VIDEO: The Long Blowback of U.S. Support for Pinochet’s Chile
On September 9, the Windham World Affairs Council in Brattleboro, Vermont hosted a full-house lecture marking the 50th anniversary of the assassination of IPS colleagues Orlando Letelier and Ronni Karpen Moffitt.
Introduced by IPS colleague Chuck Collins, Sarah Anderson, director of the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies, traced the arc of U.S. involvement in Chile from Nixon’s directive to the CIA to “make the Chilean economy scream” through the September 11, 1973 coup, and the car bombing on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., that killed Letelier and Moffitt three years later.
A declassified record of a 1976 meeting captures Secretary of State Henry Kissinger telling Pinochet: “You did a great service to the west in overthrowing Allende.” The message, Sarah argued, was a green light for the assassination that followed. She detailed the legal milestones that ensued, including Pinochet’s 1998 arrest in London under the principle of universal jurisdiction — engineered by Spanish lawyer Juan Garcés, another former IPS colleague. Most recently, in June 2026, three former Chilean military officials were sentenced to 15 years in prison for Ronni Moffitt’s murder.
Throughout the evening, Sarah drew direct parallels to the present moment in the U.S., pointing to ICE raids and the dismantling of international human rights institutions. “A lot of people when they hear human rights, they think of something happening very far away. We should use that same term to talk about what’s going on here.”
Sarah has spent more than 30 years at IPS helping to maintain the fight for justice in the Letelier-Moffitt case. “While you’re in the middle of it, you don’t know,” she reflected, “but later you can see that the work paid off and you just have to keep doing the work.”
Each year in Orlando and Ronni’s memory, IPS gives one Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Award to a domestic human rights organization and another to an international organization doing work in the Americas. You can read about the history of the award and find out how to attend here.
