Political Crimes and Abuse of Power

Washington, D.C., 21 August 2002 - State Department documents released yesterday on Argentina's dirty war (1976-83) show that the Argentine military believed it had U.S. approval for its all-out assault on the left in the name of fighting terrorism. The U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires complained to Washington that the Argentine officers were "euphoric" over signals from high-ranking U.S. officials including then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The Embassy reported to Washington that after Mr.

Washington, D.C., 21 August 2002 - State Department documents released yesterday on Argentina's dirty war (1976-83) show that the Argentine military believed it had U.S. approval for its all-out assault on the left in the name of fighting terrorism. The U.S. Embassy in Buenos Aires complained to Washington that the Argentine officers were "euphoric" over signals from high-ranking U.S. officials including then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

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.

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., June 5, 2001 – Thirty years ago this month, President Nixon picked up his Sunday New York Times on June 13, 1971 to see the wedding picture of his daughter Tricia and himself in the Rose Garden, leading the left-hand side of the front page.  Next to that picture, on the right, was the headline over Neil Sheehan's first story on the Pentagon Papers, "Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement."  Nixon did not read the story (so he says on tape in his 12:18 p.m. phone call with Alexander Haig).

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.

After twenty-seven years of withholding details about covert activities following the 1973 military coup in Chile, the CIA released a report yesterday acknowledging its close relations with General Augusto Pinochet’s violent regime. The report, “CIA Activities in Chile,” revealed for the first time that the head of the Chile’s feared secret police, DINA, was a paid CIA asset in 1975, and that CIA contacts continued with him long after he dispatched his agents to Washington D.C.

Introduction In July 1994, the Guatemalan government and the URNG signed the Human Rights Accord establishing the Historical Clarification Commission. That same month, the National Security Archive began work on a Guatemala Documentation Project, an effort to obtain the release of secret U.S. files on Guatemala. The project's first objective was to support the human rights investigations of the Clarification Commission. We believed that the commission would benefit from access to declassified U.S.

On March 17, 2000, Long Island University named The National Security Archive as winner of a Special George Polk Award for 1999 "for serving as an essential journalistic resource and for expanding access to previously classified documents" including, over the past year: