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., July 29, 2025 - In a historic decision, Alvaro Uribe Velez yesterday became the first former president of Colombia to be found guilty of a crime, a landmark ruling that could clear the way for him to be prosecuted for more serious violations.
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.
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., 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., 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 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.