U.S. Documents Link Pinochet to Killing

Newly declassified U.S. government documents establish a link between former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet and two men convicted in the September 1976 assassination in Washington of Chile’s onetime top diplomat. The documents state that Pinochet telephoned Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner to ask that he provide passports to two agents of Chile’s secret police, who ultimately used Chilean passports to enter the United States. Weeks later, ex-Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and an American aide died in a car bombing. The Pinochet government considered Letelier an enemy because of his efforts to depose the dictatorship that Pinochet had headed since 1973.