Mexico and Central America

Washington, D.C., February 3, 2025 - Continued U.S. control of the Panama Canal “looks like pure colonialism,” Henry Kissinger advised President Gerald Ford during a National Security Council meeting in May 1975, 50 years ago. “Internationally, failure to conclude a treaty is going to get us into a cause celebre, with harassment, demonstrations, bombing of embassies,” Kissinger warned, according to a declassified memorandum of conversation posted today by the National Security Archive.

Washington, D.C., December 20, 2024—Half a century ago, Mexico was convulsed by state violence and social upheaval. The year 1974 witnessed some of the most emblematic human rights abuses to occur during the country’s long-running Dirty War: the forced disappearance of community activist Rosendo Radilla Pacheco, the killing of revolutionary guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas, and the Mexican military’s use of “death flights” to eliminate suspected subversives by throwing their bodies from planes into the Pacific Ocean.

Washington, D.C., September 26, 2024 - On the 10th anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Iguala, Mexico, the National Security Archive posts a keynote speech given by Senior Analyst Kate Doyle at an event organized by University College London to commemorate the tragedy and to spotlight ongoing impunity for state actors involved in the crime and the cover-up.

Mexico City, Mexico, August 19, 2024 - From 1965 to 1990, the Mexican State was responsible for “systematic and widespread” human rights abuses “against broad sectors of the population,” according to the recently published report of a truth commission on Mexico’s dirty war.

Washington, D.C., September 26, 2023 - Nine years ago today, 43 Mexican college students were violently abducted and disappeared by police and drug traffickers in the town of Iguala, Guerrero. As the families of the missing boys mark another wrenching anniversary and the investigation in Mexico grinds on, the National Security Archive takes a look at the declassified record on Ayotzinapa in the United States and asks, Why has the U.S. government released so little information about this case?

Washington, D.C., April 14, 2023 - Tomás Zerón’s rehabilitation tour has begun.

Washington, D.C., April 3, 2023 - Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) today announced that the National Security Archive and its partner, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, are winners of a 2022 IRE Award for “Longform Journalism in Audio” for producing the After Ayotzinapa podcast.

In selecting After Ayotzinapa for the award, IRE judges called it “a jaw-dropping chronicle of a horrendous crime and the lengths that Mexican authorities went to cover it up.”

Washington, D.C., March 10, 2023 - Years before 43 young men from the Ayotzinapa teachers’ college were attacked and forcibly disappeared in Iguala, Guerrero, the Mexican military had the school under surveillance and considered its students to be subversives, according to internal communications and documents from the Mexican armed forces published today by the National Security Archive.

Washington, D.C., January 24, 2023 - On Friday, January 20, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights set a new legal precedent for access to human rights information when it ordered the government of Bolivia to open historical military archives concerning a case of assassination and forced disappearance. The sentence in Flores Bedregal v.