The Most Incongruous Latin American History Lesson of the Year

While cruising around on the internets today, I checked out what's been going on recently in professional wrestling. Apparently, in what is unquestionably a new storyline (were it real news, you could find it on websites that host, well, real news), owner/CEO/heel Vince McMahon was killed last night in a car bomb. This is, as I said, obviously not true, and is being used to push some new storyline in the near future.

However, what's particularly odd about this story is the history they actually include. Towards the bottom of the story, there is the following paragraph: "This incident [the "carbombing"] is the first of its kind in the U.S. since the assassination of political figure Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. in 1976. Sources say that given the nature of the apparent car bombing, under law federal authorities will be called in for a more thorough investigation that would supersede local Pennsylvania authorities."

To my knowledge, that's actually completely true (if we accept the silliness of the McMahon carbombing). Orlando Letelier died in Washington, D.C. in 1976 when Augusto Pinochet's government had Letelier (who was a vocal critic of Pinochet) blown up, along with his assistant, Ronni Moffitt (her husband was severely wounded but survived).

I could chastise WWE for being offensive in tying together a political victim of an authoritarian state and Vince McMahon, but offensiveness is nothing new for WWE. So instead, I'll actually begrudgingly congratulate them. While McMahon will pop up again soon, the WWE actually not only brought in an actual history lesson to their wrestling audience (that of Letelier); they even got the basic fact of the car-bombing right.