Orlando Letelier

Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar (13 April 1932 – 21 September 1976) was a Chilean economist, politician and diplomat during the presidency of Salvador Allende.

A refugee from the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, Letelier accepted several academic positions in Washington, D.C. following his exile from Chile.

In 1955, he joined the recently formed Copper Office (Departamento del Cobre, now CODELCO), where he worked until 1959 as a research analyst in the copper industry.

On 17 December 1955, Letelier married Isabel Margarita Morel Gumucio with whom he had four children: Cristián, José, Francisco, and Juan Pablo.

In 1959 Letelier was fired from the Copper Office, ostensibly for having supported Salvador Allende's unsuccessful second presidential campaign.

The Letelier family left for Venezuela, where Orlando became a copper consultant to the Finance Ministry.

While at university, Letelier became a student representative in the University of Chile's Student Union.

In 1959, he joined the Chilean Socialist Party (PS).

In 1971, President Allende appointed him ambassador to the United States.

His specific mission was to advocate in defense of the Chilean nationalization of copper, which had replaced the private ownership model favoured by the US government.

In 1973, Letelier was recalled to Chile and served successively as Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Interior and Defense.

In the coup d'état of 11 September 1973, he was the first high-ranking member of the Allende administration to be arrested.

He was held for twelve months in various concentration camps and suffered severe torture: first at the Tacna Regiment, then at the Military Academy; later he was sent for eight months to a political prison on Dawson Island; from there he was transferred to the basement of the Air Force War Academy, and finally to the concentration camp of Ritoque.

Following international diplomatic pressure, especially from Diego Arria, then Governor of Distrito Federal of Venezuela, he was released in September 1974 on the condition that he immediately leave Chile.

After his release, he and his family resettled in Caracas, but later moved to the United States on the recommendation of American writer Saul Landau.

In 1975, Letelier moved to Washington D.C., where he became senior fellow of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies, a think tank Landau was involved in.

Letelier became director of the Amsterdam-based Transnational Institute and taught at the School of International Service of the American University in Washington, D.C.

Letelier wrote several articles criticizing the "Chicago Boys", a group of South American economists trained at the University of Chicago by Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger who returned to their home countries to promote and advise leaders on the benefits of a free-market economy.

This economic model was used to great effect in Chile where General Pinochet sought to dismantle the country's socialist economic system and replace it with a free market economy.

Letelier believed that in a resource driven economy such as Chile, allowing markets to operate freely simply guaranteed the movement of wealth from the lower and middle classes to the monopolists and financial speculators.

He soon became the leading voice of the Chilean resistance, preventing several loans (especially from Europe) from being awarded to the Chilean government.

In 1976, agents of Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA), the Pinochet regime's secret police, assassinated Letelier in Washington via the use of a car bomb.

These agents had been working in collaboration with members of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, an anti-Castro militant group.

Sergio Orlando Letelier del Solar was born in Temuco, Chile, the youngest child of Orlando Letelier Ruiz and Inés del Solar.

He studied at the Instituto Nacional and, at the age of sixteen, was accepted as a cadet at the Chilean Military Academy, where he completed his secondary studies.

Later, he abandoned a military career.

He did not finish college and never received a university degree.

On 10 September 1976, he was stripped of his Chilean nationality.

Letelier was killed by a car bomb explosion on 21 September 1976 in Sheridan Circle in Washington, D.C., along with his American co-worker, Ronni Karpen Moffitt.

Moffitt's husband, Michael Moffitt, was injured but survived.

Several people were prosecuted and convicted for the murder.

Among them were Michael Townley, a U.S. expatriate working for DINA, General Manuel Contreras, former head of DINA, and Brigadier Pedro Espinoza, also formerly of DINA.

Townley was convicted in the United States in 1978 and served 62 months in prison for the murder; he is now free as a participant in the United States Federal Witness Protection Program.

Contreras and Espinoza were convicted in Chile in 1993.

During the FBI investigation into the assassination, documents in Letelier's possession were copied and leaked to journalists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak of The Washington Times and Jack Anderson by the FBI before being returned to his widow.

The documents purportedly show Letelier was working with Eastern Bloc Intelligence agencies for a decade and coordinating his activities with the surviving political leadership of the Popular Unity coalition exiled in East Berlin.

The FBI suspected that these individuals had been recruited by the Stasi.

Documents in the briefcase showed that Letelier had maintained contact with Salvador Allende's daughter, Beatriz Allende who was married to Cuban DGI station chief Luis Fernandez Ona.

Letelier's funeral was held at St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington D.C., followed by a march to the site of the car-bombing at Sheridan Circle on Massachusetts Avenue, where folksinger Joan Baez sang in honor of Letelier.

Several thousand U.S. citizens and Chilean exiles took part.