The Foreign Service Journal, April 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2020 83 He takes the reader through legal and diplomatic battles over letters roga- tory, extraditions, Chile’s amnesty law, the U.S. Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, the testimony of false or unreliable witnesses, and the constant looming challenge of statutes of limitation. And as in any crime story, sudden break- throughs time and again run up against new barricades. The investigatory and legal dramas of the case played out against the back- drop of Chilean politics. With the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990, the conditions for closure seemed to arrive at last—but even then, the mills of God ground slowly. In 1992 the United States and Chile used provisions of a 1914 bilateral treaty to negotiate a financial award, payable to the families of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt. Despite Chile’s amnesty law, enacted in 1978 to protect military personnel from civilian prosecution, Chilean courts tried and convicted members of DINA, including its leader, General Manuel Contreras, whose last appeal was denied in 1995. (When Con- treras died in 2015, he was serving 28 sentences totaling more than 300 years.) Pinochet himself was indicted in 2000 on 177 counts of torture, murder and other crimes. He died in a military hospital in 2006, 30 years after the death of Letelier, without a verdict having been rendered. He was 91 years old. McPherson offers some thoughts about the legacy of the Letelier affair. In Chile, the case strengthened the judiciary, contributed to the end of the Pinochet regime and broke the impu- nity conferred by the amnesty law. In the United States, it raised coun- terterrorism to an area of special inter- est and expertise in the FBI, and led to new judicial powers to act against inter- national terrorism, including through civil as well as criminal actions. In diplomacy, said Chilean Ambas- sador Juan Gabriel Valdés, the case elevated human rights to “an area of international politics that you had to take into consideration, [one] not to be taken lightly.” McPherson concludes that the Lete- lier case “provided hope that ordinary people—survivors of terror, mourning family members, investigators, lawyers, diplomats and their allies in nongov- ernmental organizations—could obtain justice against tyrants and terrorists even when their own governments were less than forthcoming.” Did justice at last prevail? Metaphys- ical questions have no clear answers, but this statement comes pretty close to an unhedged yes. n Former Foreign Service Officer Harry Kopp is a frequent contributor to The Foreign Service Journal and a member of its edito- rial board. The major share of the credit for the eventual indictments, arrests and convictions must go to nonpolitical, midlevel American government employees—the prosecutors, special agents and diplomats who persevered, did their jobs, solved the crime and held the perpetrators to account.