Colombia lifts bombing truce after Farc attack in Cauca

[Judi Lynn]

11. Super good ending to the article excerpted above:

Discovering the Past

For the past eight years, I have been collecting historical materials about the death of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan from the files of U.S. government agencies. Most of these materials I have obtained were located at the U.S. National Archives, including reports from the Office of Intelligence Research of the US State Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, reports of the US Embassy in Bogota, and the transcript of a closed-door Congressional investigation of the CIA's first "intelligence failure" in not predicting the Bogotazo.

The files of America's premier intelligence agencies, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have proven elusive. I filed suit against both agencies in Federal court in Washington, D.C. in 2001. After four years, I learned that the FBI had "disposed of" most its post-World War II Latin America records without authorization from the National Archives. Technically, this means they could have destroyed them, lost them, or given them to an employee to store in his basement. It means only that the FBI is no longer maintains them and there is no accountability for what happened to them.

The CIA is even worse. For seven years, it argued that it would harm US national security and US-Colombia relations if it were to admit that records about the assassination of Gaitan even existed. Eventually, the DC Court of Appeals decided I was entitled to thirteen documents used by Admiral Hillenkoetter in his Congressional testimony. It was at this point that the CIA admitted that its "Post WWII Era Records" are on microfilm, and that their microfilms are indexed by an old IBM-type punch card computer which is no longer operational. This is the dustbin of our history. The CIA is demanding payment of $147,000 to find the missing reports from the first Congressional investigation of the CIA. I am now seeking judicial review of the CIA's recordkeeping policies. However, aside from the thirteen records used by Admiral Hillenkoetter in his presentation, any other information in the possession of the CIA appears to be outside the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.

What should also be made public are the working papers of the Colombian judge who first investigated the matter, Ricardo Jordan Jimenez. These were once in the possession of Gaitan's daughter Gloria, who managed the Casa-Museo Gaitan (the Gaitan House Museum) and are now in the hands of the Colombian government. It's unlikely the public will have access to them any time soon.

Yet this is a mystery that demands resolution. Colombia's war is a war of assassination, and Gaitan's dramatic death is a paradigm of the conflict. The plethora of conspiracy theories is the predictable result of unreasonable government preoccupation with the secrecy of its historical records. As long as these files are kept secret, the suspicion that someone is hiding something will remain. Whatever the answer may be - and most likely, we will never know the answer - there is nothing to be gained from obscuring our common history. After 60 years, it's time we learned the truth.