Death of a Dissident

Driving slowly through the drizzle on Washington's Sheridan Circle one morning last week, former Chilean Ambassador to Washington Orlando Letelier, 44, passed by the stately stone mansion that had been his official residence for nearly two years. A few hundred yards farther along his route, a blast of orange flame engulfed Letelier's light blue Chevelle, blowing away the sheet-metal on the door on the driver's side, smashing the windows and floor and jamming the roof up as if a tent pole had been rammed into it. Parts of the shattered car rained down as far as 250 feet away.

Letelier died instantly, his legs blown off. Gobbets of flesh and blood-soaked upholstery were flung throughout the car's interior. A metal fragment slashed the neck of Letelier's front-seat companion, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, 25, severing her carotid artery. She drowned in her own blood. Her husband, Michael Moffitt, 25, who had been sitting in the back seat, somehow escaped almost uninjured.

The Hate List. The grisly murder ended the life of a man high on the hate list of Chile's right-wing military government. Letelier had been one of Chile's most prominent citizens-in-exile. An economist, a lawyer and a committed Socialist, he was sent to Washington as Santiago's ambassador by Chile's Marxist President Salvador Allende Gossens in 1971. Two years later, Letelier returned home to take a series of top Cabinet jobs during the frenetic final days of the Allende regime. Imprisoned by the junta that succeeded Allende, Letelier was freed in mid-1975. Returning to Washington as an economist at the Institute for Policy Studies, a self-styled radical think tank where the Moffitts also worked, Letelier had begun calling for unity among opponents of "fascism in Chile." Early in September, he had spoken out against the junta at a benefit concert in Manhattan for Chilean refugees. Just before that concert, the junta revoked his citizenship, accusing him of "grave crimes against the essential interests of the state." Eleven days afterward, he was dead.

The Chilean government quickly denied any connection with Letelier's murder. "The evil attack," said Santiago's pro-junta daily El Mercuric, would be "used to revive the campaign of hate and lies against Chile" at the United Nations General Assembly, which convened last week. But opponents of the regime noted that Letelier's killing was the latest in a string of attacks on prominent Chilean exiles who posed problems for the junta. In September 1974, General Carlos Prats Gonzalez, predecessor as army chief of staff of the tough current junta boss, General Augusto Pinochet Uguarte, was assassinated by a bomb in his car in Buenos Aires. In October 1975, Christian Democratic Leader Bernardo Leighton, who irritated the regime by calling, as Letelier had, for a united opposition against it, was wounded by gunmen in Rome.

Some Chilean exiles believe that these attacks were carried out by hit teams set up by the feared secret police, DINA. They claim that DINA officials or members of the right-wing paramilitary organization, Patria y Libertad, were seen in the vicinity of the two previous assaults roughly at the time they took place. In the wake of last week's killing, Survivor Michael Moffitt said that Letelier had been convinced that killers were also on his trail. "He knew that one more life wouldn't matter to them." Though U.S. federal investigators were considering that possibility, at week's end they had no firm leads as to who bombed Letelier's blue Chevelle, or why.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.