South America

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., April 23, 2001 – On Friday, April 20, 2001, a Peruvian Air Force jet, acting on intelligence supplied by a U.S. intelligence plane, shot down a civilian aircraft that was mistakenly suspected of being part of a drug trafficking operation. An American missionary and her infant daughter were killed in a hail of gunfire, and the Bush administration immediately suspended all U.S. drug interdiction flights over Peru.

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.

Washington D.C.: The National Security Archive today hailed the release of more than 16,000 secret U.S. records on the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and Washington’s role in the violent overthrow of the Allende government and the advent of the military regime to power. The release, totaling over 50,000 pages of State Department, CIA, White House, Defense and Justice Department records, represents the fourth and final “tranche” of the Clinton Administration’s special Chile Declassification Project.

Washington D.C.: Under pressure from the Clinton White House and human rights groups, the CIA has agreed to release more than 700 documents on covert operations in Chile that the Directorate of Operations had refused to declassify last August, according to the non-profit foreign policy center, the National Security Archive. The CIA documents have already been turned over to the Department of State for final processing and are slated to be publicly released on November 13.

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.

Context On February 1st, 1999, the Clinton White House ordered the U.S. national security agencies to “retrieve and review for declassification documents that shed light on human rights abuses, terrorism, and other acts of political violence in Chile” from 1968-1990--a policy initiative taken after the arrest of General Augusto Pinochet in London.

Washington, D.C., June 30, 2000 – On Friday, June 30, 2000, the U.S. government released hundreds of formerly secret CIA, Defense, State, Justice Deparment, and National Security Council records relating to the deaths of Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, both of whom were killed by the Chilean military in the days following the 1973 coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. The murders of Horman and Teruggi were later dramatized in the 1982 film Missing. Documents on another American, Boris Weisfiler, who disappeared in Chile in 1985, were also released.

Washington, D.C., March 14, 2000 – Today's Washington Post features an op-ed on page A17 titled "Hardly a Distinguished Career," written by National Security Archive director Tom Blanton and commenting on the CIA's decision to award the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal to the highest-ranking CIA official fired in a 1995 scandal for failing to inform Congress about the CIA's ties to human rights abuses in Guatemala.

THE DOCUMENTS

Document 1: The Biographic Register, U.S. Department of State, July 1973, p. 402