Human Rights and Genocide

Washington D.C., September 23, 2016 – A CIA special intelligence assessment in 1987 concluded that Chilean General Augusto Pinochet ordered an “act of state terrorism” on the streets of Washington, D.C., that took the lives of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier, and his 25-year-old colleague, Ronni Moffitt, forty years ago this week. “A review of our files on the Letelier assassination,” the CIA reported, “has provided what we regard as convincing evidence that President Pinochet personally ordered his intelligence chief to carry out the murder.”  The assessment added that Pinochet later “decided to stonewall on the case to hide his involvement and, ultimately, to protect his hold on the presidency.”

Washington, D.C., August 11, 2016 – In September 1980, the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires transmitted a detailed six-page cable, entitled “The Tactic of Disappearance,” to the State Department. Although the Argentine military regime had already “won the ‘dirty war,’” the cable stated, the military would not cease using “disappearance” as its preferred form of repression. “This unwillingness does not reflect simple bloody-mindedness by unthinking military men,” the Embassy reported in its comprehensive effort to explain the institutional mindset behind this horrific atrocity.

Washington D.C., May 27, 2016 - As a federal tribunal in Buenos Aires announced guilty verdicts in the historic prosecution of eighteen Argentine military officers for participating in the coordinated, cross-border system of repression known as “Operation Condor,” the National Security Archive today hailed the ruling as a “major milestone for the principle of human rights and the pursuit of accountability for human rights violators.” 

Washington D.C., May 12, 2016 – The legendary Moscow Helsinki Group celebrates its 40^th anniversary today, marking four decades since the day in 1976 when dissident physicist Yuri Orlov gathered a small group of activists in the apartment of academician Andrei Sakharov to establish what is now the oldest functioning human rights organization in Russia.

Washington, March 23, 2016 – Reinforcing the Obama administration’s planned “comprehensive effort to declassify” historical records on Argentina’s dirty war, the National Security Archive today posted examples of the kinds of materials in U.S. government files that would most likely enhance public understanding of that troubled period in Latin American history.  The posted documents, relating not just to regional developments but to official U.S.

Washington, March 18, 2016 – As President Obama prepares to go to Argentina next week on the 40^th anniversary of the military coup, the National Security Archive hailed his decision to declassify hundreds of still secret CIA and Defense Department records on the repression during the military dictatorship.