Textual materials 77

As mentioned above, the textual documents included National Security Archive’s Electronic Briefing Books, reports and blog postings, court decisional documents, news, and secondary sources. It is important to mention that as a bilingual student I was able to analyze documents in English and Spanish. This is particularly significant since this dissertation includes the study of newspapers in Spanish, online information from Latin American human rights groups and legal decision documents from Latin American countries that are only available in Spanish.

212 _{Yan Zhang and Barbara M. Wildemuth, "Qualitative Analysis of Content," in Barbara M. Wildemuth,}

Applications of Social Research Methods to Questions in Information and Library Science (Westport, CT: Libraries

National Security Archive sources

Electronic Briefing Books and reports – Thirteen Electronic Briefing Books were studied. The Electronic Briefing Books are available at the Archive’s website and present digitized documents of a particular event. Each briefing book provides a summary of the event and how the documents released are related to it. Each document is also accompanied by its own summary. The Archive also publishes reports about declassification initiatives. For the list of Electronic Briefing Books see the Bibliography.

Publications by staff of the NSA – Analysts from the National Security Archive have published books, journal and magazine articles and posts at the Archive’s blog. A number of these publications, and specially the blog posts contain narratives of staff’s experience with particular cases in Latin America. For the list of Electronic Briefing Books see the Bibliography.

Collection’s guides – The collections guides available through the Digital National Security Archive were valuable sources for the understanding of how the NSA collects and publishes the materials. Each guide includes a methodology section that describes how a particular documentation project was planned and implemented. I consulted the following collections guide:

1. "El Salvador: The Making of U.S. Policy, 1977-1984." 2. “El Salvador: War, Peace, and Human Rights, 1980-1994.” 3. "Peru: Human Rights, Drugs and Democracy, 1980-2000."

4. “Death Squads, Guerrilla War, Covert Operations, and Genocide: Guatemala and the United States, 1954-1999.”

The guides for the Peru and Guatemala collections also included an essay written by the project director. The essays provide a historical context to the conflicts and what do the declassified records tell.

Court decisional documents

Legal decisions provide a very good source to analyze the impact of records used as evidence in criminal trials. In the case of human rights trials the availability of formerly secret documents has been critical, and the National Security Archive has provided important U.S. documents obtained through FOIA. Furthermore, NSA analysts Kate Doyle and Carlos Osorio have testified in trials in Peru and Argentina, respectively. Some of the legal decisions describe how the documents provided by the Archive served as evidence in the investigation. This includes the guilty verdict against former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori.

Reading these court decisions proved what scholars from the field of transitional justice have presented regarding the historical value of these documents. As explained in Chapter 2, court decisions and documentation also become an authoritative historical record. The decisional documents studied for this dissertation not only describe the specific criminal charges and the judges’ decision, but they also include a historical overview of the period in which the crimes were committed.

I obtained access to court records from the trial of Colonel Nicolás Carranza through PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records), a government database that provides access to case files from federal appellate, district and bankruptcy courts in the United States. The

website derechos.org was also a very important source. The website is maintained by Equipo Nizkor, an international organization founded in 1994 in Spain that collects and disseminates information about human rights. It includes news, reports, court decisions and trial transcripts.213

Declassified U.S. government documents – I consulted declassified U.S. government documents that were presented as evidence in human rights investigations. I accessed these documents through the Digital National Security Archive, which provides remote access to archival collections published by the institution.

I also filed two FOIA requests. I filed one request to the FBI, without any expectations, seeking any information the federal agency had about the National Security Archive. The FBI responded indicating that they don’t have any records about the organization. My second request was made to the Department of State. During my examination of the NSA work in Peru, which included an interview with the former director of the NSA Peru Documentation Project, I learned about the efforts by the Peruvian truth commission to obtain declassified documents. In my request to the State Department I asked for cables related to these efforts, covering the years 2001 – 2003. I received 16 declassified documents.

News reports – Through Lexis Nexis and newspapers’ online archives I was able to access news reports from the United States, El Salvador, Spain, Uruguay, Argentina, Peru, and Guatemala. The use of these news reports was twofold. First, I searched and retrieved news from 1986 to the early 1990s that covered the National Security Archive. The objective was to identify what the

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news media reported about the institution during its early years. Second, I studied news reports that were related to the countries and particular events discussed in this dissertation. For the list of newspapers see the Bibliography.