Human Rights and Genocide

Agustin Edwards: A Declassified Obituary

Washington, D.C., April 25, 2017 – Media mogul Agustin Edwards Eastman, who was widely regarded as the Rupert Murdoch of Chile, died on April 24, at age 89, leaving a legacy of close collaboration with Henry Kissinger and the CIA in instigating and supporting the September 11, 1973, military coup.  Edwards was the only Chilean—civilian or military—known to meet face-to-face with CIA Director Richard Helms in September 1970 in connection with plans to instigate regime change against Socialist leader Salvador Allende, who had just been elected president.

The New Chiquita Papers: Secret Testimony and Internal Records Identify Banana Executives who Bankrolled Terror in Colombia

Washington, D.C., April 24, 2017 - Ten years ago, Chiquita Brands International became the first U.S.-based corporation convicted of violating a U.S. law against funding an international terrorist group—the paramilitary United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC). But punishment for the crime was reserved only for the corporate entity, while the names of the individual company officials who engineered the payments have since remained hidden behind a wall of impunity.

Creative Justice: Behind the battle to make U.S. courtrooms sites of accountability for Latin American human rights atrocities

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This posting initially appeared in Volume 49 of NACLA Report on the Americas.  Poet, musician, theater director, teacher, and activist, Víctor Jara was the creative heart of the movement in Chile seeking social change under President Salvador Allende, and an early victim of Augusto Pinochet’s terror regime. Jara was 40 years old when he died […]

Operation Condor: Condemned to Life!

Washington D.C., January 17, 2017 –  A tribunal in Rome, Italy, today sentenced two former heads of state and two ex-chiefs of security forces from Bolivia and Peru, and a former Uruguayan foreign minister to life imprisonment for their  involvement in the coordinated, cross-border system of repression known as “Operation Condor.”  The National Security Archive, which provided testimony and dozens of declassified documents

Dos Erres Arrest, FBI Drastically Reduces Number of Pages for “Complex” Request Threshold, and More: FRINFORMSUM: 1/12/2017

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Dos Erres Arrest in Maryland Federal agents arrested 54-year-old Jose Mardoqueo Ortiz Morales in Maryland last week for suspected involvement in the Guatemalan Special Forces brutal murder of more than 250 men, women and children 1982 – known as the Dos Erres massacre, which was part of the Guatemalan military’s “scorched earth campaign” carried out […]

25 Years Later, US Evidence on Caloto Massacre Still Under Wraps

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Today, Colombians mark 25 years of impunity for members of the police implicated in the December 16, 1991, killing of 20 members of the Colombian Nasa-Paez indigenous group in the Caloto, Cauca, massacre. With Colombia now poised to enter a long period of transitional justice, cases like Caloto are emblematic of how Colombian courts have largely failed to […]

Operation Condor: Officials of Amnesty International Targeted for 'Liquidation'

Washington D.C., December 14, 2016 - Operation Condor, the trans-border, multinational effort by Southern Cone secret police services to track down and “liquidate” opponents of their regimes in the 1970s, targeted officials of Amnesty International as well as other human rights groups, and planned overseas missions in Paris and London, according to a comprehensive CIA report on Condor operations just released by the Obama administration. “The basic mission of Condor teams to be sent overseas,” according to the CIA, was “to liquidate top-level terrorist leaders.

New Identification of Guatemala’s Disappeared

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The Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation (FAFG) has confirmed the identification of one of the victims associated with the notorious “Death Squad Diary,” or Diario Militar, a Guatemalan military document of the disappeared made public in 1999 by the National Security Archive. FAFG unearthed Juan Ramiro Estuardo Orozco López’s remains during its exhumation of ossuaries containing […]

Bombing of Cuban Jetliner 40 Years Later

Washington D.C., October 6, 2016 - On the 40th anniversary of the mid-air terrorist bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner over the Caribbean, the National Security Archive today called on the Obama Administration to declassify all remaining intelligence records on Luis Posada Carriles to shed light on his activities, provide historical evidence for his victims, and offer a gesture of declassified diplomacy towards Cuba.