Chilean-American muralist Francisco Letelier comes by his passion for human rights honestly. Son of the prominent and dominant activist against Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Francisco was just 17 years old and a junior at Bethesda’s Walt Whitman high school when his father was blown up by a car bomb. Chile’s Secret Police ordered the 1976 assasination of Orlando Letelier, the longtime colleague of democratically-elected President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown in a coup led by General Pinochet. Living in Washington, DC, where many top Chilean emigres fled Pinochet’s wrath, Orlando Letelier helped lead the resistance. A brilliant economist, foreign minister, defense minister, ambassador and activist, Letelier had earlier suffered a year of torture in Pinochet’s notorious Dawson Island concentration camp until the US and others pressured for his release. A year after the bombing, his son Francisco Letelier joined other artists to paint a mural in Rock Creek Park. The years that followed were filled with pursuing changes against Pinochet, publicly sharing the danger of the man who ordered his father’s killing, challenging authoritarianism everywhere. As a muralist painting private and public spaces across the country and around the world, Letelier universalizes struggle against autocracy, the fight for justice. His work has encompassed portraits of his father along with other other freedom fighters, from local leaders to Martin Luther King, Jr. More recent pieces relate to the very essence of today’s world: youth chafing against aggressive authority. Letelier’s difficult subjects are beautified by his fascination with natural imagery. Delicate Queen Anne’s Lace flowers and fireflies superimposed over a work, the bottom of a challenging scene brightened with red poppies and an ear of corn beg the question, why? See Flower Power, for example. It shows students protesting during the 2021 uprising in Chile, a time when the president was diffident to public health urgencies and refused to believe that people needed protection from Covid-19. The people took to the streets, blaming bad governance for allowing many helpless thousands to die from the virus. Government response was quick on this however, with teargas, beating gear, and lethal weapons. Here, Letelier captures the courageous “front line of youth” that stepped forward “to protect and defend other marchers and protesters.” An obvious play on the 1960s Flower Power anti-war peace movement in the US, the painting’s title and its accompanying botanicals give a sense of renewal. In Herbarium, the artist tells us, “protestors carry flags with images of seeding plants, they walk through a landscape that contains clouds of tear gas and buildings lost in smoke. This painting is a scene at Columbia University, land of the Lenni-Lenape and Wappinger people, the indigenous residents of Manahata (“island of hills” in the Algonquian language). Here, Letelier takes us beyond a simple protest, by artfully overlapping and sometimes combining peoples, their sustenance and their challenges. .Part of the New York Botanical Garden, Columbia’s Steere Herbarium contains a historic collection of the seeds and plants used by original Native Americans; it also houses the largest collection of herbs in the Western Hemisphere. Letelier says that the corn, squash, and beans depicted here along with the cattail, are all used widely by native people of the region. He also paints in thistle, he says, because it's “an important and historic food source for Palestinians, Israeli authorities have controlled the harvest of the plant for generations, but its collection and use is an important part of tradition, resistance, and survival.” “So much attention has been paid to plants, yet students who support, Palestinian culture, believe in peace and an end to the war in Gaza have not been afforded the care given to the items in Columbia’s collection.” Still, Flower Power. Those poppies allude to the many lives lost in Gaza.