U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesperson
MEDIA NOTE
September 23, 2016
Secretary Kerry announced during his October 2015 visit to Chile that the United States had undertaken a comprehensive effort to identify additional records related to human rights abuses committed during the Pinochet era, specifically the assassination of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and U.S. citizen Ronni Karpen Moffitt. Today, during a ceremony in Washington, D.C., to mark the 40th anniversary of the assassinations, Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources Heather Higginbottom delivered the final tranche of records related to the assassinations. This concludes a multi-year interagency effort to identify and declassify these documents, in response to a request from the Government of Chile.
This effort complements the Chilean Declassification Project begun in 1999, and represents an historic effort by U.S. Government departments and agencies to search, identify, review for declassification, and make public records that shed light on human rights abuses in Chile. To date, the United States has declassified tens of thousands of pages of documents from the period of the Chilean military dictatorship. These records have helped support Chilean criminal investigations involving human rights violations under the dictatorship and shed light on the events of the period for the benefit of the dictatorship’s victims and the citizens of Chile and United States.
State Department documents will be available to the public on our website at foia.state.gov. Presidential Daily Briefs are available at www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/presidents-daily-brief and other documents will be available from the Reagan Presidential Library https://reaganlibrary.gov/.
Today, as we solemnly honor the lives that were taken 40 years ago, we remain committed to transparency in government, respect for human rights, the search for justice, and the enduring relationship between the people and governments of the United States and Chile.
