Chilean court sentences three Pinochet agents for 1976 Washington DC murder of Ronni Moffitt, 50 years on
A Santiago appeals court convicted retired colonels Pedro Espinoza Bravo, José Zara Holger, and Raúl Iturriaga Neumann as co-authors of the murder of American Ronni Moffitt, killed by a DINA car bomb on September 21, 1976 alongside former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier; Letelier's killers were sentenced in 1995 but Moffitt's murder remained unprosecuted until now
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Summary
A Chilean appeals court sentenced three retired colonels from Pinochet's secret police, DINA, to 15 years in prison on June 29, 2026, for the murder of American Ronni Moffitt in Washington, D.C., fifty years earlier. Moffitt, 25, was killed on September 21, 1976, when a remote-controlled bomb destroyed the car carrying former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier near Sheridan Circle. Letelier, the primary target, was also killed. The convicted men, Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, José Octavio Zara Holger, and Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann, were found guilty as direct co-authors of aggravated homicide. Letelier's immediate killers were sentenced in 1995; Moffitt's murder had remained a symbol of unpunished state terrorism for three decades since.
Why it matters
The conviction closes the last major accountability gap from what Chilean courts class as a state terrorism operation conducted on US soil. It establishes Chilean judicial jurisdiction over DINA crimes against non-Chilean citizens in third countries and signals that Operation Condor impunity, which protected transnational Pinochet-era killings for decades, is no longer absolute.