I just received an invitation to a fete honoring Ronni Karen Moffitt and I had to look up the name because I hadn’t thought about the Letelier assignation for a very long time, my investigations into the history of the United States intrusions into Latin America, almost always for the purpose of making sure that the wealthy in those country could continue to dominate over the piss poor majorities of people who made doing business in that part of the country really good for truly bad American corporations. Ronni Moffitt and her husband were killed when Letelier, an economist for the Chilean state under Salvador Allende. He fled his country after Allende, the democratically elected leader of Chile was assigned himself with aid from the American government which, for the sake of American business, preferred the brutal dictator Pinochet over a socialist such as Allende.
The force of America backing the very rich in Chile and the ravaging of Chile by American corporations was repeated over and over again and throughout the world. The American government supporting the very rich against the welfare of the bulk of the American people, the Northern American people, is how things have been operating for a long period of time. The history of the Dulles brothers, one of whom has an airport in Texas named after him for his work to make the world safe for exploitation should have been a cautionary tale for those concerned with how we would be allowed to live through the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
But that part of our history, our post WWII behavior in the countries we labeled “third world,” is a reflection of what we were becoming as a nation and what this nation was forcing the world to become, oligarchical to the point that a very few own most of the wealth in the world and good numbers of people suffer greatly for their poverty and powerlessness.
Few give a damn anymore about Ronni Karen Moffitt and Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar or even care to know that they were murdered on the streets of the capital of our democracy, in Washington D.C. by Chilean agents who were a part of a operation serving the dictator Pinochet called Operation Condor and aided by agents of the United States of America.
As I have said before, what we see now and so many of those I know despise is but a symptom of a reality long ignored. I haven’t read Naomi Klein’s new book about how we are living now and why, but I am about to with one of her other books, The Shock Doctrine, that deserves a careful reading by all who really give a shit about what we need to do to create a just and honest society.
