Fifty years ago Monday in Washington, Virgilio Paz Romero, a militant young refugee from communist Cuba, allegedly activated a remote control that detonated a bomb placed under the driver’s seat of another man’s car. As the vehicle rounded Sheridan Circle on Embassy Row, the blast killed two of the three passengers inside.
The slain target was Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States who had also found refuge here from his country’s dictatorship. The CIA assessed more than a decade later that the assassination had been ordered by Chile’s military president, Augusto Pinochet.
Until Sept. 11, 2001, it was the worst foreign-sponsored terrorist attack ever to occur in the U.S. capital.
Paz eventually served a relatively brief prison sentence as part of the assassination plot. For most of the past half-century, he has been a free man living in Florida, a hero of sorts to the many in the aging anti-Castro generation.
But in a twist of fate and American politics, Paz last year came to the attention of the Trump administration and its determination to deport noncitizen immigrants convicted of felonies.
Since January, Paz has been held in Miami’s Krome immigrant detention center, just another one of the many foreigners on their way to removal. A federal judge in Florida on Aug. 28 denied his petition for release after the administration said it expected to deport him to a third country in a matter of weeks.
Over years of investigations and declassified documents, much, but not all, of the story of responsibility for the assassination has gradually been revealed.
The anniversary coincides with new documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research center based at George Washington University.
Among them, an FBI document from 2000 details authorization the previous year by Clinton administration Attorney General Janet Reno for a “renewed investigation” of the killings “to determine whether sufficient admissible, credible evidence exists to establish that one or more additional persons, up to and including General Augusto Pinochet, was involved in the homicides.”
Despite the earlier CIA assessment that he authorized the bombing, Pinochet, who left office in 1990 but continued for several years as head of the armed forces and died in 2006, was never indicted in the deaths of Letelier and a colleague, Ronni Moffitt, in Washington. During his reign as Chile’s autocratic president in the 1970s and 1980s, Pinochet — along with like-minded right-wing dictators across southern South America — authorized a coordinated campaign of clandestine killings of perceived political enemies, many exiled in other countries.
Reno’s investigation, conducted by a special team of FBI and Justice Department investigators who spent a month in Chile, examined tens of thousands of pages of documents and collected sworn testimony from dozens of witnesses in Chile and the U.S. — including U.S. senators and Henry Kissinger, whose involvement in facilitating the 1973 Pinochet coup that overthrew elected Marxist President Salvador Allende has been detailed in numerous books and previously declassified documents.
The results of that investigation or any recommendations made by the team regarding a U.S. indictment of Pinochet have not been released. Several officials who were involved in the matter at the Justice Department and FBI under the Clinton and Bush administrations declined to comment or did not respond last week to requests for comment.
“Pinochet never had a judicial reckoning in the Letelier-Moffitt case,” even though “the documents have provided a very good history on his role as the intellectual author of an act of terrorism in Washington,” said Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archive who is still waiting for the release of other long-sought information under the FOIA request.
Among those sent to prison over the plot, Michael Townley, a U.S.-Chilean citizen who played a central role in the assassination, testified against others, served a relatively short term and reportedly went into the witness protection program.
Armando Fernández Larios, a Chilean intelligence agent who slipped into the United States to help plan the assassination, returned to the U.S. in 1987 and confessed to his participation. After five months in prison, according to an account this past summer by the New York Times, U.S. officials helped secure his release. He remained in Florida until last year, when U.S. Immigration and Customs agents arrested him, put him on their “Worst of the Worst” list and prepared to deport him.
Fernández filed a lawsuit, arguing that the U.S. had violated an agreement made when he turned himself in and offered information about the Letelier plot. The government never responded to the suit, and Fernández was released. He is no longer listed as under ICE detention.
Whatever happens now to Virgilio Paz Romero may be among the last chapters in the long-running story.
Paz eluded U.S. law enforcement for 15 years, until the day in 1991 when the assassination story was featured in a 1991 episode of the TV show “America’s Most Wanted.”
Viewers in a Miami suburb quickly notified authorities that a photo of Paz appeared to be a man named Frank Baez, who ran their neighborhood landscaping service. Stopped in his pickup truck on the way to work, Paz surrendered. After pleading guilty to a lesser crime than murder, Paz served seven years of a 12-year-sentence.
Upon release, he was immediately turned over to U.S. immigration services and spent the next three years in detention. But in 2001, with the U.S. having no diplomatic relations with Cuba and no way to deport him, he was let go.
“Looking back, I think it was a grave human error,” Paz said of the assassination in a news conference as he was freed. He attributed his “regrettable” involvement to “my youth.”
Twenty-five years later, despite increasingly tense relations with the Trump administration, Cuba has continued this year to accept deportation flights. But Paz, now in his 70s, has long said he will not return to the country he left as an adolescent under the communist government. In past interviews, he said he never applied for a U.S. passport — a path that until relatively recently was far easier for Cubans than other nationalities — because he always intended to go home.
Now back in immigration detention, Paz petitioned last month for his release on grounds that “there is no significant likelihood of removal in the foreseeable future due to his continued serious medical issues,” according to court documents in the Southern District of Florida that do not specify the nature of those issues.
In his Aug. 28 ruling, Judge Darrin P. Gayles disagreed, saying that Paz had not proved his case. Gayles noted that the ICE removal office said that it was “actively pursuing” Paz’s dispatch to a third country and the State Department was “engaged in ongoing negotiations” to have that country accept him.
The government anticipated, ICE told the judge, that “removal will occur in late August or possibly early September, pending confirmation of flight details.”
Gayles instructed the government to remove him “to a third country within 30 days of this order or release him on appropriate terms of supervision.”
The State Department referred questions about the status of its third-country removal plans for Paz to the Department of Homeland Security. A DHS spokesperson said in an emailed response that “the Trump Administration is utilizing all lawful options to carry out the largest deportation operation in history, just as President Trump promised.”
“If an illegal alien chooses to file a claim in court refusing to go to their home country, we are required by law to find a safe and secure nation for them to go to,” said the spokesperson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under rules set by DHS.
ICE declined to comment on the case other than to refer to its Detainee Locator site, which last week still listed Paz at the Krome facility. Paz’s Miami attorney, Angela Alvero, did not respond to numerous calls asking for comment.
Assuming Paz’s removal is not stopped by a federal appeals court ruling Friday imposing new restrictions on third-country deportations, his departure may overlap with remembrance ceremonies to be held this week at Sheridan Circle, where a small monument marks the spot where Letelier and Moffitt died.
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