South America

Washington, D.C., August 31, 2020 – Under house arrest in a case linking him to a feared paramilitary bloc, former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, perhaps the most important political figure in Colombian history, finds his legacy hanging in the balance. Declassified documents published today reveal new details about his suspected links to narcotraffickers and the paramilitary groups who called him “El Viejo.”

Washington D.C., July 21, 2020 – Forty-four years after the Argentine military began disappearing thousands of citizens following the March 24, 1976, coup, human rights investigators have located one of the first clandestine torture sites used by state intelligence operatives. The clandestine center was identified after the declassification of thousands of U.S.

Washington, DC, April 6, 2020 – Cold War concerns about another Communist Cuba in Latin America drove President John F. Kennedy to approve a covert CIA political campaign to rig national elections in British Guiana, then a British colony but soon to be independent, according to declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive.

Washington, D.C., March 10, 2020 - Franklin Allen “Tex” Harris , the former political officer who took charge of reporting on human rights at the U.S. Embassy in Argentina between 1977 and 1979 and was the first official to document the disappearance of thousands of Argentine citizens during the military dictatorship, passed away on February 23, 2020. He was 81 years old.

Washington D.C., February 11, 2020 - The U.S. intelligence community actively monitored for decades the diplomatic and military communications of numerous Latin American nations through encryption machines supplied by a Swiss company that was secretly owned by the CIA and the German intelligence agency, BND, according to reports today by the German public television channel, ZDF and the Washington Post.

Washington D.C., May 30, 2019 – On August 20, 1976, Argentine security personnel dynamited the bodies of thirty people – ten women and twenty men – who had been detained by the Federal Police and executed in the town of Pilar, north of Buenos Aires. The explosion scattered human remains over a wide radius.

Washington D.C., April 12, 2019 – In late May 1976, the secret police chieftains of six Southern Cone military regimes gathered at a clandestine summit in Santiago, Chile, to create a “new unit, which was given the code name ‘Teseo’”—a reference to Theseus, the mythical Greek King of the Athenians and heroic slayer of the Minotaur, among other enemies.

Washington, D.C., December 21, 2018 – Banana executives with Chiquita Brands now the subject of a major criminal investigation in Colombia were instrumental in the development and execution of company policies surrounding secret payments to Colombian guerrilla and paramilitary groups, according to an article and Web posting published today by National Security Archive senior analyst Michael Evans.

November 29, 2018 – The formal launch today in Colombia of the Commission for the Clarification of the Truth, Coexistence and Non-Repetition (Truth Commission) is an important step forward in the country’s effort to consolidate peace, guarantee the rights of victims, and move forward after a long and brutal conflict that took hundreds of thousands of lives.