Long before September 21, 1976, far from home in Washington, DC, Orlando Letelier’s wife Isabel had experienced a political transformation. Through law school friends, some from Venezuela during its era of dictatorship from 1948 to 1958, “I got my political education,” Isabel Letelier recently recalled. “It was the first time I had ever really heard about dictatorship and torture, about corporations keeping more than their share, about nationalization of natural resources. Orlando himself was talking about copper belonging to the Chileans. . . . That was an awakening.”
She told Orlando she considered herself on the “Christian left,” but she couldn’t find a party to join.
Letelier remembered his second year of university as his own awakening. “The truth is that, when I was young, politics mattered little to me, even less so socialism.” As he read more and had long discussions with Salvador Allende, then a senator, and others, he grew a social conscience and joined the Socialist Party. Early on in their relationship, he told Isabel that finding out about the extraction of copper, Chile’s primary export, by foreign corporations was “a blow to my heart.”
Allende lost the 1958 presidential election but kept running in the 1960s. Letelier’s connection to the Marxist, however, spelled personal disaster. Not only was he fired from the copper department where he worked, but also he was told, “Do not waste any time trying to find a job with this government. You are not going to find a job from north to south. You are being punished for being a traitor to your class. This is a lesson you should learn now when you are young.” The Leteliers were resourceful. Three months after Letelier lost his job, in late 1959, he and the family left for Venezuela, where his exiled friends were now back and in power and offered him a position with the Vollmer Group doing market studies. Soon after, the governments of the Americas created the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, and its first president happened to be Letelier’s former law professor, Felipe Herrera. He offered Orlando a job.
At 3 AM one day in late 1970, the whole clan at Chile Chico, the Leteliers’ cottage in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, was awakened by Isabel’s shouts: “Allende won!”
Their old Chilean friend, the physician, senator, and head of a leftist coalition called Popular Unity, had pulled off the feat of winning Chile’s presidency while openly Marxist.
Letelier, following the results from Washington, immediately drove out to the Shenandoah Valley, honking his horn as he approached the property. Isabel and he hugged.