The Chilean president's D.C. visit took me back to Pinochet's rule [View all]

Gabriel Boric attended ceremonies for Salvador Allende, killed in the 1973 CIA-backed coup, and an exiled diplomat killed in Washington three years later

By Pamela Constable
September 25, 2023 at 3:21 p.m. EDT



Chilean President Gabriel Boric after laying a flower Saturday at the memorial to Orlando Letelier, an exiled former Chilean diplomat, and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt, who were killed in a 1976 car bombing at Sheridan Circle in D.C. (Pamela Constable/The Washington Post)

At the edge of Sheridan Circle in Northwest Washington sits a tree stump crowned with an engraved stone disk. Barely noticeable to the drivers who whiz by on Massachusetts Avenue, the spot has poignant meaning for the crowd that gathers here every September to mourn twin tragedies in the modern history of Chile.

Fifty years ago this month, on Sept. 11, 1973, Chile’s armed forces, backed by the CIA, staged a brutal coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government in Santiago. President Salvador Allende was killed, and power was seized by the right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, who led 17 years of military rule — a period when thousands of Chileans were tortured, killed or disappeared.

Three years after the coup, on Sept. 21, 1976, a car bombing at Sheridan Circle killed an exiled former Chilean diplomat, Orlando Letelier, and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt. The crime was ultimately traced to agents of Pinochet’s secret police.

I know about the annual ritual at the circle because I worked and lived in Chile as a journalist for long stints during the Pinochet era, during which I had some of the most horrifying and moving experiences of my career. Later, back in Washington, I attended the ceremony once or twice, briefly reliving the intensity of those times, but the news increasingly took me to other distant conflicts — especially after 2001, when the date Sept. 11 acquired a new notoriety, in the United States and around the world.

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