VIDEO: A Tribute to Isabel Letelier at the Site of Her Husband’s Assassination
As three Institute for Policy Studies colleagues were riding together to their office in the nation’s capital on September 21, 1976, agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet detonated a bomb strapped under their car.
Two died in the attack: Orlando Letelier, a leading Pinochet critic and former Chilean ambassador to the United States, and Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a 25-year-old American woman who worked as an IPS development associate.
Shortly after this horrific act of international terrorism, IPS leaders Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet hired Orlando’s widow, Isabel Letelier, to carry on the fight for justice in Chile. For 17 years she also ran the IPS Human Rights Program and IPS’s Third World Women’s program, which educated Americans about the struggles of women in the Global South.
Family, friends, and fellow human rights activists recently gathered to pay tribute to Isabel’s many decades of leadership in the global human rights movement. This tribute was part of an annual memorial program the Institute has organized at the site of the assassination at Sheridan Circle on Massachusetts Avenue.
While Isabel could not travel to Washington, three of her four sons — Juan Pablo, Cristian, and José Letelier — spoke at the event. Longtime IPS director and current senior advisor John Cavanagh presented them with a book of written tributes to Isabel from many of her friends and fans.
“While it’s most unfortunate that my mother cannot be here with us in person today,” Cristian said, “she is ever present here in spirit. From her home in Santiago she continues to inspire us all with her unwavering strength, love, and commitment to justice.”
The assassination “was meant to scare us off. It was meant to stop us,” shared José Letelier. “Did Isabel stop? No. She was relentless. She continued the fight. She was unwavering in her commitment to this cause. And she was always there for people in need.”
Juan Pablo Letelier, a former Chilean senator, reported that Chilean President Gabriel Boric, who spoke at Sheridan Circle in 2023, recently inaugurated a gallery in the presidential palace with photos of Orlando Letelier and two other men, José Tohá González and Carlos Prats, who had also served in the government of President Salvador Allende. All three were murdered by the Pinochet dictatorship.
This new gallery is just one sign of Boric’s “commitment to memory” and his dedication to human rights, Juan Pablo said.
Current Chilean ambassador to the United States, Juan Gabriel Valdés, was a colleague of Orlando Letelier’s at IPS at the time of the assassination. At the Sheridan Circle event, he told a gripping story about how Isabel and the wife of José Tohá, Moy de Tohá, had boldly entered the Ministry of Defense just two days after the coup in September 1973.
The military had detained both of their husbands, along with thousands of other Chileans. Remarkably, the women crossed the security barriers and made it to the fourth floor where they were shocked to encounter Pinochet himself.
“They knew him. He knew them. They had dined together in their homes. They knew the names of their children,” Valdés said. “Pinochet rushed over to them. He knew they were fearless. And they knew he had the psychology of a traitor.”
The coup leader set up a meeting with the women for the following day. By this time, they’d learned that the military had imprisoned their husbands at Dawson Island, in the far south of the country.
As Valdés described the scene, Pinochet immediately began screaming, blaming Allende, the women’s husbands, and other leftists for the coup, which deposed Allende’s elected progressive government and installed Pinochet’s right-wing dictatorship.
“He yelled, but he didn’t look at their eyes,” Valdés said. Isabel interrupted the dictator and demanded the prisoners’ immediate release, pointing out that they had no legal grounds for detaining them.
When Pinochet claimed there was nothing he could do, Isabel told Moy she couldn’t stand it anymore and the women stood up and walked out, leaving the traitor ranting in his office. “Isabel Margarita Morel de Letelier,” Valdés said, “is, above all, a very courageous woman.”
IPS holds an annual human rights awards program in honor of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt to lift up new champions of justice and accountability in Latin America and the United States. Tickets for this year’s event on October 10 are available here.
