Assassination on U.S. Soil – The Long Blowback of U.S. Support for Chile’s Pinochet 9/9/26
This September marks the 50th anniversary of a political assassination carried out on U.S. soil, a car bombing in Washington, D.C., ordered by agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Until September 11, 2001, it was among the most notorious acts of international terrorism ever committed in the nation’s capital.
The Windham World Affairs Council welcomes Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies for an evening exploring this extraordinary history, and what it can teach us about U.S. foreign policy, human rights, and accountability today.
The target of the September 1976 bombing was Orlando Letelier, Chile’s former ambassador to the United States and a cabinet minister under President Salvador Allende. Three years earlier, Allende’s democratically elected government had been overthrown in a military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. The United States had worked to undermine Allende’s government and supported forces seeking his removal amid Cold War fears about the spread of socialism and communism in Latin America.
Letelier survived imprisonment and exile and became a prominent international critic of the Pinochet dictatorship. While working at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, he continued to challenge the regime’s human rights abuses and international legitimacy. On September 21, 1976, a bomb planted beneath Letelier’s car exploded as he drove through Washington’s Embassy Row. Letelier and his 25-year-old American colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, were killed. Their murders did not end the struggle for accountability.
Over the next five decades, former colleagues, family members, lawyers, journalists, and human rights advocates transformed the tragedy into a sustained international campaign for justice. Among its most consequential moments was Pinochet’s 1998 arrest in London, a landmark case that helped establish that former heads of state could face prosecution for grave human rights abuses beyond their own borders. The pursuit of accountability continues today, including the conviction by a Chilean judge this year of three former secret police agents in connection with Moffitt’s murder.
