From the UNESCO Courier are several remarkable articles on the relationship between secrecy and memory and their collective relation to history.
First, Operation Condor and the Archives of Terror documents teacher Martín Almada’s use of the Paraguay’s constitution regarding public records to locate three tons of Condor documents that were finally “exhumed” in a suburban police station. Mr. Alamada was accused of “intellectual terrorism” by a Paraguayan military tribunal for his involvement in education rights. The Foreign Relations of the United States, the “official documentary historical record of major U.S. foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity,” offers the U.S. view of Operation Condor.
The second article, “Memories of Broken Dreams and Intact Hopes,” concers the admission of the League of Nations archives into the Memory of the World project. The project seeks “to guard against collective amnesia calling upon the preservation of the valuable archive holdings and library collections all over the world ensuring their wide dissemination.” The League’s archives are “2.175 linear meters, approximately 15 million documents.”
secrecy {fragments} 