A court in Santiago, Chile, on November 4 sentenced three former members of the secret police force DINA (Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia) under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet to 15 years in prison for their role in the murder of Ronni Karpen Moffitt, 25, an American colleague of former Chilean minister Orlando Letelier.
Judge Paola Plaza, a special human rights magistrate in Chile, convicted Pedro Espinoza, José Zara, and Raúl Iturriaga, all former DINA agents—the notorious force that hunted political opponents at home and abroad.
According to the court ruling, the agents, under the command of former DINA director Manuel Contreras, planned extrajudicial killings on foreign soil and surveilled Letelier. The explosion occurred on September 21, 1976, as Letelier and Moffitt were driving to work; the bomb detonated as they turned onto Massachusetts Avenue in Washington D.C.
Among the three defendants, Espinoza and Iturriaga (who is already serving over 500 years in prison for multiple human rights crimes) are being held at a special facility outside Santiago. Zara, who had been released in August 2023 after completing a 15-year sentence, was rearrested.
The case strained relations between Chile and the United States, which had strongly financially supported Pinochet's coup on September 11, 1973. The U.S. Congress subsequently ordered an investigation and imposed an arms embargo on Chile. In response, the Pinochet regime disbanded DINA and replaced it with the National Information Agency (CNI) several months later.
Rebecca Karpen, Moffitt's niece, said in a statement: 'These sentences are not only a victory for our family, but also a reminder that the countless lives destroyed by the Pinochet regime are still being fought for, that the pain of the Chilean people will not be forgotten.'
Orlando Letelier, then a prominent critic of the dictatorship living in exile in the United States, had his Chilean citizenship revoked on September 10, 1976. At an anti-Pinochet rally at Madison Square Garden in New York, he declared: 'I was born a Chilean, I am a Chilean, and I will die a Chilean. They were born traitors, live as traitors, and will forever be known as fascist traitors.' He was murdered 11 days later, at the age of 44.
