Since 2012, UWCHR researchers have been working in partnership with Salvadoran human rights defenders to uncover new documentation about atrocities committed in the context of the Salvadoran armed conflict. We began this work at the urging of former political prisoners in El Salvador, who were urgently pressing their government to allow access to its records in the interest of truth, justice, and reparations for wartime abuses; they knew that, given US support for the Salvadoran counterinsurgency, US government archives were also likely to contain relevant information. A dozen years into this work—and over 40 years since the events in question—UWCHR researchers have filed almost 800 FOIA requests of nine different federal agencies, obtaining thousands of pages of documents. And our efforts continue to uncover new information, even from some surprising sources.
In the past year, we’ve gained access to two troves of relevant documents, each of which offers the prospect of important new insights—but also the promise of hours of painstaking labor for the student researchers processing the newly-obtained information.
A dozen years into this work—and over 40 years since the events in question—UWCHR researchers have filed almost 800 FOIA requests of nine different federal agencies, obtaining thousands of pages of documents. And our efforts continue to uncover new information, even from some surprising sources.
First, we’re working to process documents the Defense Intelligence Agency is declassifying as a result of our latest lawsuit. In 2019, we discovered the existence of a previously unknown set of documents collected by the Central America Joint Intelligence Team, a “fusion center” established in 1982 to facilitate the exchange of military intelligence between the US Army’s Southern Command and its allies, including the Salvadoran military. Comprising some 90 cubic feet of records stored in 50 large boxes, this collection was languishing in a storage warehouse in Suitland, Maryland, and slated for destruction in 2023. After multiple fruitless attempts to gain access through FOIA requests, UWCHR brought suit last year under FOIA, aiming to avoid the documents’ destruction and beginning a lengthy process of negotiations to gain access to them. We are now working with the DIA to review indices of each box, identify our highest priorities for declassification, and analyze the records as they come in via monthly installments.
Second, last December we dispatched a UWCHR research team to Buenos Aires in the hopes of uncovering new information in the archives of the Argentine Foreign Ministry. We knew the archive possessed some documents pertaining to the Argentine role in advising counterinsurgency efforts in Central America, because some portion had already been digitized, but the archivists had told us there were other records that remained undigitized—and furthermore, that they were concerned about their preservation in a changing political climate. We were intrigued, but as student researcher Nicole Grabiel describes, we didn’t know what we’d find.
During the 1970s and ‘80s, the government of Argentina provided significant counterinsurgency assistance to El Salvador, partly at the urging of US anticommunists. Among other things, the Argentines trained Salvadorans in urban counterinsurgency, interrogation, and other skills they had honed during their own dirty war against leftists in Argentina; indeed, some of the former political prisoners we have worked with in El Salvador report having been tortured by men who spoke with a distinct Argentine accent.
Declassified documents relaying 1981 communications between the former deputy director of the CIA, Vernon Walters, and Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla. Image credit/ UWCHR
Featured in this article are a couple of relevant US government documents memorializing conversations held in early 1981 between US Ambassador-at-large Vernon Walters, then a former deputy director of the CIA, and Argentine dictator Videla. In these documents, Videla said that Argentina had been worried by what they perceived as the Carter administration’s lack of concern about “communist infiltration” in Central America, but was greatly heartened by the messages they were now receiving from the Reagan administration, and eager to help: “They recognize the United States as the natural leader of the West and wish to help us share the burden of the defense of human freedom,” Walters reports, later waxing eloquent about how impressed he was by Videla: “I believe he is what his mother thinks he is.” The second document is more pithy, concluding, “All we have to do is tell them what to do.”
In Argentina, our research did not yield documents of Argentines acting on US orders. But we did find ample evidence of Argentine awareness of, and tolerance for, abuses happening in El Salvador. Indeed, among the records we came across were lists of suspected subversives shared with the Argentine ambassador, who in turn sent the lists to his superiors in Buenos Aires; many of the individuals listed were subsequently targeted by the security forces, and some remain “disappeared” to this day. We continue to analyze these documents in collaboration with our Salvadoran partners, including, where possible, those named in the documents, or their family members, and we anticipate sharing them with the broader public in the year ahead.
In July, UWCHR director Angelina Godoy travelled to El Salvador to explore the possibility of deepening our existing partnerships with Salvadoran organizations in ways that would permit the broader sharing, in El Salvador, of the US and Argentine government documents obtained through our research. We look forward to continuing this work to ensure that these historic records, painful as their details may be, are placed at the service of human rights work in El Salvador and beyond.
This update is featured in UWCHR’s 2023-2024 Annual Report.
To access more information about this project: https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/projects/unfinished-sentences/
