Human Rights Quarterly

I. INTRODUCTION

On 21 September 1976, in the first known terrorist assassination by a foreign government [End Page 205] on US soil in modern history, a car bomb exploded at Sheridan Circle on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., killing Orlando Letelier, former Chilean Ambassador to the US, and Ronni Moffitt, a US citizen and colleague of Letelier at the Institute for Policy Studies.

There ensued criminal investigations and convictions of the direct perpetrators in the US, as well as a civil suit against Chile that led indirectly to compensation. Almost two decades after the assassinations, the Chilean Supreme Court in 1995 upheld the criminal convictions of former Chilean intelligence chief, General Manuel Contreras, and his former head of operations, Brigadier General Pedro Espinoza. They were sentenced to prison terms of seven and six years, respectively.

Charges against them for other murders and disappearances followed. By the time of his death in 2015, Contreras was serving fifty-eight sentences totaling over 526 years, with fifty-six more cases pending.¹ As of August 2020, Espinoza is apparently still alive, and on 8 August was reportedly sentenced to ten years in prison for other murders.²

General Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator who almost certainly ordered or authorized Contreras to have Letelier killed, was never tried. When he died in 2006, however, he was facing about 300 charges for human rights violations and corruption.³

In Ghosts of Sheridan Circle,⁴ Temple University history Professor Alan McPherson has given us the first detailed, book-length rendition of the entire saga of the Letelier-Moffitt murders and the subsequent pursuit of justice, from the bombing in 1976 to the ongoing Chilean investigation in 2018 of the killing of Ronni Moffitt. The book is an extensively footnoted academic work. Yet McPherson's narrative talent and dramatic material make his book as gripping a read as a good novelist's murder mystery.

McPherson's opus will be valuable reading for scholars and others interested in such topics as the development of the human rights movement since the days of Jimmy Carter, the interplay of state interests and human rights, the role and limits of domestic and international law in prosecuting crimes of state, US-Chilean relations, and Chilean history.

Unfortunately, contrary to the publisher's claim, the book is not and cannot be a "definitive" account of the story. Did Pinochet himself order or authorize the murder? Almost certainly, but the book does not provide definitive proof. Did the CIA know about the murder beforehand? And what evidence did the US government have, soon after the assassinations, of Pinochet's role?

Alas, through no fault of McPherson's, we don't know. As recently as 2019 and 2020, revelations of US government documents and CIA operations have shed further light on these questions. But even today, we still do not have the full story. Not all the documents are yet released, and many of those made public to date are heavily redacted.

Even full release of contemporaneous CIA documents will be less than definitive. [End Page 206] Pinochet did not likely give such an order in writing. He never admitted it, although on his deathbed he took "political responsibility for everything that was done."⁵ In 2005 Contreras claimed in a court document that Pinochet "personally arranged and directed the actions" of those who killed Letelier and Moffitt.⁶ That is almost certainly true. But what is the added value of this claim by a man who lied about his own involvement for decades, and who had a motive to lie again, and to insist he was only following orders, when facing further imprisonment in 2005?

II. PERSONAL SKETCHES

Most of McPherson's book undertakes a rendering of the story that is as chronological as possible in managing so many overlapping parts. The planning and execution of the assassinations are presented in dismaying detail...