Long before September 21, 1976, far from home in Washington, DC, Orlando Letelier’s wife Isabel had experienced a political transformation. Through law school friends, some from Venezuela during its era of dictatorship from 1948 to 1958, “I got my political education,” Isabel Letelier recently recalled. “It was the first time I had ever really heard about dictatorship and torture, about corporations keeping more than their share, about nationalization of natural resources. Orlando himself was talking about copper belonging to the Chileans. . . . That was an awakening.”

She told Orlando she considered herself on the “Christian left,” but she couldn’t find a party to join.

Letelier remembered his second year of university as his own awakening. “The truth is that, when I was young, politics mattered little to me, even less so socialism.” As he read more and had long discussions with Salvador Allende, then a senator, and others, he grew a social conscience and joined the Socialist Party. Early on in their relationship, he told Isabel that finding out about the extraction of copper, Chile’s primary export, by foreign corporations was “a blow to my heart.”