Sheridan Circle 2006

This year, we enjoyed music, poetry and reflections in honor of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American Ronni Karpen Moffitt, who were killed by agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet on September 21, 1976.

Until September 11, 2001, the car bombing on Massachusetts Ave. was the most infamous act of international terrorism ever to take place in our nation's capital. Letelier and Moffitt were colleagues at the Institute for Policy Studies, where Letelier had become one of the most outspoken critics of Pinochet. Moffitt was a 25-year-old development associate. For three decades, the pursuit of justice for their murders has been a symbol of hope for victims of tyranny everywhere.

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Photos from the ceremony
by Jeremy Bigwood

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The following is a transcript of the speech given on this day by Katie Roberts Hite, former IPSer and current professor of Latin American Studies at Vassar College:

I am deeply honored to be here with you, among many old friends and co-workers and co-marchers. I have to confess that I have not been to a memorial ceremony in Sheridan Circle since 1988, when the dictatorship was still in power. So this is the first time I have been able to participate in the company of Chilean government officials (at least those publicly acknowledging their presence). And it is particularly moving to remember Orlando Letelier, Chilean Ambassador to the United States, standing here with Ambassador Fernández.

While I have not been to Sheridan Circle for so long, I have visited Orlando’s gravesite in the Cementerio General in Santiago, along with the gravesites of Allende, Victor Jara, and the Memorial Wall to the Detained-Disappeared and Executed. I’ve gone with my former boss and human rights mentor Isabel Margarita Morel de Letelier. And as we stood before her husband’s grave, Isabel told me the story of how complicated it was to choose a proper place in the cemetery to lay his body permanently to rest. Until then I had never really thought about the importance of whom you were buried next to. After having to reject several proposed sites, Isabel said, she chose a place for Orlando next to General Emil Koerner, the Prussian father of the modern Chilean military. And I remember how she paused and looked at me to see what kind of a reaction I might have to his being buried next to a famous father of the Chilean military. I have to say I was taken aback, which is what she clearly expected. Then she explained:

You see, Katie, this isn’t any old general – this was a famous nineteenth century war hero and military strategist. And before the coup, I remember that Orlando always liked to remind me that the Chilean military was the most professionally trained there was, that Orlando received the best education in Chile at the Military Academy, and that this General Koerner helped establish a proud tradition. So I picture them lying there together, having fascinating conversations about the good old days.

Throughout Santiago, throughout the country, there has been an explosion of memorials, and they are taking all kinds of forms. Government officials now recognize their political value. The grassroots find that memorials can be both cathartic and useful assertions of political identity. A few hours from now, a commemoration will begin in Villa Grimaldi, the notorious former clandestine torture center in Santiago. Some 4500 prisoners were held there, of whom a known 226 were then disappeared and another eighteen were executed. Today’s commemoration at Villa Grimaldi is the second stage of the project “Roses of Villa Grimaldi,” a homage to women who were murdered and disappeared between 1973 and 1979. So we are part of a global remembrance of Chile’s lost today.

Symbolic representations of the past are appearing everywhere in Chile. Young architects are working with former political prisoners of the Estadio Nacional to design dynamic spaces of memory for those who visit the Stadium. Allende’s iconic black-rimmed glasses are beginning to appear in anticipation of the hundredth anniversary of his birth. The Chilean congress is fighting over an Institute for Human rights, to be housed in a former clandestine detention center downtown. Distinct groups humanize and re-politicize the victims, at points producing a polarizing, angry, but very much alive conversation.

Groups like the Corporación Villa Grimaldi have developed educational materials for teachers, they educate young people about what happened there. In addition, Chilean youth have brought new life to a range of memorialization processes, animating their forms with color, creating dynamic representations on blogs and web pages, performing theatrically at the sites, and pushing their connections to a present ethically minded sensibility.

We recognize that how we represent what took place must strive for empathy -- a relationship among human beings that may, in fact, question the distance between those who were imprisoned, killed, disappeared and those who could have been imprisoned, killed, disappeared, or those who killed and those who could have killed. This raises one of the essential dimensions of memorials: public recognition of the need for an environment in which to facilitate or contribute to an empathetic process.

Memorials tells rich stories of struggle, loss, perseverance, and hope. Memorials are lenses into a deep politics. They can also teach a broader public about conflict and tragedy, toward understandings of political difference. Memorialization processes can become vital spaces for societal soul-searching and for dialogue, not only about the past, but also about the present and future.

Memory is constitutive of our interpretations of the here and now, and for many, many people, the here and now is absolutely deplorable. As a US Latin Americanist, I am mortified by a US imperial project that finds all too familiar echoes in US actions in Latin America over the past century-and-a-half or more. We rely on memory to orient our understandings of the present. We ask if Iraq is another Vietnam in part because we experience the current razing and killings of Iraqi men, women, and children as we remember our carpet bombings, devastation, and killings of a million Vietnamese. Such traumatic memories, however latent for many of us, found our anxieties, our hand-ringing about the utter senselessness of violence and loss as well as our sense of powerlessness in the face of an administration that both ignores our denunciations and accuses us of some kind of lack of patriotism. We ask ourselves where meaning lies in the current wreckage, as well as what our children will face as we continue to dig a deeper morass. We remember Orlando and Ronni as inspirations, as those whose spirits join us in speaking truth to power, in denouncing the cynicism and degradation and embracing the struggle for human rights, justice, dignity.

And now in my classroom at Vassar, I recount the story of Chile, and I tell my students that many who disappeared, who we remember, were little more than their ages, and that Ronni Karpen Moffitt was not much older than they, and then some of the students go off to spend their junior years in Chile, or they come to Washington, to be interns at IPS or at WOLA or at the National Security Archives or with Eliana at the National Alliance for Hispanic Health. It is an ever flowing water of life and energy and replenishment and continuing learning and struggle.

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Thank you to all who attended this year's ceremony. We look forward to seeing you next year.

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31st Anniversary Letelier-Moffitt Human Rights Awards
Wednesday, October 18, 2007
National Press Club