Tacna Artillery Regiment, then at the Military Academy. He spent eight months as a political prisoner on Dawson Island in the Strait of Magellan alongside other former ministers, including José Tohá, Clodomiro Almeyda, Edgardo Enríquez, and Luis Corvalán. He was later moved to the basement of the Air Force War Academy and finally to a camp at Ritoque, north of Valparaíso. Following international diplomatic pressure—especially from Diego Arria, then governor of the Federal District of Venezuela—he was released in September 1974 on condition that he leave Chile immediately.
Exile After his release, Letelier and his family moved to Caracas, Venezuela, but relocated to the United States on the advice of American writer Saul Landau. In 1975 he settled in Washington, D.C., where he became a senior fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a left-leaning foreign-policy think tank with which Landau was also affiliated. He also became director of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute and taught at the School of International Service of American University.
Letelier wrote and lectured extensively against the "Chicago Boys," a group of Latin American economists trained at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger who returned home to promote free-market policy.Letelier, Orlando. "The Chicago Boys in Chile: Economic Freedom's Awful Toll", The Nation 223, no. 28 (1976): 137–42. He argued that in a resource-dependent economy like Chile's, unrestrained markets simply redirected wealth from workers and the middle class toward monopolists and financial speculators. He soon became the most prominent voice of the Chilean exile opposition, lobbying the U.S. Congress and European governments and helping to block several loans—particularly from Europe—sought by the military government to shore up the Chilean economy. His activism angered the dictatorship, and on 10 September 1976, Pinochet's government formally stripped him of his Chilean citizenship. In response, Letelier said he had been deprived of his dignity as a Chilean, but insisted he remained Chilean by birth and would die Chilean, adding that his persecutors had been born, lived, and would be remembered only as traitors.Crimen en Washington D.C., La Nación (Santiago).
Assassination
On the morning of 21 September 1976, Letelier picked up his IPS colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt and her husband, Michael, who needed a ride to work after car trouble. Letelier drove along Massachusetts Avenue and, as the car entered Sheridan Circle, a remotely detonated bomb hidden beneath the driver's seat exploded, hurling the vehicle into a parked car outside the Irish embassy. Michael Moffitt escaped through the rear window; Letelier, whose lower body had been shattered by the blast, died in the wreckage, while Ronni Moffitt, struck by a metal fragment that severed her carotid artery, died of blood loss shortly afterward at a hospital. An autopsy recorded the causes of Letelier's death as exsanguination, traumatic amputation of the lower extremities, and blast injuries. Michael Moffitt survived with only minor injuries.
Investigation and prosecutions Identifying the bombers The Federal Bureau of Investigation traced the bombing to Michael Townley, a U.S.-born naturalized Chilean who worked for DINA and had previously had contact with the CIA. Townley and a Chilean accomplice, Armando Fernández Larios, had obtained U.S. entry visas in Paraguay with the help of the U.S. ambassador there, George Landau, after Paraguayan intelligence indicated the men intended to meet with a U.S. general on business the CIA would recognize. When Landau grew suspicious and cabled Washington for confirmation, the visas were revoked by the State Department in early August 1976; the DINA operatives nonetheless entered the United States using false Chilean diplomatic passports under the same names. Landau's retained visa applications later helped investigators document DINA's involvement.
In 1978, Chile agreed to extradite Townley, who confessed to building the bomb and told investigators the assassination had been ordered by DINA chief Manuel Contreras. According to journalist Jean-Guy Allard, Townley recruited the operatives who planted the device after consultations with leaders of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), an anti-Castro Cuban militant umbrella group that the FBI has described as a terrorist organization, including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. The men ultimately chosen to carry out the bombing were Cuban-American exiles José Dionisio Suárez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Díaz, and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll. According to the Miami Herald, Posada Carriles also took part in the meeting that settled on Letelier's murder and, weeks later, the bombing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455.
Trials Townley pleaded guilty in the United States in 1978 to a single count of conspiracy in exchange for a ten-year sentence and admission to the Witness Protection Program; he ultimately served 62 months.Freudenheim, Milt and Roberts, Katherine "Chilean Admits Role in '76 Murder" The New York Times, 8 February 1987. Retrieved 20 September 2011. Guillermo Novo Sampoll and Alvin Ross Díaz went to trial in January 1979 and were convicted on all charges, including murder and conspiracy to murder a foreign official, and sentenced to life imprisonment; Ignacio Novo Sampoll was convicted of perjury for lying to a grand jury. On appeal, the convictions of Guillermo Novo and Ross Díaz were overturned on an evidentiary issue, and both men were acquitted at a 1981 retrial, while Ignacio Novo's perjury conviction was likewise later overturned. Suárez and Paz Romero remained fugitives for roughly fifteen years before being captured and pleading guilty in the early 1990s, each serving less than twelve years. Fernández Larios fled to the United States in 1987 and, under a plea agreement, pleaded guilty as an accessory after the fact in exchange for a reduced sentence.
In Chile, Manuel Contreras and his deputy, Brigadier Pedro Espinoza, were convicted by a Chilean court in November 1993 of masterminding the assassination and were sentenced to seven and six years' imprisonment respectively; their sentences were upheld on appeal in 1995. Pinochet, who died on 10 December 2006, was never brought to trial for the killings.
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