IPS Receives Prestigious Chilean Human Rights Award
The Institute for Policy Studies is proud to announce that the Chilean government has inducted long-time employees Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh into the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins, an honor bestowed on foreigners who have made a special contribution to Chilean society.
The awards ceremony took place on September 28 at the official residence of Chilean Ambassador Juan Gabriel Valdés in Washington, DC. In his presentation, Valdés highlighted Anderson and Cavanagh’s efforts to pursue justice in the case of two IPS colleagues, former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American Ronni Karpen Moffitt, who were assassinated in Washington, DC in 1976 by agents of the Chilean dictatorship.
Cavanagh is a former director of IPS and a current senior advisor. Anderson directs the Institute’s Global Economy Program. For several decades, they have worked with deeply committed lawyers, family members, policymakers, and other human rights activists to achieve a number of measures of justice in the Letelier-Moffitt case.
They have also played leadership roles in coordinating two annual events to honor Letelier and Moffitt: a memorial program at the site of the assassination on Washington’s Embassy Row and a human rights award that lifts up new U.S. and Latin American human rights heroes. This year’s Letelier-Moffitt awards program will take place on October 9.
In his acceptance speech, Cavanagh thanked several IPS colleagues, including our late co-founders Marcus Raskin and Richard J. Barnet. On the very day of the assassination, they committed the Institute to the pursuit of justice and accountability for this heinous act of political violence.
Cavanagh also paid tribute to the late IPS fellow Saul Landau, who led an independent IPS investigation of the crime, working closely with FBI agents assigned to the case who were committed to an unbiased pursuit of the facts and to holding the killers accountable through the legal process.
“I have absorbed their wisdom and their commitment to justice and to teaching and inspiring the world with the lessons of Ronni and Orlando’s lives and the struggle to hold their killers accountable,” Cavanagh said.
In her remarks, Anderson thanked Letelier family members in attendance at the ceremony, including Orlando Letelier’s four sons and two of his grandsons.
“For 30 years now, I’ve been able to observe how you’ve used your diverse talents to turn your personal family tragedy into a force for justice,” Anderson said. “And this force has strengthened the remarkable international movement that has brought down generals, put assassins on trial, won path-breaking human rights lawsuits, stripped Pinochet of his immunity, and exposed the U.S. government’s role in supporting a brutal dictatorship.”
Anderson shared news at the ceremony of the latest development in this nearly half-century-long campaign: the first Chilean legal case related to Ronni Moffitt’s murder. The opening of this case has already resulted in a convicted terrorist being returned to prison after serving a sentence for a separate political assassination during the Pinochet dictatorship.
