Human Rights and Genocide

Washington, D.C., August 28, 2019 – The U.S. government was aware for months that the Indonesian military had created, and was arming and directing paramilitary militias in East Timor in the leadup to the territory’s historic August 30, 1999, independence referendum, according to recently declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive based at The George Washington University.  The documents provide an unprecedented window into U.S.

Today the National Security Archive publishes a special exhibit on the 30th anniversary of the massacre at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, 4 June 1989.  To mark an event that decisively shaped contemporary China, the National Security Archive is republishing three documentary E-books that appeared on previous anniversaries, in 1999, 2001, and 2014.  The declassified documents demonstrate that U.S.

Washington, D.C., May 30, 2019 – The National Security Archive joins our international and Guatemalan colleagues in calling for the protection of the Historical Archive of the National Police (AHPN) of Guatemala, which faces new threats to its independence and to public access to its holdings.

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.

Washington, D.C., December 10, 2018 – The National Security Archive mourns the passing of Lyudmila Mikhailovna Alexeyeva, our dear friend, colleague and inspiration for all our work documenting human rights abuses globally. She passed away on December 8 at the age of 91.

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.

Washington D.C., October 5, 2018 – On the 30^th anniversary of the historic plebiscite in Chile, the National Security Archive today posted key documents revealing General Augusto Pinochet’s secret plans to “use violence and terror” to annul the October 5, 1988, referendum and sustain his dictatorship in power.  The Pinochet plot was thwarted when key officials of his own regime revealed it to U.S.