Primary Sources: Latin America, the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal: El Salvador

This set of documents focuses on United States policy toward El Salvador and events in El Salvador from the Carter Administration's formulation of a new Central American policy in January 1977 through the Salvadoran Presidential elections of May 1984 that brought José Napoleón Duarte to power.

The second set of declassified U.S. records concerning El Salvador, this collection incorporates several thousand U.S. government documents relevant to the human rights cases that were studied by the United Nations Truth Commission. Following the March 15, 1993 release of the commission's ground-breaking investigation, From Madness to Hope: The 12-Year War in El Salvador, members of the United States Congress wrote to President Clinton asking that the government documents be declassified for public inspection.

The Iran-Contra document collection provides a contemporary record of the political, military and paramilitary operations -- overt, covert and extra-official -- which served as the foundation for the most significant American scandal since Watergate. The collection consists of 4,635 documents totaling approximately 14,000 pages. The bulk of the documentation was produced between the fall of 1983, when Congress first put significant limits on official U.S. assistance to the Nicaraguan Contras, and the end of 1986, when the Iran initiative and the Contra resupply operations were publicly exposed, and official investigations began. Relevant legal papers, including the March 1988 indictment of National Security Council (NSC) officials John Poindexter and Lt. Col. Oliver North, and private operators Richard Secord and Albert Hakim, round out the set. The collection provides documents germane to the immediate scandal as well as to the decisionmaking process, the policies, and operations from which the Iran-Contra Affair evolved.

List of newspapers from El Salvador available at Cornell.

The HRDI is committed to the long-term preservation of fragile and vulnerable records of human rights struggles worldwide, the promotion and secure usage of human rights archival materials, and the advancement of human rights research and advocacy around the world. This collection is particularly strong for Latin America, including collections such as the Guatemalan National Police Historical Archive (AHPN) and the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen (El Salvador).

Open Access repository of digitized primary sources.