Orlando Letelier

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Orlando Letelier
Orlando Letelier
Memorial at the site of the murder
Memorial at the site of the murder
Orlando Letelier's grave
Orlando Letelier

Orlando Letelier del Solar (born April 13, 1932 in Temuco , † September 21, 1976 in Washington, DC , USA ) was a Chilean diplomat and politician . He was murdered in exile in the US on the orders of the dictator Augusto Pinochet by agents of the Chilean secret police DINA . The assassination attempt in Washington strained relations between Chile and the United States and caused the US government, among other things, to stop its support for Operation Condor .

Orlando Letelier is the father of Chilean Senator Juan Pablo Letelier .

Life

Letelier was born as the youngest child of the married couple Orlando Letelier Ruiz and Inés del Solar Rosenberg in the southern Chilean town of Temuco . He began his school education at the Instituto Nacional in Santiago, which is renowned in Chile . At the age of 16 he was accepted as a cadet in the military academy in Chile, where he continued his secondary education. After finishing his military career, he began to study at the Universidad de Chile . It was here that he became politically active in the student union for the first time. In 1954 he completed his studies with a law exam.

On December 17, 1955, Letelier married Isabel Margarita Morel Gumucio. With her he had four sons: Cristian, José, Francisco and Juan Pablo.

In 1955 he began working for the Departamento del Cobre, the forerunner of today's Codelco , where he worked as a research analyst for the copper industry until 1959. That year, Letelier joined the Chilean Socialist Party (PS) and was involved in Allende's second, unsuccessful presidential campaign, whereupon he was fired by his state employer.

Letelier emigrated with his family to Venezuela , where he worked as an advisor to the Ministry of Finance for copper. There he began his career as Senior Economist at the Inter-American Development Bank and Director of the Credit Department . As a UN advisor, he was also responsible for establishing the Asian Development Bank .

Member of the government under Salvador Allende

In 1971 the socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende appointed Orlando Letelier as his country's ambassador to the United States. His main challenge was to explain to the US government the nationalization of US-owned Chilean copper mines . In 1973 Letelier became foreign minister , within a few months then interior minister and finally defense minister of Chile.

Persecution under Augusto Pinochet

After the military coup on September 11, 1973 , Letelier was arrested on entering his offices in the Ministry of Defense and tortured first in the Tacna regiment, then in the military academy . He was later dragged eight months to a prison for political prisoners on Dawson Island in the Tierra del Fuego Archipelago, from where he was taken to the Ritoque concentration camp via an Air Force Academy building. After his release in September 1974 due to massive diplomatic pressure from the Venezuelan governor Diego Arria, he went to Caracas . At the suggestion of the American writer Saul Landau , who worked at the Institute for Policy Studies, Letelier traveled to Washington, DC in 1975 and began working for the Institute for Policy Studies .

assassination

Letelier and his American assistant Ronni Karpen Moffitt were murdered by a car bomb in Sheridan Circle in Washington DC on September 21, 1976. Her husband Michael Moffitt was injured, but survived.

Confidential US government documents, which were released in October 2015 by decision of the Barack Obama's government and personally handed over to Chilean President Michelle Bachelet by Secretary of State John Kerry , prove that the Chilean President and dictator Augusto Pinochet personally ordered the murder and his intelligence chief Manuel Contreras with it had commissioned. Contreras himself had always denied his involvement and instead held the CIA responsible for the murder. The released documents also show that Pinochet intended to have Contreras murdered in order to prevent him from testifying about the murder order issued by Pinochet.

In a December 17, 2004 letter to the Los Angeles Times , Letelier's son Francisco wrote that his father's murder was part of Operation Condor , which he described as the intelligence network of six South American dictatorships of the era that eliminated their dissidents. In it, he stressed that Pinochet was never charged for his involvement in Operation Condor. Francisco Letelier emphasized: "My father's murderer was part of Operation Condor." The broken-off agent of the Israeli secret service Mossad, Victor Ostrovsky , reported in his book "The Mossad" that Chilean DINA agents were in terror before Letelier was murdered in Israel -, interrogation and torture methods had been trained. This training took place at the former Kfar Sirkin air base near Tel Aviv. The chief of the DINA, General Contreras, served as the liaison between the Chilean dictatorship and the Mossad.

Prosecution

Various people have been tried and convicted of murder. Among them was Michael Townley , a former CIA agent and expatriate who worked for DINA; General Manuel Contreras , former head of DINA; and Brigadier Pedro Espinoza Bravo , who also previously worked for DINA. Townley was sentenced in 1978 in the USA, Contreras in 1993 in Chile to 12 years in prison. Pinochet never stood on trial for the murders he ordered, despite Townley incriminating him as responsible. During his trial, Townley confessed that he had attached the car bomb to Letelier's car and spent 62 months in prison for it. In 1987, the former Chilean secret police officer Armando Fernández Larios admitted his involvement in a court in Washington. He had carried out the order to scout Letelier's whereabouts and daily routines.

Signs of knowing the USA

CIA documents later released confirm that the CIA was closely associated with Contreras up to and even after Letelier's assassination. Armando Fernández, who was also involved in the murder, was granted a visa at the urging of the US Ambassador to Paraguay , Robert White , despite presenting forged Paraguayan passports .

Documents published by John Dinges in 1999 and 2000 show that "two months before Letelier was murdered, the CIA had secret service inside information about the murder plot, but did nothing to prevent the plot". The CIA also knew of a Uruguayan attempted murder of the US Congressman and later New York Mayor Ed Koch , who later became CIA director George Bush sr. only warned after the murder of Orlando Letelier. When / in which function?

Kenneth Maxwell emphasized that US politicians were not only informed about Operation Condor in general, but also specifically "... that a Chilean murder team was planning to enter the United States." A month before Letelier's murder, Kissinger ordered: " ... that the Latin American rulers involved were to be informed that the murder of subversives, politicians and prominent personalities would cause serious moral and political problems both within the national borders of certain South American states and abroad. " Maxwell wrote in his review of Peter Kornbluh's book: "This demarche was apparently not delivered: The US embassy in Santiago de Chile hesitated because delivering such a harsh ruffle could upset the dictator" and that on September 20, 1976, the day before the murder Letelier and his assistant Moffitt, “the State Department [instructed] the ambassadors' nothing far to undertake in relation to the Condor plot. ” Proof?

Important US politicians are said to have welcomed Letelier's assassination. For example, the journalist Brian Crozier reported that the presidential candidate Ronald Reagan had told him in July 1980 that "it was a good thing that Letelier was killed". Reagan's then-vice-presidential candidate, George Bush, Sr., was director of the CIA at the time of Letelier's assassination.

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Guardian: Pinochet directly ordered killing on US soil of Chilean diplomat, papers reveal , October 8, 2015
  2. ↑ a b Chilean Admits Role in '76 Murder. In: New York Times, February 8, 1987, accessed November 17, 2015.
  3. ↑ Summary of a Tete-a-tete Conversation with Ronald Reagan in His Home at Pacific Palisades outside Los Angeles July 8. 1980. In: Brian Crozier Papers. Box 3. Folder 4., Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, July 1980.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Letelier, Orlando
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Letelier del Solar, Orlando
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Chilean diplomat
DATE OF BIRTH April 13, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Temuco
DATE OF DEATH September 21, 1976
Place of death Washington, DC , USA