South America

Introduction On the evening of September 14, 2000, Peruvian cable TV station Canal N broadcast a video of Peruvian intelligence chief Vladimiro Montesinos apparently giving a bribe of $15,000 to opposition congressman Alberto Kouri for his defection to President Alberto Fujimori's Peru 2000 Party. The video, leaked to the Peruvian opposition party FIM (Independent Moralising Front) by sources unknown, was the first to become public of thousands that had been taped by Montesinos.

Newly declassified documents detail the Nixon administration's broad-gauged efforts to prevent a victory by the leftist “Frente Amplio” in the Uruguayan presidential elections of 1971. The documents show that Nixon was aware of – and may in fact have been complicit in – Brazilian efforts to influence the election results.

Summary and Findings Over the past 15 years, Congress has insisted that U.S. security assistance for Colombia be restricted to combating the drug trade rather than fighting the long-standing civil war, in large part because of human rights concerns. Now, the Bush administration is pressing to lift those restrictions and allow all past, present and future aid to be used in operations against guerrilla forces. But recently declassified U.S. documents show that despite the legal limits and repeated public assurances by government officials, U.S.

On November 21, 2000, the Peruvian Congress voted to remove Alberto Fujimori as president, declaring him morally unfit for office and rejecting his resignation letter sent from Japan—where he had fled to avoid arrest. This was the culminating point of a broad corruption scandal involving bribery of opposition politicians, military officials, the media and others by Fujimori’s advisor Vladimiro Montesinos.

Washington, D.C., January 22, 2002 – The National Security Archive today published on the World Wide Web forty-one declassified U.S. government documents detailing human rights atrocities over the past 20 years in Peru. They range in date from February 1983 until April 1994, recording a progression of events through three Peruvian regimes (Presidents Fernando Belaunde, Alan Garcia, and Alberto Fujimori) while highlighting key human rights violations committed by government security forces and Peruvian insurgents.

Washington, D.C., April 23, 2001 – On Friday, April 20, 2001, a Peruvian Air Force jet, acting on intelligence supplied by a U.S. intelligence plane, shot down a civilian aircraft that was mistakenly suspected of being part of a drug trafficking operation. An American missionary and her infant daughter were killed in a hail of gunfire, and the Bush administration immediately suspended all U.S. drug interdiction flights over Peru.

On March 6, 2001, The New York Times reported the existence of a recently declassified State Department document revealing that the United States facilitated communications among South American intelligence chiefs who were working together to eliminate left-wing opposition groups in their countries as part of a covert program known as Operation Condor. The document, a 1978 cable from Robert E. White, the U.S. ambassador to Paraguay, was discovered by Professor J. Patrice McSherry of Long Island University, who has published several articles on Condor.

Update May 10, 2001: The National Security Archive recently received responses to FOIA requests we sent out earlier this year on Vladimiro Montesinos. These new documents focus on Montesinos' early career and links with the United States in the 1970s. These documents deal with the unauthorized trip to the United States that Montesinos made in September 1976 and his later arrest, detention and cashiering from the army in 1977.

Washington D.C.: The National Security Archive today hailed the release of more than 16,000 secret U.S. records on the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and Washington’s role in the violent overthrow of the Allende government and the advent of the military regime to power. The release, totaling over 50,000 pages of State Department, CIA, White House, Defense and Justice Department records, represents the fourth and final “tranche” of the Clinton Administration’s special Chile Declassification Project.

Washington D.C.: Under pressure from the Clinton White House and human rights groups, the CIA has agreed to release more than 700 documents on covert operations in Chile that the Directorate of Operations had refused to declassify last August, according to the non-profit foreign policy center, the National Security Archive. The CIA documents have already been turned over to the Department of State for final processing and are slated to be publicly released on November 13.