BRATTLEBORO-To mark the 50th anniversary of an assassination by car bombing carried out in Washington, D.C., by agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the program director ofthe Institute for Policy Studies (IPS),will speak in Brattleboro about U.S. policy in Chile and how a U.S.-backed coup there three years earlier led to the political violence on American soil.
Until the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001, that car bombing was, in the words of the event organizers, “the most infamous international terrorist attack in the nation’s capital region.”
The Windham World Affairs Council (WWAC) will host Sarah Anderson’s talk — “An Assassination on U.S. Soil: The Long Blowback of U.S. Support for Chile’s Pinochet” — Wednesday, Sept. 9, at 118 Elliot.
Introducing Anderson, will be her colleague at IPS, Chuck Collins of Guilford, who describes her as “the perfect person to talk about the U.S. role in overthrowing a democratic government in Chile in 1973 and how it continues to play out today.”
The attack killed Orlando Letelier, a former ambassador to the United States from Chile and a former member of the cabinet of socialist President Salvador Allende. Also killed was Letelier’s secretary, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, whose husband, Michael Moffitt, was injured in the blast.
Letelier, the target of the attack on Washington’s busy Massachusetts Avenue, was exiled after the coup. He worked as an academic in Washington, D.C., for IPS, the same think tank that now employs Anderson and Collins.
The talk is part of a WWAC series, “Blowback,” which, according to organizers, “focuses on the ways that U.S. foreign policy, particularly during periods of aggressive military intervention and regime change, have sowed seeds of long-lasting instability, authoritarianism, migration, and resentment in the rest of the world.”
Of the upcoming talk, Collins says, “Thanks to our historical ignorance and amnesia, Americans underestimate the long tail of U.S. foreign interventions and the blowback that lasts for decades.”
Anderson was inducted in 2025 by the Chilean government into the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins, the country’s highest civilian honor named for the leader of its independence movement.
The Commons spoke recently with Anderson, based in Washington, D.C., who, for 30 years, has been on staff at IPS where she directs the Global Economy Project and co-edits Inequality.org with Collins.
The two have worked closely for years on economic policy issues and inequality. Anderson focuses on efforts in the United States, Chile, and around the world to achieve accountability and justice for that Sept. 21, 1976, attack and related offenses.
‘It could happen to me’
Fearing Allende’s election in 1970 would lead to a communist stronghold taking root in the Western hemisphere, the U.S. government helped sabotage the Allende government, leading to a 1973 coup.
The democratically elected Allende was deposed, replaced by a military junta and Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.
U.S. support thus paved the way for Letelier’s assassination, but the bombing in Washington, D.C., took the Nixon administration off guard.
Of its impact, Anderson notes, “the U.S. administration had been telling Pinochet they were supportive of what he was doing, but they didn’t think he’d come and do this in their own backyard.”
“The fact that not only did this result in the death of a prominent Chilean critic of Pinochet, but also of a young American woman I think made a lot of young people in this country feel like, well, ‘If it could happen to Ronnie Carpenter Moffitt, it could happen to me. So maybe I better get involved and speak out about it,’” she says. “And those are words that can certainly apply to these times, too.”
With Letelier and Moffitt’s former colleagues, the IPS has, the release continues, “turned this tragic murder into a force for justice,” most notably, perhaps, with “the 1998 arrest of Pinochet in London, a landmark case that struck fear in the hearts of dictators the world over.”
Pinochet was returned to Chile on the grounds of poor health, and lived there under house arrest. He died in 2006 while still facing approximately 300 human rights and corruption charges.
In the pursuit of accountability, Anderson has worked closely with lawyers, victims’ family members, journalists, and researchers “to really build a movement that has won some measure of progress over the years,” she explained.
She said it has been exciting to be a part of this movement for justice.
“I think people find it a really fascinating history — that of U.S. involvement in one of the most brutal dictatorships in the world and how that dictatorship had a long arm that reached right into the central downtown area of Washington, D.C.”
Anderson adds that this “most notorious act of international terrorism in the capital area” is a story “about how, through so many different angles, through using the law, through using media and culture and powerful stories, people have come together to achieve a lot. Part of that has been exposing the details of what really happened.”
That came about, she explains, thanks to “a huge declassification initiative by the Clinton administration that led to tens of thousands of documents being released. So it’s given us a really close-up view of U.S. foreign policy gone awry.”
As “more of an economics person,” Anderson adds that she is “particularly interested in how economists used the dictatorship in Chile to also do drastic experiments with neoliberal economics.”
The Pinochet regime “used a moment of really oppressive authoritarian rule to drive through very drastic economic policy reforms that led to really extreme inequality in that country,” she says, crediting author Naomi Klein, who told the story in her book The Shock Doctrine.
Awakening a global movement
Anderson notes that Pinochet’s government, one of history’s most brutal dictatorships and the consequences of their actions are both “terribly negative, but also positive.”
U.S. support for that regime “gave a green light to human rights abusers around the world,” she says. But that, in turn, “catalyzed a human rights movement that has achieved a lot over past decades.”
Connecting that history “with the current moment,” she says, “I think we can learn from [it] today as we’re witnessing our current administration in Washington also facing charges of widespread human rights abuses.”
More than half a century ago, the Nixon administration’s support of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship “provoked a lot of members of Congress to think that they needed to be more involved in foreign policy and to put more checks on presidential power, especially with regard to human rights.”
As a result, Congress “reined in an administration that was supporting extreme human rights abuses,” Anderson says.
“I think that we can do it again,” she adds.
Anderson said the momentum built around the justice-seeking efforts at IPS “really took people who brought so many different strengths to the table.”
Relating to now, she adds, “there are a lot of positive things I think we can draw from that experience that we can apply to the current moment when our president apparently is enamored by the leader of North Korea. And so, Pinochet versus the North Korean leader: not so different.”
Citing the hotly contested legality of the bombing of ships allegedly involved in drug smuggling in the Caribbean and the ongoing war on Iran, Anderson adds, “There aren’t many guardrails right now on what the Trump administration is doing in terms of foreign policy, and we need to figure out how to bring those guardrails back.”
Does she hold hope for that?
“I have a long view of history. That’s one outcome of working on something like this for so long. I have seen that perseverance can pay off. We’ve achieved impressive things in the past when we unified forces for a higher moral goal with international human rights at the core. I think we can do that again.”
A native of Minnesota, Anderson acknowledges “it’s hard to not feel overwhelmed right now.”
But she finds it heartening to follow closely what’s happening in her home state, where she sees “all of the people who signed up to get trained as constitutional observers, knowing their rights, knowing how to document things, all of that is so critical.”
“I think it can be transformative,” Anderson says.
Anderson’s talk at 118 Elliot in Brattleboro begins at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 9. A number of arpilleras — artistic tableaus that Chileans have made as symbols of resistance to the Pinochet dictatorship — will be on display in the 118 Elliot gallery. Admission is free with a suggested donation of $10, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds. For more information, visit windhamworldaffairscouncil.org.
This News item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.