Human Rights and Genocide

Bogotá, 28 June 2022 - Today, Colombia’s Truth Commission wraps up three-and-a-half years of work with the launch of its report on the causes and consequences of Colombia’s conflict. The publication of the Commission's findings and recommendations is an important step forward in guaranteeing the rights of victims and of Colombian society to know the truth about what happened, to build a foundation for coexistence among Colombians, and to ensure that such a conflict is never repeated.

Washington, D.C., June 27, 2022 – In a remarkable example of transforming the mundane into high art, poet Mai Der Vang, daughter of Hmong refugees and finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, pored through thousands of pages of declassified documents from the collections of the National Security Archive and other sources to find material for her poems, whose purpose is to record and vivify the trauma experienced by the Hmong people during the Secret War in Laos of the 1960s and 1970s.

Friday, 1 April 2022, Mexico City—International experts investigating the disappearance of 43 Mexican college students have uncovered astonishing new evidence about the case in secret archives of the Mexican military, according to a report released Monday.

Ayotzinapa Investigations is a special page dedicated to the work of the National Security Archive and others in documenting and seeking justice for the 43 disappeared students of the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College. The National Security Archive advocates for the declassification of documentary evidence in fighting impunity amidst the unprecedented crisis of forced disappearances in Mexico. 

Washington, D.C., March 3, 2022 – While Russian troops invaded Ukraine this week, the Russian Supreme Court turned down the appeal by the legendary human rights group Memorial against the “liquidation” orders intended by the authorities in December 2021 to put the society out of business, after more than 30 years’ work documenting the victims and the previously secret history of Soviet repression.

Washington, DC, January 28, 2022 – National Security Archive continues the "After Ayotzinapa" project by publishing today the José Torero Cullen interview. 

Washington, DC, January 21, 2022 – John Gibler is a journalist, author, and activist who writes eloquently and prolifically about Mexico. His collection of testimonies from Ayotzinapa students who survived the tragedy of September 26, 2014 – which he published as a book, I Couldn’t Even Imagine That They Would Kill Us: An Oral History of the Attacks Against the Students of Ayotzinapa (City Lights, 2017) – became and remains the most definitive account of those terrible events from the young men who lived through them.

Washington, D.C., January 10, 2022—On Saturday, January 15, a new podcast exploring the shocking case of 43 Mexican students disappeared by security forces in 2014 will launch on radio stations around the United States and on podcast platforms. The three-part serial is the result of a two-year collaboration between the National Security Archive and Reveal News from the Center for Investigative Reporting.

Washington, D.C., October 4, 2021 – Declassified State Department and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports that “acknowledge the long-standing relationship between [Colombian] state security forces and the paramilitaries” are among the key evidence behind a historic $12-million judgment against a former Colombian paramilitary leader last week in U.S. federal court in Miami.

Washington D.C., September 22, 2021 - In an effort to advance a novel foreign policy tool known as “Declassification Diplomacy,” the National Security Archive today posted key administrative papers on the Argentina Declassification Project (ADP), begun by President Barack Obama and completed during the Trump administration.