43rd Anniversary

LETELIER-MOFFITT MEMORIAL PROGRAM

Outdoor program at Sheridan Circle, 23rd and Massachusetts Ave. NW, Washington, DC

Please join us to remember Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, who were assassinated on this site in 1976 by agents of the Pinochet dictatorship.

Featuring:

Jamie Raskin, the U.S. Representative for Maryland’s 8th congressional district, is also a son of Institute for Policy Studies Co-founder Marcus Raskin.

Francisco Letelier will speak about a new work-in-progress to create a multidisciplinary mural installation with an online component on Operation Condor, the collaborative effort by South American military dictatorships to eliminate people they labeled as “subversives,” including Francisco’s father, Orlando Letelier. In 2016, Francisco worked with students from the Latin American Youth Center to create the multi-panel Todas las Manos mural (see photo) about the Letelier-Moffitt assassination.

Josue De Luna Navarro, the New Mexico Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and an activist with United We Dream.

His Excellency Alfonso Silva Navarro, Ambassador of Chile to the United States

Emcee: Phyllis Bennis, Institute for Policy Studies

With music by the mother-daughter duo Melinda St. Louis and Lila Benavente

Background:

On September 21, 1976, agents of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile detonated a car bomb on Washington, DC’s Embassy Row, taking the lives but not the memory of Institute for Policy Studies colleagues Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt.

Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, had become one of the most outspoken critics of the Pinochet regime. Moffitt was a 25-year-old IPS development associate. For more than three decades, the pursuit of justice for their murders has been a symbol of hope for victims of tyranny everywhere.

Every year, human rights activists, friends, family, and colleagues gather in remembrance of Letelier and Moffitt and to reflect on the ongoing struggle for human rights around the world.

This program will take place outdoors at the site of the assassination and end with a laying of flowers on the Letelier-Moffitt memorial across the street from Sheridan Circle.