Victim’s Son Urges U.S. Action on Pinochet

When Francisco Letelier came to Washington, he thought his family was finally safe from the soldiers who ousted Chile’s democratic government and held his father at a bleak island prison.

That assurance vanished in 1976, when he was pulled out of high school to find that his father, Chilean pro-democracy exile leader Orlando Letelier, was killed a mile from the White House by a car bomb. An American colleague, Ronni Moffitt, died with him.

An agent of the Chilean secret police subsequently confessed to sneaking up the driveway of the Leteliers’ suburban Maryland home and planting the bomb while the family slept.

Today, Letelier and other relatives of the victims want the United States to prosecute the man who they believe ordered the unprecedented Washington assassination--former Chilean military strongman Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet is under house arrest in London as jurists argue whether he can be extradited to Spain for crimes against humanity.

“More than enough evidence exists not only to investigate Pinochet, but to indict him,” said Letelier, 39, a Los Angeles artist. “Americans should be passionately interested in this because a young American woman lost her life. It is inconceivable that these murders in Washington were committed without the authorization of Pinochet.”

U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno says that Justice Department officials are reviewing the Letelier case to determine whether Pinochet could be tried in the United States.

“If President Clinton is in fact serious about fighting terrorism worldwide, this was a serious act of terrorism,” said California Rep. George Miller (D-Martinez), one of the staunchest congressional advocates of stronger U.S. involvement in international efforts to try Pinochet.

“I think the federal government has within its possession the evidence that links Pinochet to that terrorist bombing,” Miller said. “[Reno] has the ability to pull together all the information from all the federal agencies.”

U.S. officials have stopped short of publicly endorsing Pinochet’s prosecution and said privately that it would set a legal precedent that could expose numerous world leaders--and even, for example, Americans who served in Vietnam--to lawsuits in other countries.

Miller, noting that U.S. officials have already brought one foreign leader--Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega--to trial in the United States, believes there are other U.S. reservations.

Possible U.S. Role in Coup

The Nixon administration was involved in efforts in the early 1970s to overthrow Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, or prevent him from taking office, and the CIA had close ties to the Chilean secret police. Digging further might unearth details of U.S. participation in the 1973 military coup, in which Allende died, Miller said.

“Clearly there has been resistance within various agencies for a full release of these documents,” Miller said. “Already some declassification is showing some deeper involvement” in the coup.

Miller has urged Reno to give Spain access to the Chilean American agent of Pinochet’s intelligence service, Michael Townley, who served five years in U.S. prison for planting the bomb. Townley is in the federal witness protection program.

Manuel Contreras, the former head of Pinochet’s feared secret police, was convicted along with his deputy of ordering the bombing, and is serving a seven-year sentence in Chile. Contreras argued in general terms that everything he did was authorized or ordered by Pinochet.

“Contreras would certainly be a critical witness” for any U.S. prosecution, said Sam Buffone, the Washington attorney representing the spouses of the victims, Isabel Letelier and Michael Moffitt. Moffitt, whose 25-year-old wife died in the bombing a few months after their wedding, was in the back seat of the car, and was the only survivor.

If U.S. prosecutors reactivate the Letelier case, “there’s only one target--Pinochet. Everyone else has been brought to justice.”

“It’s incomprehensible that a plan to assassinate a Chilean diplomat in Washington, D.C., could have been carried out without Pinochet’s approval,” Buffone said.

Before the assassination, Washington was simply the city of Francisco Letelier’s childhood.

He was just a toddler when his father was posted to Washington by his employers in the Chilean copper industry. His father later worked for the Inter-American Development Bank, and when Allende was elected in 1970, became Chilean ambassador to Washington. Three years later, he was named foreign minister, and the family moved back to Chile.

Francisco, then 14, was still asleep when his father got the early morning phone call alerting him of unusual troops movements. Orlando Letelier rushed to the defense ministry, although one of his two bodyguards had still not arrived for work.

When he got there, someone shoved a gun in his back. It was his missing bodyguard. For the next few days, Orlando Letelier watched prisoners be led out in blindfolds and listened to the rifle volleys of their executions. One day he was called, but after an argument between army officers, he was taken back to his cell. Later, he was transferred to the notorious political prison on Dawson Island, a freezing, wind-swept rock a few hundred miles from Antarctica.

Brief Respite From Violence

At home, a colonel arrived to take charge of the house arrest of Francisco’s mother. The boys’ school was closed and the American priests who ran it were expelled.

At night there was gunfire, and at dawn, bodies on the ground. More than 3,000 Chileans died or disappeared by the time Pinochet stepped down in 1990.

Francisco’s father survived his year in prison, although he lost 40 pounds. The Leteliers moved back to Bethesda, Md., in 1975. Carlos Fuentes met Orlando Letelier in Washington that year and found him a “cultured man, elegant, extraordinarily attractive and physically and mentally refined,” the novelist wrote in a column published Tuesday.

The Leteliers were just beginning to savor the sweet monotony of normal family life when Francisco was pulled out of class in September 1976.

On the way to the hospital, he passed the assassination site, Sheridan Square, where he and his three brothers once played on the statue while waiting for the bus. Firefighters were still cleaning up the blood and remnants of his father, whose legs were blown off.

Francisco was 17 years old.

“What happened there made me an American in the true sense of the word,” he said. “My father parented me on the streets of the nation’s capital, and he died there.

“The United States is built on ideals of freedom and democracy, and it should not miss the boat on this,” he said. “This has become a symbolic case for the way the world can deal with human rights issues on an international level.”

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Times researcher William Holmes contributed to this story.