Allan Nairn Biography
Allan Nairn is an investigative journalist from the United States. While reporting in East Timor, he was detained by Indonesian military forces loyal to the US-backed strongman Suharto. His writings on US foreign policy have focused on Haiti, Guatemala, Indonesia, and East Timor.
How old is Allan Nairn? – Age
He is 67 years old as of 2023. He was born in 1956 in Morristown, New Jersey, United States.
Allan Nairn Family – Education
Nairn was born in Puerto Rico to a Puerto Rican mother. He got a job with consumer activist Ralph Nader in high school and worked for him for six years.
Allan Nairn Net Worth
He has an estimated net worth of $850,000.
Allan Nairn Guatemala
Nairn visited Guatemala in the midst of an assassination campaign against student leaders and a chaotic counterinsurgency campaign against Marxist guerrillas active in both urban and rural areas in 1980. He interviewed US corporate executives there who supported the death squads, and he decided to look into death squad activities in that country as well as El Salvador, which was also in the grip of civil war. Nairn became interested in East Timor and helped establish the East Timor Action Network (ETAN), which was instrumental in bringing the East Timor independence movement to international attention.
Allan Nairn Indonesia
On November 12, 1991, while covering events in East Timor, Nairn, and colleague Amy Goodman was severely beaten by Indonesian soldiers after witnessing a mass killing of Timorese demonstrators known as the Santa Cruz Massacre. During the melee, he was beaten with the butts of M16 rifles and had his skull fractured. Nairn was declared a “threat to national security” and barred from returning to East Timor, but he did so several times illegally, and his subsequent reports helped persuade the United States Congress to cut off military aid to Jakarta in 1993. Nairn revealed the ongoing US military training of Indonesian troops involved in the torture and killing of civilians in a dispatch from East Timor on March 30, 1998.
Nairn was briefly detained by the Indonesian Army in East Timor in 1999, where he had chosen to remain after most other media outlets had fled following East Timor’s independence referendum.
Nairn revealed the US government’s role in establishing and funding the Haitian paramilitary Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), which was involved in human rights abuses, in an article published in The Nation in 1994.
Nairn could face detention and criminal charges in Indonesia for revealing Indonesian military assassinations of civilian activists, it was revealed on March 24, 2010. According to an Indonesian military spokesperson, the military is considering legal action in response to Nairn’s publication. Nairn and several other celebrities appeared in a video supporting Chelsea Manning in June 2013.
According to a June 27, 2014 report, Nairn was threatened with arrest for revealing the role of Indonesian presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto in human rights violations.