South America

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Washington D.C. May 7, 2025 – On November 29, 2011, a Chilean judge stunned the world by indicting a retired U.S. Navy captain as an accomplice to the executions of two U.S. citizens in the days following the violent U.S.-backed military coup in Chile in September 1973. The judge, Jorge Zepeda, charged that the former head of the U.S.

Washington, D.C., December 6, 2024 - Yesterday, Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced that he has asked the United States to expedite the declassification of archival records on the 1985 Palace of Justice case.

Washington, D.C., November 26, 2024 - U.S. officials had an “unusual” degree of concern about the “potential ecological and social impacts” of the Camisea natural gas pipeline in Peru, according to declassified documents published today by the National Security Archive. The new Electronic Briefing Book consists of records on the initial stages of U.S. government financing for the massive and controversial international development project that first began production 20 years ago in 2004.

Washington, D.C., October 1, 2024 - On the 50th anniversary of the Pinochet regime’s first act of international terrorism, the National Security Archive is posting a compilation of documents, including CIA intelligence reports and a judicial confession of the Chilean secret police operative, Michael Townley, who constructed, placed, and detonated the car bomb that killed Chilean General Carlos Prats and his wife Sofía Cuthbert in Buenos Aires on September 30, 1974.

Washington, D.C., September 9, 2024 – Fifty years ago, as the New York Times prepared to break a major exposé on CIA covert operations in Chile, the architect of those operations, Henry Kissinger, misled President Gerald Ford about clandestine U.S. efforts to undermine the elected government of Socialist Party leader Salvador Allende, documents posted today by the National Security Archive show.

Washington, D.C., June 21, 2024 – On Wednesday, a Colombian court condemned former Colombian Army Gen. Iván Ramírez Quintero to 31 years in prison for the death of Irma Franco, a member of the M-19 militant group who was tortured and killed by a Colombian Army intelligence unit under his command in the aftermath of the November 1985 Palace of Justice assault.

Washington, D.C., June 18, 2024 - On June 18, 1974, the official registry of the Chilean military dictatorship published Decree 521 on the “creation of the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA),” the secret police force responsible for some of the regime’s most emblematic human rights crimes.

Washington, D.C., June 10, 2024 – Today, an eight-member jury in West Palm Beach, Florida, found Chiquita Brands International liable for funding a violent Colombian paramilitary organization, the United Self-defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), that was responsible for major human rights atrocities during the 1990s and 2000s.

Washington, D.C., April 15, 2024 – A highly sensitive blacklist of allegedly corrupt Colombian officials assembled by the U.S. government and presented to Colombian President Alfonso López Michelsen in July 1977 as a way of gaining leverage over Colombian drug policy is the focus of a new Electronic Briefing Book published today by the National Security Archive.