Letelier was taking meetings with party leaders to strategize about Chile after the dictatorship when Pinochet finally had him murdered. Moffitt, Letelier’s 25-year-old assistant, was collateral damage. Letelier was cut in half by the explosion on the warm autumn day, dying instantly. Moffitt took a tiny piece of shrapnel through her carotid artery and died on the pavement, choking on her own blood as her husband tried to save her. Two years later, a grand jury in the District of Columbia convicted the head of Chile’s secret police of the crime, but the message Pinochet sent to the dictatorship’s exiles around the world was clear.
“We knew this dictatorship has a lot of power, because it’s capable of killing in the United States,” said my father, Luis Manríquez, another Pinochet exile, who learned of the Letelier assassination as a teenager in Santiago reading Solidaridad, an underground newspaper published by the Roman Catholic Church and distributed in secret. “Solidaridad reported on the torture and deaths under Pinochet,” my father recalled in a phone interview Sunday, adding that it’s important that Boric has publicly recognized that the Chilean state assassinated Letelier, who was represented at Saturday’s ceremony by two of his living sons.
“In Chile today there are those who believe that the coup was correct,” said Juan Pablo Letelier of the U.S.-backed action that deposed Allende. “And it’s the same type of people like those who stormed Capitol Hill” on January 6, he added.
Moffitt’s brother, Michael Karpen, also compared Pinochet’s coup and Donald Trump’s coup attempt, in an interview with The New Republic. “What happened in Chile happened in an instant. I guess the analogy here is kind of a slow boil,” Karpen said. “I’m just concerned that we will have to go through similar pain and suffering.”
Representative Jamie Raskin was also on hand Saturday to present his House resolution with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to recognize the Chilean dissidents who helped end the dictatorship. “It expresses profound regret for the U.S. contribution to destabilizing democratic institutions in Chile,” said Raskin of his resolution, which was introduced in the Senate by Bernie Sanders and Tim Kaine.
Ocasio-Cortez recently traveled to Chile with Democratic Representatives Nydia Velasquez, Joaquin Castro, Greg Casar, and Maxwell Frost, and they visited the museum in Santiago dedicated to preserving the memory of Pinochet’s victims. “For years, the U.S. has refused to disclose the extent of its involvement,” wrote Ocasio-Cortez upon returning stateside, touting her role in declassifying documents relating to the 1973 coup, “and while there are still many documents that should be declassified, this was an important first step.”