In October 1998, the British government arrested former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet at the London Bridge hospital, where he was recovering from minor back surgery. The British government planned to extradite Pinochet to Spain, where the Spanish government would then prosecute him for crimes against humanity committed during his reign from 1973 to 1990.

London Bridge Hospital, the Site of Pinochet’s Arrest (2017) James Petts | WikiMedia

Although the U.S. government was not strictly involved in the process, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL) advocated fiercely for the extradition, inspired by the leadership of then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her well-known commitment to universal human rights.

A legal technicality ultimately allowed Pinochet to return to Chile a free man; however, the incident inspired Secretary Albright and DRL to launch a project that would send a message to dictators around the world that they would not enjoy impunity for their crimes. Robert Ward, a Foreign Service Officer who served in DRL in the late 1990s, describes in his oral history his work with the Office of Freedom of Information Act Services to declassify and release more than 10,000 State Department documents relating to the Pinochet era, a project which ultimately represented a huge stride forward in the advancement of human rights.

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