The University of Washington El Salvador FOIA collection contains documents that were released by federal various agencies of the United States federal government to the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) as a result of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) or Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) requests submitted by UWCHR faculty, staff, and student researchers.
Since 2012, UWCHR has conducted research on human rights during El Salvador’s civil war through its “Unfinished Sentences” project. As part of this research, UWCHR researchers regularly file requests for relevant records from federal agencies including the U.S. Department of State, Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, Defense Intelligence Agency, and others. In some cases, when agencies have failed to comply with the requirements of federal law, UWCHR has sued for access to records; since 2015, the University of Washington has successfully brought suit under FOIA against the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, and Defense Intelligence Agency.
All of these documents in this collection have been declassified and are now in the public domain; determinations about redaction were made by the releasing agency in compliance with FOIA. They have been processed with optical character recognition (OCR) and are full-text searchable.
This collection was originally published in 2017 and will be updated periodically as new documents are released to the UWCHR; the collection was most recently updated in September, 2024.