Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice by Alan McPherson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice by Alan McPherson James Barefoot, Ph.D. Candidate Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet's Terror State to Justice. By Alan McPherson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019, p. 392, $34.95. On September 21, 1976, operatives of Augusto Pinochet's Chilean dictatorship and Cuban-exile allies murdered former Chilean Minister of Defense Orlando Letelier and his research assistant Ronni Moffit in the middle of Washington DC. The action stemmed from other international assassinations related to both Pinochet and his South American allies within Operation Condor, a transnational network and extradition treaty amongst Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay in the 1970s and early 1980s. While other operations proved successful in Argentina and Europe, Alan McPherson shows that Letelier's death permanently divided the U.S. and Chile, which ultimately put the dictatorship on the long path to collapse. Lack of secure financial and political relations with the U.S. had great relevance in a time where Chile's anti-communist stance should have served as an asset during the Ronald Reagan presidency. Thirty-nine years after John Dinges and Saul Landau published their groundbreaking work on these murders, Assassination on Embassy Row, McPherson enhances and expands the narrative and provides an approachable analysis for a broad audience. His subject matter already lends itself to a spy thriller if the antagonists were as incompetent as real political operatives. McPherson quotes U.S. diplomat Robert Steven, "The Letelier assassination in retrospect was of the more stupid things done by any government." He painstakingly captures the complexity and power relations of transnational murder, divided legal systems on two continents, the political rise of human rights, sparse evidence of covert and extrajudicial operations, and the bumbling ideologues who cost the aggressors their prized immunity in the end. Much like his historiographical counterpart Tanya Harmer, author of Allende's Chile, McPherson's bottom-up approach reads like a novel or screenplay. The text is centered around the people on the ground and sticks with them in chapters that truly read like scenes because of the level of detail associated with bibliographic backstories, setting, and allotting space to the voices of people on the ground. The narrative is linear, but it also overlaps on occasion due to groups of individuals getting their own chapters. If a chapter concerns a trial in the US, then the next chapter may retrace a few steps as the reader is now focused on simultaneous events in Chile. This is a big-picture text, but it is not a birds-eye-view analysis. The reader does not need a background in theory or Latin American history. The volume of information provided within each arm of the argument and the 'peopled' narrative makes this a hybrid between academic and popular history. This is a methodology that will draw even casual readers into a complex historical narrative. [End Page 586] The layout of the work is not simply a bonus for accessibility. McPherson's methodology drives at the age-old question of agency versus fatalism. Scholars phrase this dilemma as agency and post-structuralism vs structuralism. This competition gauges how much weight an author gives to the decisions of individuals in relation to often overwhelming 'structures,' such as culture, ideology, economics, and everyday things that are seemingly out of the control of an individual. At first, it may appear that he sides with structuralists. When he introduces the reader to historical actors, he includes their (un)happy childhoods, how they fared in school, and the ideologies of those around them. There is a notion of each person, from 1976 onward, as a product of all these shaping forces. In addition, the narrative of the separate trials and larger politics of judiciary systems in both countries can make individuals seem somewhat irrelevant as the system seems designed against the notion of justice. However, the crux of the story and a side-effect of all the included dialogue shows the overwhelming importance of individual decisions. Seemingly throwaway lines of dialogue, which sometimes seem like scenery or establishing their personalities, are clues...