Sunlight diplomacy

ON THE morning of September 21st 1976, Orlando Letelier, a Chilean dissident, was at the wheel of his Chevrolet Malibu on his way to work at a think-tank in Washington, DC. A former foreign minister in Salvador Allende’s government, he had been jailed by the military regime that took power in 1973. After his release, he went to the United States and became one of the junta’s most prominent critics. He wrote letters and lobbied Congress to withdraw military aid to the generals. His work had not gone unnoticed in Santiago, Chile’s capital. As his car rounded Sheridan Circle a bomb beneath his seat exploded, killing him and Ronni Moffitt, a colleague sitting beside him. The murder is the only state-sponsored terrorist attack to have struck the United States’ capital.

For decades people suspected that Augusto Pinochet, Chile’s military dictator, was behind the murder. Evidence of that came to light only in October 2015, when John Kerry, America’s secretary of state, gave Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s president, a pen drive containing hundreds of newly declassified documents. One of them, a memo in 1987 from George Shultz, an earlier secretary of state, to Ronald Reagan, quoted a CIA finding that “President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murders.” The revelation came too late to be used to try the despot; he died in 2006. Chile welcomed it anyway. “It helps us to clarify a painful historical moment for our country,” said Heraldo Muñoz, Chile’s then-foreign minister.