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A Modicum of Justice for Ronni Karpen Moffitt

Fifty years after Pinochet’s henchmen assassinated her and Orlando Letelier, finally a judicial reckoning.

At Sheridan Circle on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, DC, a small monument marks the spot where former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his young colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt were killed by a car bomb planted by agen ts of the Chilean secret police on the morning of September 21, 1976. The monument is inscribed with the words “Justice – Peace – Dignity”; every year dozens of friends and colleagues gather at the circle to honor the lives of the two extraordinary people whose conscientious pursuit of those goals were cut short by an act of international terrorism.

This September, the annual gathering will carry a special meaning—and not only because it is the 50th anniversary of the assassination. It comes after a Chilean judge has called new attention to the case of Ronni Karpen Moffitt, finalizing a 15-year judicial effort to bring long-overdue accountability for her death as a victim of the Pinochet regime’s ruthless repression, rather than as collateral damage in the regime’s effort to eliminate its leading international critic, Orlando Letelier. Fifty years after she was murdered, there is finally a degree of justice for Ronni Moffitt, and a significant step toward closure in the infamous Letelier-Moffitt case.

The Long Arc of Justice

Ronni Susan Karpen Moffitt was just 25 years old when a piece of shrapnel from the car bomb cut through her neck, as she and her husband, Michael, were commuting to work at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) with Orlando Letelier that fall morning 50 years ago. A Jersey girl—she was the daughter of Murray and Hilda Karpen, proud owners of Karpen’s Delicatessen in Passaic, where I once enjoyed a delicious knish—she had just been promoted to a fundraising position at IPS where she worked closely with cofounders Marcus Raskin and Richard Barnet. “Everyone loved Ronni, who used to babysit for me and my siblings,” Representative Jamie Raskin fondly remembered during a special ceremony at Sheridan Circle in 2023.

“My Aunt Ronni was music,” as her niece Rebecca Karpen recalled the highlights of her short life in an interview with The Nation. “She wanted to create an after-school music program for low-income kids of color. She got married in the backyard of her parents’ home in Passaic, New Jersey, where she walked down the aisle in a flower crown and posed inside the family deli food truck. She was kind, but not weak. She was just confident of her worth and unwilling to shrink herself to conform to outdated stereotypes of women’s roles in the workplace. I’ve been told that she didn’t take anyone’s shit!”

“Ronni lost her life because the dictatorship decided to exterminate those it defined as enemies,” notes Dr. Elizabeth Lira, who directs the Human Rights Center of the Alberto Hurtado University in Santiago, Chile. Indeed, Ronni was not the target of the assassination plot; her outspoken Chilean colleague Orlando Letelier was. The FBI investigation, codenamed........

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