Orlando Letelier was a Chilean patriot. Today, many Americans—and probably many Nation readers—have problems with the very notion of patriotism. How can progressives be proud of this country’s repeated military interventions, endless wars, police brutality, gross racial inequity, overflowing prisons, vast income disparities, or the 30,000-plus people killed by guns in a single year? The best most can do is to feel patriotism for a United States that could be, that was meant to be—the one we fight for.
Orlando also possessed the characteristics of the romantic hero, a genre now extinct, or nearly. Not movie-star handsome, but dashing and charismatic nonetheless. He had been through arrest, a series of concentration camps, severe torture, prison on Dawson Island, and finally exile from his beloved country—and yet he retained his enthusiasm,…