Strange Bedfellows at the End of the Cold War: the Letelier Assassination, Human Rights, and State Sovereignty.”

H-Diplo H-Diplo Article Review 893 on “Strange Bedfellows at the End of the Cold War: the Letelier Assassination, Human Rights, and State Sovereignty.” Discussion published by George Fujii on Tuesday, October 29, 2019 H-Diplo Article Review No. 893 29 October 2019 Article Review Editors: Diane Labrosse and Seth Offenbach Production Editor: George Fujii Alan McPherson. “Strange Bedfellows at the End of the Cold War: the Letelier Assassination, Human Rights, and State Sovereignty.” Cold War History (1 April 2019). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2019.1583212. URL: https://hdiplo.org/to/AR893 Review by Stephen G. Rabe, University of Oregon Over the past two decades, Alan McPherson, the Thomas J. Freaney, Jr. Professor of History at Temple University, has established himself as a preeminent scholar of inter-American relations. He has written or edited eleven books in the field. His most notable achievement has been his award- winning study, The Invaded: How Latin Americans and their Allies Fought and Ended U.S. Occupations (2014).[1] McPherson, who is fluent in Spanish and French, conducted multi-archival research in the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States and read a variety of Latin American newspapers, including those from Haiti. His forthcoming book is Ghosts of Sheridan Circle: How a Washington Assassination Brought Pinochet’s Terror State to Justice, which will be published by the University of North Carolina Press. The article under review here explores themes that are fully developed in the book. As in McPherson’s previous articles and books, this article demonstrates the author’s command of the published scholarly literature and his willingness to conduct multi-archival research. McPherson gained access to the archives of the Chilean foreign ministry in Santiago. McPherson presents a straight-forward, sensible thesis in thisCold War History article. On 21 September 1976, a car-bomb blast killed Orlando Letelier, the former foreign, interior, and defense minister in Salvador Allende’s government (1970-1973), in Washington, D.C. The blast also killed passenger Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a U.S. citizen who worked for the Institute of Policy Studies, and injured her husband. Letelier’s legs were blown off in the explosion, and Moffit’s carotid artery was severed by shrapnel, filling her lungs with blood. The attack on Letelier represented the first act of state-supported terrorism in the history of the U.S. capital. The government of General Augusto Pinochet assassinated Letelier because he had been effectively lobbying in Europe and the United States against loans for Chile’s military dictatorship. In a meeting on 8 June 1976 in Santiago with Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, General Pinochet twice objected to Letelier’s activities. Agents Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 893 on “Strange Bedfellows at the End of the Cold War: the Letelier Assassination, Human Rights, and State Sovereignty.”. H-Diplo. 10-29-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/5165104/h-diplo-article-review-893-%E2%80%9Cstrange-bedfellows-end-cold-war Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Diplo associated with the Chilean secret police, DINA, perpetrated the attack. A U.S. expatriate in Chile, Michael Vernon Townley, orchestrated the plot. Townley had been involved in previous assassination plots against Chilean dissidents living abroad. But Pinochet bore direct responsibility for the assassination of Letelier and Moffitt. Secretary of State George Shultz would subsequently inform President Ronald Reagan that U.S. intelligence agencies had directly linked Pinochet to the assassination. In Secretary Shultz’s words, it was “a blatant example of a chief of state’s direct involvement in an act of state terrorism.”[2] As McPherson informs us, the hunt for the Chilean terrorists has been well told in other studies.[3] In 1978, the U.S. government successfully pressured Chile to extradite Townley. In return for his cooperation, Townley served approximately five years in prison, was given immunity from future prosecution, and was placed in the federal Witness Protection Program. Born in December 1941, Townley may still be alive. The two other key terrorists, Colonel Manuel Contreras, chief of the secret police, and Pinochet, did not stand trial in the United States. Contreras, who died in 2015 in Chilean custody, had received jail sentences from Chilean judges amounting to over 500 years for his gross violations of the human rights of Chileans. Although charged with numerous crimes by Chilean jurists, Pinochet died at home in 2006, having escaped prosecution in Chile and abroad for presiding over the murder of over 3,000 Chileans and the torture of perhaps 100,000 citizens. Shultz had actually posed the question to Reagan on whether the United States should consider indicting the Chilean dictator. What McPherson argues is that scholars have not explored the significant consequences of the Letelier assassination. He judges it a ‘watershed’ moment in the global history of the human rights movement. Borrowing Arthur M. Schlesinger’s term, Pinochet’s act of terrorism in Washington had precipitated a new ‘vital center.’ The ‘strange bedfellows’ of the political left and right in the United States had found a common cause. They had an ‘unstated agreement.’ Officials responsible for national security in the State and Justice Departments and the Central Intelligence Agency were outraged by this violation of U.S. sovereignty. During the Jimmy Carter and Reagan administrations, the United States constantly pressed Pinochet to extradite witnesses and turn over documents. U.S. policy for Chile between 1970 and 1990 could be characterized as ‘Letelier diplomacy.’ Only during the brief reign of Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr. and U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick did the United States stop pressing Pinochet on the Letelier assassination. Shultz thought, however, that what “we now know about Pinochet’s role in these assassinations is of the greatest seriousness and adds further impetus to the need to work toward complete democratization of Chile.”[4] International advocates of human rights needed no persuasion to call for the end of the Pinochet regime. The dictator was the human rights community’s favorite villain. But McPherson notes there was a subtle shift in the approach to Chile and the other military dictators of South America. Marxism as a solution to Latin America’s formidable economic problems had fallen out of favor in Latin America. President Allende had made a series of disastrous economic choices that alienated a significant percentage of the Chilean population. Allende’s overthrow could be labeled “assisted suicide,” the smart term used by scholar Jonathan Haslam.[5] Orlando Letelier downplayed his commitment to socialism when he spoke with European and U.S. officials in 1976. Moderate politicians like Patricio Alywin (1990-1994) of Chile and Raúl Alfonsín (1983-1989) of Argentina provided the Reagan administration with a safe way to embrace democracy and human rights in the Cold War. Demanding a restoration of democracy additionally provided cover for the Reagan Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 893 on “Strange Bedfellows at the End of the Cold War: the Letelier Assassination, Human Rights, and State Sovereignty.”. H-Diplo. 10-29-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/5165104/h-diplo-article-review-893-%E2%80%9Cstrange-bedfellows-end-cold-war Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Diplo administration in its undermining of the Sandinistas of Nicaragua. Violating U.S. sovereignty proved a disastrous policy for the Pinochet regime. McPherson puzzles over the choice, noting “we do not know why the two [Pinochet and Contreras] thought it would be acceptable to violate US sovereignty so dramatically. We can merely speculate that they considered that the Cold War’s global nature justified any such violation” (11). Whereas a document has not surfaced that explicitly explains Pinochet’s thinking, the decision to carry out the assassination on U.S. soil is not especially surprising within the context of Henry Kissinger’s policy toward military dictatorships in the Southern Cone countries of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Kissinger, who became secretary of state soon after the overthrow of Salvador Allende, created an atmosphere in which military tyrants could plausibly reason that they could murder political opponents wherever they found them with impunity. It is telling that in over 3,000 pages in the three volumes of his memoirs, Kissinger never mentioned the assassination of Letelier and Moffitt.[6] Examples abound of Kissinger’s indifference to international assassinations and interventions ordered by the military dictatorships. In 1971, Kissinger, then national security advisor, directed a successful destabilization campaign against the leftist government of Juan José Torres (1970-1971) of Bolivia. The repressive General Hugo Banzer Suárez (1971-1978) took charge of Bolivia, and Torres went into exile in Argentina. On 2 June 1976, the Argentine military dictatorship, which had seized power in late March 1976, assassinated Torres. Five days later, Kissinger called on General Banzer at his home in Santa Cruz. The two men did not discuss the death of President Torres.[7] In

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