by Jon
Schwarz
Forty years
ago last night, agents working for the Chilean secret service
attached plastic explosives to the bottom of Orlando Letelier’s
Chevrolet as it sat in the driveway of his family’s home in
Bethesda, Maryland, just outside Washington, D.C.
A few blocks
away across Massachusetts Avenue my family’s Pinto sat in our
driveway unmolested. Our whole neighborhood, including my mother and
father and sister and me, slept through everything.
Forty years
ago this morning, the Chilean agents followed Letelier as he drove
himself into Washington, down Massachusetts to the think tank where
he worked. The bomb went off as Letelier went around Sheridan Circle,
ripping off most of the lower half of his body. He died shortly
afterward, as did Ronni Moffitt, a 25-year-old American who’d been
in the car with him. A second passenger, Moffitt’s husband Michael,
survived.
Letelier’s
murder was ordered by the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who’d
overthrown the country’s democratically elected president Salvador
Allende three years before in a military coup. Letelier, who had been
Allende’s defense minister, was arrested during the coup and
tortured for a year until Pinochet bowed to international pressure
and released him. But in Washington, Letelier became the leading
international voice of the opposition to Pinochet, who decided he had
to be eliminated.
There are
still many unanswered questions about this time. Exactly how
complicit was the U.S. in the overthrow of the Chilean government?
Why did the CIA ignore a cable telling it that Chile’s agents were
heading to the U.S.? Why did Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of
State, cancel a warning to Chile not to kill its overseas opponents
just five days before Letelier was murdered?
But for me,
the most interesting question is this: How it is possible I was right
there but didn’t learn about the assassination of Orlando Letelier
until twenty years later?
Social
Silence
It’s true
I was only in second grade when Letelier was killed. But this was a
mafia-like hit executed in the middle of our placid, leafy suburb.
Moreover, it goes far beyond Letelier — the entire neighborhood was
dripping with the bloody history of Chile:
- If you went a few blocks in the other direction from Letelier’s home you’d come to the house of Ted Shackley, on Sangamore Road. Shackley, sometimes called “The Blond Ghost,” was head of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division in 1973, and played a key role in encouraging Pinochet’s coup. Shackley house was directly across the street from Brookmont Elementary School – where my sister and I were on the morning of September 21, 1976.
- Down the hill from our house was Western Junior High, where my sister would later go. One of Western’s other alumni is Michelle Bachelet, the current president of Chile. After the coup, Bachelet’s father was tortured to death; Bachelet and her mother were tortured as well.
- When Letelier was killed, his son Francisco was called out of geometry class at Walt Whitman High School – which both my sister and I would later attend.
- Our neighborhood was directly across the Potomac River from the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia. It was so close that one of our neighbors who worked there commuted there on nice days by canoe.
- On Letelier’s final drive into Washington, his path appears to have taken him within a block of St. Columba’s Episcopal Church; its parishioners at the time included George H.W. Bush, then head of the CIA. Shortly after Letelier was killed, the CIA leaked a false report to Newsweek that Pinochet hadn’t been involved.
Given all
this, you might guess that the adults would have mentioned something
about Letelier’s assassination — not necessarily to decry it but
simply to liven up the endless car pooling to soccer practice. That
never happened.
Nor was this
an aberration. In addition to soccer practice, there was lots of pee
wee football practice at Woodacres Park around the corner from
Letelier’s house. During the fall of 1980, my father volunteered to
sub as coach if Iran released the hostages being held in Tehran —
because our regular coach worked for the Defense Department and was
part of the team that was on call to debrief them. All we kids knew
about this was that these strange foreigners were angry at us for
some incomprehensible foreign reason. No one informed us that the
U.S. had overthrown Iran’s government in 1953, so Iranians had
rational reasons to be hostile toward us.
So despite
the fact that it was right there in front of me, I didn’t learn
about Letelier (or the U.S. history with Iran) from adults, or TV, or
in high school, or college. I had to learn about them on my own, by
getting books out of the library and reading them.
Shhhhhhhhhh
The answer
to my question, I now believe, is that this is the way all countries
work. Anthropologists call this phenomenon “social silence” —
the most important aspects of how societies work are exactly the ones
that are never discussed and most easily forgotten.
But it’s
impossible to suppress the past completely — it inevitably leaks
out around the edges, even if just as a generalized anxiety. I
remember when my Bethesda friends and I went to see Blue Velvet when
it came out in 1986 and how completely it made sense to us:
Everything is polished, happy, and mundane on the surface, while
underneath there’s an eternal, animalistic, merciless struggle for
power.
Orlando
Letelier is gone and he’s not coming back. We can’t change that.
But we can break the social silence about his death, who we are as a
country, and what we’re capable of doing.
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