Editing Orlando Letelier (section)

==Assassination==
(1976)
On September 21, 1976, Letelier and Ronni Moffitt were killed in Washington, D.C., when a car bomb detonated under Letelier’s Chevrolet Chevelle on Sheridan Circle. The bomb, planted by [[Michael Townley]], a DINA operative with CIA ties, was remotely triggered by Townley and Cuban exiles from the Cuban Nationalist Movement (CNM), including José Dionisio Suárez and Virgilio Paz Romero. Letelier, aged 44, died instantly; Moffitt, in the passenger seat, succumbed to injuries shortly after. Moffitt’s husband, Michael Moffitt, in the back seat, survived with minor injuries.

The assassination, the most brazen act of Condor on U.S. soil, shocked Washington and strained U.S.-Chile relations. Townley, extradited in 1978, confessed to orchestrating the attack under DINA chief Manuel Contreras’s orders, implicating Pinochet. He received a 10-year sentence, serving 62 months, and entered U.S. witness protection. Contreras and DINA officer Pedro Espinoza Bravo were indicted but not extradited by Pinochet. In 2015, Chile’s Supreme Court convicted Contreras, Espinoza, and others, with sentences up to 20 years, though Pinochet’s 1998 immunity shielded him until his death in 2006.