Francisco Letelier
– Artist’s Website –
After his father was killed in a 1976 terrorist attack in Washington, D.C., Francisco Letelier turned to murals as a tool for building solidarity and reducing economic, political, and cultural divides. On September 21, 1976, agents of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet carried out a brutal assassination in the heart of the U.S. capital. Orlando Letelier, a vocal Pinochet critic and leading thinker on global economic inequality, was killed in the attack, along with Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a 25-year-old American colleague of Letelier’s at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Forty years later, this tragic event continues to stoke the flames of activism for social and economic justice around the world. One of the people who picked up the torch is Orlando’s son Francisco Letelier.
After his father’s murder, Francisco joined with other Chilean exiles to paint a mural in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park to create a sense of unity and hope in the face of Pinochet’s reign of terror. The artists called themselves the Brigada Orlando Letelier.
Eventually, they would paint Chilean solidarity murals in 11 cities involving thousands of participants and Francisco Letelier would devote his life to using art as a tool for narrowing political, economic, and cultural divides.
