Mexico and Central America

Washington, D.C., September 26, 2025 - The eleventh anniversary of the enforced disappearance of 43 Mexican students from the Ayotzinapa college brings a grim reckoning. To date, no one has been held accountable for the tragic “night of Iguala” that exploded on September 26, 2014. No mass graves have been located, no remains identified since the bone fragments of two boys found in 2021. Tomás Zerón, the Mexican official accused of orchestrating the cover-up that destroyed the early investigation, remains a fugitive protected by Israel.

Washington, D.C., 4 de septiembre de 2025 - Hace veinte años, un grupo de investigadores de derechos humanos en Guatemala se topó con un enorme archivo que contenía millones de registros históricos pertenecientes a la antigua y brutal fuerza policíaca nacional del país.

Washington, D.C., August 20, 2025 - Twenty years ago, a group of human rights investigators in Guatemala stumbled upon an enormous archive containing millions of historical records belonging to the country’s brutal former national police force.

Washington, D.C., September 3, 2025 - Covert CIA surveillance of a Soviet agent under diplomatic cover in Mexico City in 1968 led to the acquisition of intelligence on the “entire clandestine leadership” of the Colombian Communist Party and the nascent FARC insurgent group, according to declassified records from the John F. Kennedy assassination papers released earlier this year.

Washington, D.C., May 19, 2025 – Mexico welcomed CIA espionage activities in Mexico during the Cold War and even initiated some of them, according to recently declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive.

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Washington, D.C., February 3, 2025 - Continued U.S. control of the Panama Canal “looks like pure colonialism,” Henry Kissinger advised President Gerald Ford during a National Security Council meeting in May 1975, 50 years ago. “Internationally, failure to conclude a treaty is going to get us into a cause celebre, with harassment, demonstrations, bombing of embassies,” Kissinger warned, according to a declassified memorandum of conversation posted today by the National Security Archive.

Washington, D.C., December 20, 2024—Half a century ago, Mexico was convulsed by state violence and social upheaval. The year 1974 witnessed some of the most emblematic human rights abuses to occur during the country’s long-running Dirty War: the forced disappearance of community activist Rosendo Radilla Pacheco, the killing of revolutionary guerrilla leader Lucio Cabañas, and the Mexican military’s use of “death flights” to eliminate suspected subversives by throwing their bodies from planes into the Pacific Ocean.

Washington, D.C., September 26, 2024 - On the 10th anniversary of the forced disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Iguala, Mexico, the National Security Archive posts a keynote speech given by Senior Analyst Kate Doyle at an event organized by University College London to commemorate the tragedy and to spotlight ongoing impunity for state actors involved in the crime and the cover-up.

Mexico City, Mexico, August 19, 2024 - From 1965 to 1990, the Mexican State was responsible for “systematic and widespread” human rights abuses “against broad sectors of the population,” according to the recently published report of a truth commission on Mexico’s dirty war.