Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: how a Washington assassination brought Pinochet's terror state to justice

Abstract

The brazen assassination by car bomb of prominent Chilean political exile Orlando Letelier and his American colleague Ronni Moffitt on 21 September 1976 in the heart of Washington DC—‘the worst state-sponsored assassination in U.S. history’ (p. 292) and the most egregious act of Operation Condor beyond South America—was the ghost that haunted US–Chilean relations for the next two decades. Its reverberations were such that the Pinochet regime was obliged to exempt the crime from its otherwise wide-ranging 1978 amnesty law. The unresolved case also proved to be an albatross around the neck of the initially friendly Reagan administration, whose 1981 repeal of the 1976 Kennedy–Harkin congressional amendment prohibiting military ties to Chile required, inter alia, steps being taken to bring to justice those Chileans indicted by US prosecutors. The prime motivation for the agreement for the new civilian government to pay compensation to the Letelier and Moffitt families in...