Michael L. Evans is the Archive’s Editorial Director and the longtime head of the Colombia documentation project. From 2018-2022, Evans was an adviser to Colombia’s Truth Commission and heped its investigators comb through tens of thousands of declassified records on Coombia’s confict. Evans is editor of Colombia and the United States: Political Violence, Narcotics, and Human Rights, 1948-2010, a primary source collection of more than 2,000 declassified documents on political violence and U.S. policy in Colombia and is the author of numerous Archive Electronic Briefing Books on human rights and narcotics-reated corruption in Colombia, Mexico, and elsewhwere. A key focus of his work has been “The Chiquita Papers,” an unprecedented collection of the company's own records detailing the company’s illegal payments to Colombian terrorist groups. Evans and his colleagues have been pioneers in the use of Mexico’s transparency law to force the release of information about grave violations of human rights. He has written columns for Semana (Colombia), Verdad Abierta (Colombia), Animal Político (Mexico), The Nation, The Miami Herald and other publications. Revelations from his projects have been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post and many other media outlets.
35+ YEARS OF FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACTION