ABBREVIATIONS   — i

AMERICAN ENCOUNTERS/GLOBAL INTERACTIONS

A series edited by Gilbert M. Joseph and Emily S. Rosenberg

This series aims to stimulate critical perspectives and fresh

interpretive frameworks for scholarship on the history of the
imposing global presence of the United States. Its primary
concerns include the deployment and contestation of power,
the construction and deconstruction of cultural and politi-
cal borders, the fluid meanings of intercultural encounters,
and the complex interplay between the global and the local.
American Encounters seeks to strengthen dialogue and
collaboration between historians of U.S. international re-
lations and area studies specialists. The series encourages
scholarship based on multi­archival historical research. At
the same time, it supports a recognition of the representa-
tional character of all stories about the past and promotes
critical inquiry into issues of subjectivity and narrative. In
the process, American Encounters strives to understand the
context in which meanings related to nations, cultures, and
political economy are continually produced, challenged, and
reshaped.
 KIRSTEN WELD

PAPER CADAVERS
T H E AR C H I V E S O F D I C TAT O R S H I P

I N G UAT E M AL A

duke university press  durham and london  2014

© 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper ∞
Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Whitman by Copperline Book Services, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Weld, Kirsten, 1982–
Paper cadavers : the archives of dictatorship in Guatemala / Kirsten Weld.
pages cm — (American encounters/global interactions)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5597-­7 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5602-­8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Guatemala—Politics and government—1945–1985—Sources.
2. Guatemala. Policía Nacional. Archivo Histórico.
3. Guatemala—Relations—United States—Sources.
4. United States—Relations—Guatemala—Sources.
5. Archives—Political aspects.
I. Title.  II. Series: American encounters/global interactions.
f1466.5.w45 2014
972.8105'2—dc23 2013026391

Photographs on cover and p. i by Daniel Hernández-­Salazar

and used by permission of the photographer.
For the workers, past and present,
of the Proyecto para la Recuperación del
Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional
CONTENTS

List of Abbreviations  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii

introduction  The Power of Archival Thinking  1

PART I: EXPLOSIONS AT THE ARCHIVES   27

chapter 1: Excavating Babylon  29
chapter 2: Archival Culture, State Secrets,
and the Archive Wars  50
chapter 3: How the Guerrillero Became an Archivist  69

PART II: ARCHIVES AND COUNTERINSURGENCY

IN COLD WAR GUATEMALA

chapter 4: Building Counterinsurgency Archives  91

chapter 5: Recycling the National Police in War,
Peace, and Post-­Peace  119

PART III: ARCHIVES AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION

IN POSTWAR GUATEMALA

chapter 6: Revolutionary Lives in the Archives  153

chapter 7: Archives and the Next Generation(s)  183

PART IV: PASTS PRESENT AND THE FUTURE IMPERFECT

chapter 8: Changing the Law of What Can Be Said,

and Done  213
chapter 9: Conclusion: The Possibilities and
Limitations of Archival Thinking  236

Notes  257  Bibliography  301  Index  323

 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

aeu Association of University Students, University of San Carlos

(Asociación de Estudiantes Universitarios)
afpc Accord on the Strengthening of Civil Power and the Role of the
Armed Forces in a Democratic Society (Acuerdo de Fortaleci­
miento del Poder Civil y Función del Ejército en una Sociedad
Democrática)
agca General Archives of Central America (Archivo General de
Centroamérica)
agsaemp Archives and Support Services of the Presidential General Staff
(Archivos Generales y Servicios Apoyados del Estado Mayor
Presidencial)
ahpn Historical Archives of the National Police (Archivo Histórico de la
Policía Nacional)
aid Agency for International Development
arena Nationalist Republican Alliance, El Salvador (Alianza Republicana
Nacionalista)
avemilgua Association of Military Veterans of Guatemala (Asociación de
Veteranos Militares de Guatemala)
bien Special Investigations and Narcotics Brigade (Brigada de Investiga-
ciones Especiales y Narcóticos)
broe Special Operations Reaction Brigade (Brigada de Reacción de
Operaciones Especiales)
cacif Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial,
and Financial Associations (Comité Coordinador de Asociaciones
Agrícolas, Comerciales, Industriales, y Financieras)
cadeg Anti-­Communist Council of Guatemala (Consejo Anticomunista de
Guatemala)
cci International Advisory Board, Project for the Recovery of the Na-
tional Police Historical Archives (Consejo Consultivo Internacional)
ccn National Advisory Board, Project for the Recovery of the National
Police Historical Archives (Consejo Consultivo Nacional)
ceh Commission for Historical Clarification (Comisión de
Esclarecimiento Histórico)
cem Center for Military Studies (Centro de Estudios Militares)
cicig International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (Comis-
ión Internacional Contra la Impunidad en Guatemala)
cnt National Workers’ Central (Central Nacional de Trabajadores)
cnus National Committee on Trade Union Unity (Comité Nacional de
Unidad Sindical)
cocp Joint Operations Center of the National Police (Centro de Opera-
ciones Conjuntas)
coe Special Operations Commando (Comando de Operaciones
Especiales)
crio Regional Telecommunications Center (Centro de Reunión de
Información y Operaciones)
cuc Campesino Unity Committee (Comité de Unidad Campesina)
dgpn Director-­General of the National Police
dic Department of Criminal Investigations
dinc Criminal Investigations Division (División de Investigación
Criminal)
dit Department of Technical Investigations
dnsa Digital National Security Archive
egp Guerrilla Army of the Poor (Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres)
emdn National Defense General Staff (Estado Mayor de la Defensa
Nacional)
emge Army General Staff (Estado Mayor General del Ejército)
emp Presidential Staff (Estado Mayor Presidencial)
esa Secret Anti-­Communist Army (Ejército Secreto Anticomunista)
fafg Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala (Fundación de
Antropología Forense de Guatemala)
famdegua Association of the Families of the Detained and Disappeared in
Guatemala (Asociación de Familiares de Detenidos-­Desaparecidos
de Guatemala)
far Rebel Armed Forces (Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes)
ferg Robin García Student Front (Frente Estudiantil Robin García)
frg Guatemalan Republican Front (Frente Republicano Guatemalteco)
fur United Revolutionary Front (Frente Unido de la Revolución)
gam Mutual Support Group (Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo)
gog Government of Guatemala

x  —  ABBREVIATIONS
hijos Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice and Against Forgetting
and Silence (Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia y Contra el
Olvido y el Silencio)
hrdag Human Rights Data Analysis Group
ica International Cooperation Administration
icitap U.S. Criminal Investigations Training Assistance Program
iiaa Institute of Inter-­American Affairs
inta National Institute for Agrarian Transformation (Instituto Nacional
de Transformación Agraria)
isaar International Standard Archival Authority Record
isad(g) International Standard for Archival Description (General)
jpt Patriotic Workers’ Youth (Juventud Patriótica de Trabajo)
minugua United Nations Verification Mission in Guatemala
mln Movement of National Liberation
monap National Movement of Pobladores (Movimiento Nacional de
Pobladores)
mp Public Ministry
noa New Anti-­Communist Organization (Nueva Organización
Anticomunista)
odhag Human Rights Office of the Archbishop of Guatemala (Oficina
de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala)
ops Office of Public Safety
orpa Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms
pac Civil Self-­Defense Patrols (Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil)
pdh Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office (Procuraduría de los Derechos
Humanos)
pgt Guatemalan Workers’ Party (Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo)
pma Mobile Military Police (Policía Militar Ambulante)
pn National Police
pnc National Civil Police
pr Revolutionary Party
prahpn Project for the Recovery of the National Police Historical Archives
(Proyecto para la Recuperación del Archivo Histórico de la Policía
Nacional)
psd Social Democratic Party
psp Public Safety Program
remhi Interdiocesan Project for the Recuperation of Historical Memory
(Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica)

ABBREVIATIONS   — xi
rmu Master Location Registry (Registro Maestro de Ubicación)
scuga Special Commando Unit (Unidad de Comando Especial del Ejército
de Guatemala)
sedem Security in Democracy
sepaz Presidential Peace Secretariat (Secretaría de la Paz de la Presidencia
de la República)
sic Criminal Investigations Section (Sección de Investigaciones
Criminales)
siproci Civilian Protection System (Sistema de Protección Civil)
stusc University of San Carlos Employees’ Union (Sindicato de Traba-
jadores de la Universidad de San Carlos)
uae Special Investigations Unit, Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office
(Unidad de Averiguaciones Especiales)
urng Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (Unidad Revolucionaria
Nacional Guatemalteca)
usac University of San Carlos
usaid United States Agency for International Development

xii  —  ABBREVIATIONS
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I
n All the Names, José Saramago conjures the labyrinthine archives of an un-
named city, its grim Central Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths. The
registry’s musty depths are populated only by an archon—the all-­powerful
Registrar—and the beleaguered clerks at his service. Such was the abiding
disorder and dereliction there that from time to time a bumbling researcher
would fall victim to the archives; one lost soul, a genealogist unable to find his
way back to the main desk, was only discovered, “almost miraculously, after
a week, starving, thirsty, exhausted, delirious, having survived thanks to the
desperate measure of ingesting enormous quantities of old documents.” In
response, the Registrar, who had written the wayward genealogist off as dead,
did what bureaucrats do best: he issued an internal order. Thereafter, to avoid
other such unsavory incidents, it would be “obligatory, at the risk of incurring
a fine and a suspension of salary, for everyone going into the archive of the
dead to make use of Ariadne’s thread.”1
The notion of Ariadne’s thread ties this work together in several ways. As
a methodology intended precisely for solving problems that suggest multiple
manners of proceeding, it pushed me to embrace inter-­and multidisciplinary
approaches in tackling the National Police archives as a site of analysis. As a
metaphor, it could not be better suited to thinking about a sprawling warren
of records whose rescuers call its decaying storage facility el laberinto (while
the facility’s former occupants, who used the space as a torture and detention
center, termed it la isla). Above all, though, the idea of Ariadne’s thread serves
me best as a way of visualizing the lifeline—constituted by a dense network
of relationships, love, and solidarity—that has enabled me to navigate the ar-
chives of the dead.
First, I thank the archivists, who too often are left for last and upon whose
perspectives and labor this project relied. Chief among them were Thelma
Porres and her staff at the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Meso-
américa; Thelma Mayen de Pérez and her staff at the archives of the Tipografía
Nacional; Anna Carla Ericastilla, the director of the Archivo General de Cen-
troamérica, a voice of reason and a friend; and, at the National Police archives,
Ingrid Molina and Lizbeth Barrientos. Anna Carla, Ingrid, and Lizbeth were
themselves actors in the story I am about to tell, but their good sense and ideas
also contributed to my approach in telling it. And Trudy Huskamp Peterson—
tireless and engaged, the globetrotting gonzo archivist extraordinaire—enriched
this study in more ways than I can name. I hope she will forgive the artistic
license I have taken over the years in translating her discipline’s foundational
concepts both into Spanish and into this book.
In Guatemala, I was fortunate to draw upon the expertise of still more wise
women: Tani Adams and Marcie Mersky, who gave me thoughtful advice at
the early stages of this project, and Kate Doyle, a valued comrade and men-
tor without whom I would never have been granted anything approaching
the access I enjoyed to the police archives. The fact that the Project’s lead-
ers accepted this stranger into their midst as warmly as they did, on Kate’s
voucher alone, is a testament to the invaluable work done by Kate and her
colleagues at the National Security Archive. At the Project, many of those
individuals whose commitment and friendship I most appreciate cannot be
named here for confidentiality reasons. But some can: Gustavo Meoño and
Carla Villagrán let me join their fledgling archival rescue initiative in early
2006, granting me nearly unfettered access to the internal workings of the
Project along with their trust, which this work hopefully bears out. Alberto
Fuentes urged me to focus on young workers’ experiences of laboring in the
archives. Enmy Morán provided an example of how academic historians’ skills
can be brought to bear upon contemporary political concerns, and I thank
her for her friendship. Most of all, I thank the Project’s rank-­and-­file workers
for welcoming me as a compañera—especially the members of the 2006 his-
torical investigations team and the 2007 Joint Operations Center table team,
alongside whom I worked most closely. I am always moved by their tenacity
and dedication to imagining a different future for their country. Other friends
and colleagues outside the Project offered ideas, comfort, and camaraderie:
Laura Arriaza, Míchel Andrade, Edeliberto Cifuentes, Iduvina Hernández, and
Mario Castañeda. Thanks, too, to the talented photographer-­activists whose
images appear in this book: James Rodríguez, Jean-­Marie Simon, and Daniel
Hernández-­Salazar, who work to make visible what Guatemala’s powerful
would prefer to obscure.
As I imagined and executed this project, Stuart Schwartz and Carlota
McAllister offered constructive criticism, sound advice, and good cheer when
it was most needed. Greg Grandin accompanied me on this venture from the
moment of its inception, and along the way he taught me about power, about
Guatemala, and about engaged scholarship. Michael Denning is a boundless

xiv  —  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
reservoir of creative thinking and practical ideas, ever ready to turn a writing
problem on its head in unexpected ways; I have benefited so much from his
engagement with my work. And Gil Joseph is an incomparable mentor, fan,
editor, friend, and sage. He was at my side at every step, and I am proud to
be part of the generation of historians he has trained. More recently, Silvia
Arrom, June Erlick, Joe Tulchin, Liz Oglesby, Jean-­Marie Simon, Diane Nelson,
and several anonymous peer reviewers read the manuscript and gave generous,
indispensable feedback. Dagmar Hovestädt and Günter Bormann facilitated
my enlightening visit to the Stasi archives in Berlin. My research and writing
were supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of
Canada, the International Dissertation Research Fellowship program at the
Social Science Research Council, Yale’s Council on Latin American and Ibe-
rian Studies, Yale’s MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, the
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Florence Levy Kay Fellow­ship in Latin
American History at Brandeis University, where I was lucky enough to have
Jane Kamensky and Silvia Arrom as mentors. The Harvard University History
Department and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
have been most genial home bases from which to complete the process of
crafting this book, a process expertly and empathically guided by the inimita-
ble Valerie Millholland and Gisela Fosado at Duke University Press. Of course,
as the refrain goes, any flaws in the final product are mine alone.
In New Haven, where this book was born, I shared dreams, frustrations, and
bourbon with dear friends. My warmest thanks go to Caitlin Casey, Steve Prince,
Julia Irwin, David Huyssen, Louise Walker, Jesse Franzblau, Alison Bruey, Lisa
Pinley Covert, the 2005–2007 members of the Working Group on Globaliza-
tion and Culture, Jack Hitt, Christopher York, Ezer Vierba, Jeffrey Boyd, the
Connecticut Center for a New Economy, and the Graduate Employees and
Students’ Organization (geso) at Yale, whose long and ongoing fight for rec-
ognition made my graduate school experience both possible and worthwhile.
My New York Bureau—Patrick Guyer, Holly Beck, Seth Prins, and company—
launched me on many overnight and early-­morning flights to Central Amer-
ica. The world’s best suegros, Susan and René Aramayo, helped me with foot-
notes (Susan) and cured the archivist’s lung with which I would invariably
return from Guatemala afflicted (René). Jesse, Louise, Susan, Lisa, and par-
ticularly David and Jeffrey read parts of this work in its earlier incarnations
and offered a raft of suggestions for its improvement; David also provided
critical last-­minute help with editing and sources. As for my friends and family
from back home in Canada, I thank Kate Lunau, Esmé Webb, Daniel Aldana
Cohen, Jonah Gindin, Nick Hune-­Brown, Krista Stout, Megan Dunkley, Wayne

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS   — xv
Nadler, Lisa Nadler, David Wachsmuth, Sylvie Nicholson, Michael Wernikowski,
Maxime Rousseaux, Sophie Rousseaux, Phoebe Rousseaux, and Judith Rae for
their love, thoughts, and/or engagement with this project in various forms and
at various times. It was Judith who, innocently, first brought me to Guatemala,
not knowing at the time that she was setting me upon a much longer journey.
And throughout, I have counted on the backing and hearty encouragement of
my parents, Howard and Suzanne.
Finally, I thank Carlos Roy Aramayo, whose incomparable intellect, unerr-
ing revolutionary ethics, and irrepressible goofiness make every single one of
my days better. Always with me as we navigate life, the universe, and every-
thing, Carlos truly is my Ariadne’s thread.

xvi  —  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
 INTRODUCTION
THE POWER OF ARCHIVAL THINKING

I
n the dark of a restless night during the late 1970s, a young Guatemalan
named Raúl Perera shot into wakefulness from a dream so unusual that he
remembers it vividly thirty-­five years later. He cannot quite recall the date.
He knows that it was after he joined the Guatemalan Workers’ Party (pgt), the
outlawed communist party, and became a vocal leader of his Guatemala City
trade union, but before the two attempts on his life that left a bullet scar along
his forearm, a close friend dead, and no option for him but to begin a long
exile in Mexico. Amid years of activism and war, that one night has haunted
Raúl ever since because it brought him a vision so fantastical that it verged on
the absurd. That night, his subconscious granted him entrance to a forbidden
space: the archives kept by his country’s feared National Police.1
Once inside, Raúl crept along the archives’ labyrinthine corridors in the
crepuscular light. He yanked open drawers and thumbed through file folders
thick with surveillance photographs of loved ones and reports detailing in-
formants’ infiltration of leftist groups. He mined the files, learning how the
police organized its death squads, what sorts of information they collected on
citizens, and what could be gleaned about the fates of disappeared comrades.
In Raúl’s waking life—which he spent dodging, not courting, the attention
of state security forces—such acts would have been inconceivable transgres-
sions, sure to be met with lethal retribution. Generations of dictators and
elites had long directed the National Police (pn) to suppress not only orga-
nized resistance but any and all forms of oppositional thinking, eventually
using it to help execute the Cold War counterinsurgency campaign for which
Guatemala will always be notorious. During that campaign, police adminis-
tered spy networks; they crushed demonstrations; they did the dirty work of
generals and political leaders; they followed, abducted, tortured, and killed.
With a terrifying blend of clumsiness and zeal, they targeted schoolteachers,
students, progressive priests, peasant farmers, social democratic politicians,
street children, and Marxist revolutionaries alike. Raúl was hardly the only
Guatemalan whose reveries the police tormented.
 So it seemed unreal when, decades later, he found himself inside the po-
lice’s archives once more. This time, however, it was no dream. “The very
color of the pages, the fonts, and everything about the documents in my
dream turned out to be exactly how they looked in real life,” Raúl reflected
incredulously after several years’ work on a pathbreaking initiative to put the
once-­secret police records at the service of postwar justice.2 In a serendipi-
tous coup that none had ever imagined possible, a small contingent of human
rights activists had gained access to the National Police’s long-­lost archives.
Investigators from Guatemala’s Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office (pdh),
while conducting an unrelated inspection on police property in July 2005,
stumbled upon what seemed to be vast quantities of old papers. After survey-
ing the sprawling warehouse—a former detention and torture center once
known as la isla (the island), with spattered cinderblock walls and cell-­like
inner chambers—and navigating its maze of rooms piled high with bundles
of moldy records dating back more than a century, the investigators realized
that they had uncovered the largest collection of secret state documents in
Latin American history.3
The news spread quickly in a country still deeply divided after nearly four
decades of brutal counterinsurgent warfare, but the discovery raised more
questions and controversies than it resolved. How would the find—an esti-
mated eighty million decaying pages—be managed? Who would have control
over this potentially explosive cache of records, believed to contain damning
evidence of state abuses from an era of forced disappearances, political assas-
sinations, and genocide? Could these archives offer a new chance at postwar
reckoning, which remained stalled more than a decade after the end of a con-
flict that took the lives of as many as 200,000 citizens?4
Raúl was among the first members of a tiny team, soon to grow, that took
stock of the find. Its members would take on the arduous task of sorting
through the half-­rotten, disordered heaps of paper, hoping to rescue a dark
portion of their nation’s past. Grasping for a manageable place to start, the ear-
liest archival recovery volunteers began by rescuing a huge mound of personal
identity cards that lay decomposing in a half-­completed room at the building’s
rear. The majority of the 250,000 cards had survived, but only because sun
and water exposure had transformed those at the top of the pile into a tough
papier-­mâché crust that protected the others beneath. As Raúl sifted through
more and more records, on his hands and knees alongside fellow activists
clad in face masks and rubber gloves, he routinely stumbled upon the names
of friends and acquaintances now alive only in archives and memories. He
did not know that a Central American archivist decades earlier had described

2  —  INTRODUCTION
such documents as “paper cadavers” in need of “resurrection,” but he would
have found the metaphor almost painfully apt; in some cases, the archives
revealed companions’ fates for the first time.5 It was difficult labor, made no
easier by the arson attempts and death threats that periodically reminded the
volunteers of the real risks still faced in Guatemala by those seeking to un-
earth the war’s history.
How had these mountains of paper, with all the power and social control
they represented, never been destroyed? Why were they all but abandoned,
yet still deemed threatening enough for the Guatemalan government to keep
them secret from postwar truth commission investigators? Raúl’s life story—
his past and present encounters with the police and its archives in dreams and
in life—encapsulated a tumultuous and unsettled half century of Guatemalan
history. How had this political exile, after some thirty years of struggle and
failed revolution, found himself in the company of others like him, using the
files of their former victimizers as part of an unprecedented effort to rewrite
history? And would their collective effort finally yield justice?

People study history in order to participate in contemporary politics; we re-

cover the past in order to look to the future. As such, documents, archives,
and historical knowledge are more than just the building blocks of politics—
they are themselves sites of contemporary political struggle. We argue and
disagree, ardently, about history. We interpret the same documents and events
in myriad, divergent ways. We push for state records to be made public, decry
their censorship, and support those whistle-­blowers and document-­leakers
punished for violating the presumed sanctity of the state secret.6 And while
we can build consensus around the notion that we must learn from the past
in order to avoid repeating our forebears’ errors, we spar openly over that
past and, especially, over who should bear the blame for those errors. The
adjudication of history has serious consequences, including the payment of
reparations, the offering of official apologies following atrocities, the settle-
ment of land claims, and the integrity of national identities. This means that
our engagement with history, whether or not in a professional capacity, is
always suffused with our own ideological inclinations, personal interests, and
present-­day political ends.
This is all the more true for those communities in which matters of his-
torical interpretation have immediate real-­world stakes, such as the Guate-
malan activists whose lives and labor form the subject of this book. As E. P.
Thompson once wrote, “Experience walks in without knocking at the door,

INTRODUCTION  — 3
and announces deaths, crises of subsistence, trench warfare, unemployment,
inflation, genocide. . . . In the face of such general experiences old conceptual
systems may crumble and new problematics insist upon their presence.”7 In an
unstable postwar Guatemala, the surprising appearance of the National Police
archives presented all manner of new problematics, requiring new conceptual
systems with which to confront them. Aging police and military officials im-
plicated in war crimes walked free, enjoying impunity and ongoing political
power, while the fates of thousands of citizens remained unknown. In such a
context, the amateur historians exhuming this past had no choice but to get
down to work, and the new conceptual system they developed for reckon-
ing with the documents combined historical research, courtroom litigation,
technical archival science, and impassioned advocacy. In the process, they set
a model of political engagement with the past, one that channeled the spirit
of an observation by anthropologist Michel-­Rolph Trouillot: “No amount of
historical research about the Holocaust and no amount of guilt about Ger­
many’s past can serve as a substitute for marching in the streets against Ger-
man skinheads today.”8
This book analyzes how the sudden reappearance of seventy-­five million
pages of once-­secret police documents impacted the volatile Guatemalan
political scene, bringing a historian’s eye to bear upon how postwar activ-
ists use historical research and archives precisely as a way of marching in
the streets today. During the peace process in the mid-­1990s, then president
Alvaro Arzú and his administration denied that any police archives existed.
Arzú, defense minister Héctor Barrios Celada, and interior minister Rodolfo
Mendoza stonewalled the United Nations–sponsored Historical Clarification
Commission (ceh) charged with investigating the country’s 1960–1996 civil
war.9 In theory, and according to the terms of the 1996 Peace Accords, the
ceh had the right to access military and police records for its investigation.
In practice, however, its petitions for access were summarily denied, and the
ceh was forced to proceed without any documentation from the Guatema-
lan state.10 The police archives, therefore, were a political bombshell, because
while victims’ families had long been armed with what Gloria Alberti terms
“archives of pain”—the watchdog reports and testimonies of state violence
amassed by human rights nongovernmental organizations and other nonstate
actors—they had never before had large-­scale access to “archives of terror,”
namely, the records used by state perpetrators.11
The archives’ discovery renewed a national conversation about historical
memory and transitional justice. It also provoked violent opposition from
conservative sectors seeking to prevent the documents from coming to light.

4  —  INTRODUCTION
Today, a foreign-­funded activist initiative called the Project for the Recovery
of the National Police Historical Archives (prahpn), hereafter “the Project,”
is rescuing the decaying records and analyzing their contents, with the aim of
generating evidence to use in prosecuting war-­era officials for crimes against
humanity. Over time, the Project grew from its improvisational beginnings
into a precedent-­setting effort armed with hundreds of staff, state-­of-­the-­art
technology, and support from around the world.
It also operated from a position of political commitment; the Project’s coor-
dinator was a former guerrilla commander, and its work was animated by the
goal of reframing the official narrative about the war—what Elizabeth Jelin
has called the “master narrative of the nation”—that had been promoted for
years by its victors.12 This military-­backed version of history held, not to put
too fine a point on it, that state security forces heroically defended the father-
land from the evils of Soviet-­sponsored communism. Lives lost along the way,
the story went, were those of naive youngsters brainwashed by vulgar Marx-
ism, who would have done better to stay at home (se habían metido en algo),
or else of terrorists who deserved what they got and worse still. In this telling,
if a high school student distributing leaflets for a leftist student group ended
up as yet another defiled corpse with its tongue cut out and hands severed,
dumped in a ravine or mass grave, the student had brought it upon herself. It
tarred trade unionists, students, and peasant activists as traitors, deviants, and
vendepatrias subservient to foreign ideologies.13 But this interpretation could
neither bury survivors’ contradictory memories nor quell their expectations
that a purportedly democratic state should offer at least an opportunity at
justice. If the postwar project of building a democratic society where one had
never existed was to succeed, this paean to the armed forces could no longer
be its foundation myth.
In such a setting, the (re)writing of history is politics—politics with a defi-
nite sense of urgency, as statistical indicators unanimously warn that post-
war Guatemala finds itself in an “emergency situation.”14 The country’s major
twenty-­first-­century preoccupations (inequality, violence, impunity, Maya
disenfranchisement, out-­migration) are driven by unresolved historical griev-
ances: crimes not solved, socioeconomic disparities not redressed, power
not redistributed, and perpetrators unprosecuted.15 Only 2 or 3 percent of all
crimes, political or common, are prosecuted at all.16 And so history is lived as
an open wound. Those who have plumbed its depths know all too well how
el delito de pensar (the crime of thinking) invites punishment from those who
would turn the page on the past and foreclose certain visions of the future.17
With the weak state scarcely able to protect its citizens’ health and safety,

INTRODUCTION  — 5
entrenched affinity groups—oligarchs, business elites, foreign agro-­export
and mineral extraction interests, and the military—have made the resulting
power vacuum their own jealously guarded domain. The question today for re-
formers, and regional systems like the Inter-­American Court of Human Rights,
is: How to dislodge them?18 The Guatemalan military explicitly conceived
the country’s mid-­1980s transition to procedural democracy as a counter­
insurgency strategy; wartime power structures were never dismantled. Newer
human rights organizations struggled to carve out spaces for debate in a crip-
pled postwar society that was democratic in little more than name.19 After the
accords, these organizations focused on chipping away at a deeply corrupt
political system, with results ranging from unforeseen successes—for exam-
ple, the hard-­won conviction of Bishop Juan Gerardi’s murderers—to, more
commonly, disheartening failures, particularly in security reform.20 Framed
against such a bleak landscape, a forgotten warehouse filled with rotting ad-
ministrative documents seems an unlikely motor for substantive change.
But as with all tools, the archives’ utility derives entirely from the manner
of their application. This book seeks to make sense of the archives’ importance
in both the past and the present, investigating how these documents acquired
their power and how they are being reimagined in a very delicate postwar
setting. Though the documentary collection is composed of one physical set
of papers, those papers have at different historical moments represented two
distinct archival logics—two organizing principles, or two reasons for being.
The first logic was one of surveillance, social control, and ideological man-
agement, a Cold War–inflected logic that used archives as a weapon against
enemies of the state. The second logic, emerging from the records’ rescue, is
one of democratic opening, historical memory, and the pursuit of justice for
war crimes—again using archives as a weapon, but to very different ends. I
analyze how the varied uses to which Guatemalans have put these records
over time—the evolution from the first archival logic to the second—offer a
narrative arc that maps onto the country’s broader transition from war to an
unstable peace.21 (In so doing, I suggest that we must expand the conventional
chronology by which we define the Cold War, because in various parts of Latin
America, such as Chile and Argentina, electoral politics and judicial cultures
remain strongly colored by that period’s legacies.)
Trouillot writes that the word “history” has two vernacular, mutually de-
pendent meanings: the first refers to the materiality of the sociohistorical
process (“that which happened,” or what historians write about); the second
refers to the past, present, and future narratives that are produced about it
(“that which is said to have happened,” or what historians write).22 In this

6  —  INTRODUCTION
book, I explore these meanings and their interrelation. For example, did geno-
cide happen in Guatemala—as the ceh and, in 2013, a Guatemalan court
ruled—or is it only said to have happened? How would one go about prov-
ing it? Those accused of crimes against humanity have long argued that no
hubo genocidio; as the website of Guatemala’s Association of Military Veterans
(avemilgua) proclaims, “There are those who feel the need to manipulate
history in order to justify their crimes and treasonously implicate those who
prevented their terrorist plans from being realized. . . . They only disinform,
and the truth will never change.”23 The police archives’ reappearance, however,
destabilized such confident claims. For the first time since formal peace was
struck, human rights activists had access to abundant documentary evidence
in the state’s own hand, though they faced the risks of conflating “history”
with a description of crimes and victims. In tracking how these activists made
use of these documents—how they exhumed this mass grave filled with paper
cadavers—this book not only details how the messy process of history-­writing
and rewriting functions but also makes an argument about why it matters.

THAT WHICH HAPPENED, OR, “SÍ HUBO GENOCIDIO”

Each year, the small town of Sumpango Sacatepéquez celebrates Day of the
Dead with a festival of giant kites handmade from tissue paper and bamboo
rods.24 The round kites, the largest of which span an impressive six meters in
diameter, are intricate works of art, labored over for months by all-­male teams
of community members late each night after their days in the field. From afar,
the festival appears whimsical: the translucent kites’ vivid colors shot through
with sunlight, their tasseled edges ruffled by mountain breezes. Thousands of
visitors crowd Sumpango’s dusty soccer pitch, waiting for the climactic mo-
ment when all but the very grandest kites are taken down from their display
mountings and flown. Each kite-­building team sends its own opus aloft, with
as many as five or six young men straining to control their creations with
long ropes; the competition is fierce, but all in good fun. The beautiful kites
are effectively destroyed in the process, half a year’s work torn apart in a few
delirious seconds. Once the prizes are handed out, the community celebrates
with live music and cold Gallo beer.
The gaiety of the festival masks a dark obverse. Many of the kites appear
brightly hued and merry at a distance, but upon closer inspection they depict
detailed images of loss and suffering inspired by Mayan experiences of the
war. “Guatemala weeps and struggles, searching for its peace,” read one kite;
it showed three generations of indigenous women standing in horror before
three men’s machete-­slashed corpses whose raw tendons and bones lay ex-

INTRODUCTION  — 7
posed. Another’s imagery stretched back to the Conquest. Beneath a tableau of
Spanish conquistadors torturing captured Mayan warriors and burning pages
of hieroglyphic script, it read: “They burned our codices and killed our people,
but the flame of our culture was not extinguished; it continues burning.” Yet
another bore images of four weeping women, each captioned: “Pain, Sorrow,
Loneliness” framed the topmost woman’s weathered face, and below the pro-
files to the left and the right appeared “Poverty, Insult, Mistreatment” and “Vi-
olence, Insecurity, Crime.” But it was the 2007 festival’s most visually stunning
kite, a many-­pointed star adorned with swirling licks of color and patterns
evocative of the alfombra carpets lain during Guatemala’s Easter Week, which
featured the most arresting message. “To be born in this immense world filled
with evil is simply to begin to die,” it proclaimed above dramatic, Dalí-­inspired
renderings of winged demons hovering, spectral humans locked in a desper-
ate embrace, and a bleeding world cleaved in twain. “Guatemala,” the kite
affirmed, “lives under the shadows of death.”25 (See fig. Intro1.)
Death and violence in Guatemala are more than artistic metaphors; they
are daily realities that hover uncomfortably close to life. Historically, the
country’s salient features have been a dramatically unequal distribution of
wealth, a semifeudal labor system in which elites forcibly conscripted indige-
nous peasants into debt peonage on farms producing goods for export, a pro-
found anti-­Indian racism (though the census still classifies more than half the
population as “indigenous”), and a long tradition of dictatorship.26 Popular
protest and a general strike deposed the tyrant Jorge Ubico and brought, in
1944, a decade of political opening, free elections, and economic redistribu-
tion referred to as the Revolutionary Spring.27 It was short-­lived. In 1954, the
Central Intelligence Agency (cia), fearing the spread of Soviet-­sponsored
communism and wanting to protect U.S. economic interests, worked with
revanchist local elites to oust the progressive reformist president, Jacobo Ar-
benz.28 A new military dictator, Carlos Castillo Armas, was flown into Guate-
mala on a U.S. embassy airplane to take Arbenz’s place, ushering in decades
of antidemocratic rule. As U.S. assistance flowed into military and police cof-
fers, unrest over successive regimes’ crusades against not just the tiny Marxist
left but also unions, universities, churches, peasant cooperatives, and jour-
nalists exploded into rebellion during the 1960s and 1970s.29 Four insurgent
groups—the Rebel Armed Forces (far), the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (egp),
the Revolutionary Organization of People in Arms (orpa), and the Guatema-
lan Workers’ Party (pgt)—attempted to mobilize first urban and then mass
rural support for revolution against an increasingly murderous state.30 They
united in 1982 under the banner of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary

8  —  INTRODUCTION
FIG. INTRO1  Kite from the Sumpango Sacatepéquez Day of the Dead festival in 2007. It
reads, “Guatemala lives under the shadows of death. To be born in this immense world
filled with evil is simply to begin to die.” Photograph by author.

Unity (urng).31 These groups, and anyone deemed to be their allies—trade

unionists, students, Mayas—were defined as “internal enemies” and became
the targets of a coordinated counterinsurgency effort on the part of the mil-
itary, police, and paramilitary death squads, with the country’s elites using
Cold War rhetoric to justify a full-­spectrum campaign against any form of
democratic opening.32 When all was said and done, the army and police, for-
tified with foreign guns, technical expertise, and political cover, crushed the
weak insurgency and killed or disappeared tens of thousands of civilians.33 The
terms of the Peace Accords, only halfheartedly and partially implemented,
were a better reflection of the insurgency’s near-­total destruction than of the
victors’ will to enact change.34
The bloodbath in the highlands provoked outrage among observers, many
of whom sought to contribute by documenting the crimes to which they bore
witness.35 Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonial memoir, as well as many hundreds
of reports by human rights organizations both inside and outside of Guate-
mala, sought not only to publicize rural violence but to stop it from continu-
ing. Mindful of ongoing repression within the country and the heat of Cold
War anticommunism in the international sphere, these early reports neces-

INTRODUCTION  — 9
sarily minimized guerrilla and militant politics in order to make the more
immediately pressing case about crimes against humanity; the narrative was
simplified, stripped to the heart of the matter (army violence against unaf-
filiated Maya civilians), and framed to make the maximum possible impact
upon the U.S. Congress, interested world citizens, and foreign governments.
This version of the story, one so appalling that it stuck in the minds of peo-
ple around the world, was an important political tool. Moreover, it was true,
and it was substantiated over time by a wealth of forensic and testimonial
evidence.36
It was not, however, the entire story. Not only did it tend to collapse the
complexity of the war into a single type of victim (Maya), a single perpetrator
(the military), and a single theater (the countryside), it stripped the dead of
agency.37 In the postwar period, it produced the ahistorical suggestion that, as
Carlota McAllister writes, “to be counted as victims of the war, Maya had to be
innocent not only of any crime but also of any political agenda.”38 Scholars and
researchers both foreign and local have since amply deepened and expanded
our understandings of this complex conflict, but the sound-bite version of
the war tends, still, to reflect just a few takeaway points: genocidal military,
apolitical Mayas, rural massacres.39
This study has a different focus. The institutional perpetrator explored here
is the National Police—a wartime actor so understudied that mention of it
barely even appears in most accounts—and the theater of conflict examined,
both in wartime and in peacetime, is Guatemala City.40 Founded in 1881 by
liberal dictator Justo Rufino Barrios, the pn tied existing bands of urban gen-
darmes and rural night watchmen into a more cohesive corps that, alongside
the military, defended the interests of private capital. Two of its early directors
were U.S. citizens—José H. Pratt of the New York Police Department and Gus-
tavo Joseph of the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Force—who, fore-
shadowing the 1950s, were brought in to help with professionalization and
training. The historical record’s silence on the pn can be partly explained by
several factors: first, of course, that there were no police records available for
would-­be researchers to use until 2005; second, the common understanding
that the counterinsurgency’s primary architects and executors were the mil-
itary, not the police. The first factor contributed directly to the perception of
the second; while the military was indeed decisively in charge, the police were
still involved in many of the conflict’s defining crimes, which Guatemalans
knew well at the time. Third, the emergence of the Maya movement over the
course of the 1980s and 1990s stimulated interest in writing about the Maya
experience of the war, and indeed, Mayas—including politically mobilized

10  —  INTRODUCTION
Mayas, as Carlota McAllister, Betsy Konefal, and others have shown—made
up a majority of the war’s dead, raped, and displaced.41 This led researchers to
the rural areas where the military’s massacres were concentrated, away from
the urban centers that were the police’s main theater of operations.
There is also a fourth factor, one that brings us back to the political nature
of historical interpretation. The war in Guatemala City involved a different
kind of violence—a surgical, targeted repression against specific sectors of
civil society and popular movements—and often, consequently, a different
kind of victim. Many of the forty-­five thousand Guatemalans who disappeared
during the war had lived and agitated in the capital city. They were trade
unionists, schoolteachers, antipoverty campaigners, labor lawyers, radical stu-
dents, Communist Party members, reformist politicians, liberation theology–
influenced clergy, organizers and fund-­raisers for the insurgency, and yes, in
not a few cases, armed insurgents themselves.42 The urban counterinsurgency,
which featured heavy National Police participation, inflicted disproportion-
ate repression upon thousands of city dwellers whose only crime was to be a
student, a union member, or a victim’s family member searching for her lost
sister or son. It also, however, pursued sectors of society radicalized into fight-
ing and fighting back, self-­consciously and passionately, for revolution. Urban
insurgents blew up police stations and supply convoys, assassinated police and
military officials, and carried out high-­profile kidnappings to draw attention
to their cause and—they hoped—destabilize the state. Popular movement ac-
tivists, organized in labor and student federations, decried the escalation of
state repression and called openly for regime change. They died for it, and
they should not have. They were well aware, however, that they might, and
they knew that their police files would grow thicker with each passing day
of their foreshortened lives. Around the University of San Carlos in the early
1980s, student leaders would half-­jestingly ask each other, “¿A quién le toca
mañana?” (Whose turn will it be [to die] tomorrow?). It was an admission that
they knew what they were getting into, believed in what they stood for, and,
for better or worse, were willing to become martyrs to their cause.43
The war’s victims were not only, we now know, apolitical cannon fodder,
nor was the U.S.-­backed military the only agent of repression, nor did the
entire conflict unfold in the altiplano. Yet these other components of the
story have been comparatively little told in the war’s aftermath, leaving us
with a peculiar paradox: though the police’s counterinsurgent role and the
importance of the war’s urban stages were well understood at the time—as docu­
mented in press and popular movement reports—both of these dynamics
have largely disappeared from subsequent accounts. The discovery of the pn

INTRODUCTION  — 11
archives therefore promises a wealth of opportunities for new analyses and
understandings—about the police’s responsibility for war crimes, about urban
social movements, about the geography of insurgency, about the institutional
and social history of the police and its agents, about changing conceptions of
crime and criminality over time, and more. Also, because of the toll taken by
forced disappearance in Guatemala City, hopes run high, perhaps dangerously
so, that the archives will help bereaved family members to learn what became
of their loved ones, and to prosecute those responsible.
As the records are cleaned, reordered, and digitized—as of January 2013,
some fifteen million pages of the total seventy-­five million had been thus
preserved—these and other stories will be written and rewritten. The Project’s
publication of a hard-­hitting investigative report, Del silencio a la memoria, in
2011 represented an important first thrust. Other voices from the archives are
emerging in various forms, including undergraduate theses written by young
Guatemalans interested in excavating their country’s past. By working toward
the passage of a new national archives system law, building new diploma pro-
grams in archival science and human rights at the national university, sharing
its technical means and expertise with other arms of government and ngos
seeking to preserve their own records, and collaborating on standing war
crimes cases, the Project has argued for archives to occupy a new and different
role in national culture—and, hence, for a different and slightly more equi-
table relationship between citizens and the state. By changing the way Gua-
temala archived, the Project sought to change the way Guatemalans lived.44
It is this trajectory of continuity and change that I have sought to docu-
ment. Consequently, although this work treats the pn’s structural history and
the war in Guatemala City at significant length, it does not purport to be a
complete social history of the police. Rather, I use the archives as a conceptual
bridge with which to connect two very different periods of political ferment:
the armed conflict, and the attempts to grapple with its legacies. As men-
tioned earlier, the pn archives have at different times represented two distinct
archival logics, one of wartime social control and the other of postwar truth
claims and democratic opening. The historical evolution of the first logic into
the next parallels the transition from formal conflict to contractual peace (paz
pactada). I therefore tell the history of the archives as a way of telling the his-
tory of the war, and I conduct an ethnography of the archives and the Project
as a way of narrating the importance of this history in peacetime. In tracking
how the very same raw documents, the police archives, engendered the pro-
duction of very different historical narratives, I expose the interdependence of
history’s two meanings: that which happened and that which is said to have hap-

12  —  INTRODUCTION
pened. In this case, what connects them is the archives. In every case, archives
form stunning articulations of power and knowledge, which must be teased
apart if we are to understand the stories we tell ourselves about the past.

ARCHIVAL THINKING

To put the archives at the center of my work and to consider them as a unit of
analysis unto themselves rather than as a simple repository of historical source
material, I had to learn how to think archivally. Archival thinking, as I define
it, has a dual meaning: first, it is a method of historical analysis, and second,
it is a frame for political analysis.45 These correspond to the dual meanings of
the word “archives” itself: the first denotes collections of objects, often but
not exclusively documents, analyzed for their content; the second refers to
the politicized and contingent state institutions that house said documents.
On the historical side, archival thinking requires us to look past the words
on a document’s page to examine the conditions of that document’s produc-
tion: how it came to exist, what it was used for, what its form reveals, and
what sorts of state knowledge and action it both reflected and engendered.
On the political side, archival thinking demands that we see archives not only
as sources of data to be mined by researchers but also as more than the sum
of their parts—as instruments of political action, implements of state forma-
tion (“technologies of rule”), institutions of liberal democratization, enablers
of gaze and desire, and sites of social struggle.46 Why a particular document
was created and why it was grouped with other documents and kept in order
to constitute an “archives” are mutually dependent questions. Any archive
contains far less than it excludes, as archivists know, and every archive has
its own history—one that conditions the ability to interact with it, write from
it, and understand the larger systems of power, control, and legibility that
record keeping necessarily enables.47 The Enlightenment notions undergird-
ing the concept of state archives, as both a part of and apart from modern
societies, represent these institutions as neutral storehouses of foundational
documents.48 In practice, however, the politics of how archives are compiled,
created, and opened are intimately tied to the politics and practices of gov-
ernance, and are themselves historical in a way that transcends the content
written on their documents’ pages. This is especially so in settings where the
“terror archives” of deposed regimes are reconceived as technologies of jus-
tice and/or components of state (re-­)formation. In order to think archivally,
then, we must place archives—with their histories, their contingencies, their
silences and gaps, and their politics—at the heart of our research questions
rather than simply relegating them to footnotes and parentheses.

INTRODUCTION  — 13
 This work does so by taking the pn archives as its central site of analysis,
examining three different types of work done by the archives at the state,
civil society, and individual levels. At the level of government, these records—
like the military’s records, a prize long fought for by activists—were tools of
counterinsurgent state formation, rendering legible those sectors of society
deemed to be enemies of the state in order to enable their elimination. Polic-
ing is, in its most basic sense, a process by which a state builds an archive of
society. The work of policing—think, for example, of the criminal background
check—would be impossible without the archival tools of fingerprint data-
bases, arrest logs, and categories of circumscribed behavior. Hitched to Cold
War objectives and local elites’ efforts to shut down socioeconomic change,
however, the oppressive power of police records assumed an intensified char-
acter. By producing a massive documentary record about Guatemala and Gua-
temalans, the National Police corps was transformed—with U.S. assistance in
matters archival, technical, political, and material—into the shock troops of
the hemisphere’s most brutal counterinsurgency.
At the civil society level, the records’ current incarnation as the objects of
a revisionist recovery initiative makes them a space in which battered pro-
gressive sectors attempt both to reconstitute and construct themselves anew
through archival practice. Increasingly, human rights activists have come to
phrase their demands upon the state in archival terms: to obtain documentary
access means to obtain truth, and to obtain truth means to obtain justice.
Therefore, documentary access becomes equated with justice, even if the re-
ality remains more complicated. There is no simple equation wherein more
documents equals more truth, or more truth commissions mean more justice,
and though these propositions ring true for a reason, critiques of audit culture
suggest that the declassification of former repressive regimes’ records serves
ill as a mere barometer of state transparency or democratization.49 I pursue a
thornier question with this case study: What does the way a society grapples
with an archive like this—the way it puts history to work—tell us about that
society, its “peace process,” the nature of its institutions, and the fabric of its
relationships between citizens and state?
Finally, at the individual level, the police archives exert power over the
subjectivities of all who come into contact with them. They offer up the ever-­
elusive promise of “revealing the truth” about the war’s dynamics even as the
archive’s sheer dimension creates a totalizing illusion of counterinsurgent
omnipotence, changing and reorganizing survivors’ memories of their own
political participation. As fetishes of the state, they generate desire for the
forbidden state secret, whether a historian’s craving for virgin documenta-

14  —  INTRODUCTION
tion or a survivor’s urgent need to learn how his sister died. But although we
often assume a correlation between archived documents and historical facts,
the police records, like those of any institution, are imperfect, incomplete,
and riddled with misapprehensions and errors. They cannot align with survi-
vors’ memories of the war, owing to questions of perspective and the passage
of time.
It is important to remember that at all three levels, the memory work rep-
resented by the police archives’ rescue is more about knowledge production
than it is about knowledge’s recovery. At all three levels, the archives act—gen-
erating archival subjects, historical narratives, and state practices. I hope that
this book’s position in the interstitial space between history and anthropology,
and its development of the concept of archival thinking, will encourage his-
torians to think more ethnographically—and anthropologists to think more
historically—about archives.
In the Guatemalan case, the conditions and contingencies of how these
archives came to be both an implement of wartime social control and a site of
postconflict empowerment tell us much not only about the country’s history
but more broadly about the conduct of the Cold War in Latin America. As the
United States initiated police assistance programs in countries seen as po-
tential “dominoes,” its advisers in Guatemala focused specifically on security
forces’ need to improve their archival surveillance methods, enabling them
to more effectively eradicate “subversion.”50 As Stoler reminds us, “Filing
systems and disciplined writing produce assemblages of control and specific
methods of domination.”51 And yet, the role of archival practice in the mili-
tarization of modern regimes is rarely considered by scholars, despite a raft of
excellent studies on the uses of archives for social control in various colonial
administrations.52 This study argues for the integration of archives and ar-
chival surveillance into the pantheon of more obvious tools of international
Cold War political influence. After all, the work of containment was not only
carried out with guns, helicopters, and development programs: it was also
carried out with three-­by-­five-­inch index cards, filing cabinets, and training
in records management. Archives, in Guatemala and elsewhere, were another
front in the global Cold War.
This examination of archives’ counterinsurgent uses also provides insight
into postconflict transitions and societies’ efforts to reckon with civil war’s
corrosive legacies. It demonstrates how a society’s “archival culture”—the atti-
tudes it fosters about archival access, and how citizens can conceive of putting
information to use—is a revelatory indicator of the relationship between state
and society, one that changes over time. Put simply, we can discern a lot about

INTRODUCTION  — 15
a society, particularly a postwar society, by looking at how that society treats
its archives. As cultural theorist Jacques Derrida writes, “There is no political
power without control of the archive, if not memory. Effective democrati-
zation can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation
in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.”53 Ac-
cordingly, I use archival thinking to explore both the technologies of political
repression and the practices of social reconstruction being deployed by survi-
vors working to marshal the same body of records for different ends.
Guatemalans’ practices of postwar social reconstruction have been multi­
farious; the rescue of the pn archives is simply a bright and recent star in
a larger constellation of initiatives. As Mario Castañeda writes, “Memory is
actualized in struggle, in rebellion, in the negation of our society’s status quo,”
a notion that has produced enduring battles referred to by one activist group
as a “memory offensive.”54 “Memory,” here, is defined not as passive or recu-
perative but as active and engaged. The memory offensive has taken forms as
diverse as escrache-­style public denunciations of ex-­generals; research projects
on social movement history; efforts at criminal prosecution; raising public
awareness through historical education; demonstrations and counterdemon-
strations (for example, the annual protest march every 30 June, attempting
to rebrand Army Day); exhumations of mass graves and inhumations of iden-
tified remains; the building of local museums and memorials; and ongoing
work to combat corporate mineral extraction on Maya community land and
oppose drug war–related rural remilitarization.55 Within this array of prac-
tices, however, certain moments stand out as landmarks: the release of the
Archbishop’s Office on Human Rights report Guatemala: Never Again! in 1998;
the publication of the ceh report in 1999; the leak of a high-­impact army dos-
sier dubbed the “Death-­Squad Diary,” or Diario Militar, in 1999; and, I submit
here, the rescue of the National Police archives.56 This book explores how
the Project fit into this broader memoryscape, drew strength from previous
initiatives, and laid the groundwork for subsequent advances.
This book is thus far the only one documenting the process by which terror
archives are recovered, but this line of inquiry has regional and global reso-
nance. As Louis Bickford wrote a decade ago, “An emphasis on archival pres-
ervation is often not explicitly highlighted as a key ingredient to deepening de-
mocracy and the long-­term vibrancy of democratic practices in countries that
have experienced traumatic pasts.”57 In recent years, however, an emphasis
on preserving and declassifying archives documenting human rights abuses—
and archives in general—has increasingly been folded into post­authoritarian
strategies that previously focused more on lustration, the building of monu-

16  —  INTRODUCTION
ments, or securing apologies, though much distance remains to be covered.
In virtually every country of Central and Eastern Europe, including the for-
mer East Germany, Serbia, Romania, and the former Czechoslovakia, politi-
cal change impelled popular demands for access to secret police records, and
Germany’s decision to open the Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, archives
after reunification was influential.58 In 1997, the United Nations Commission
on Human Rights adopted the Principles for the Protection and Promotion
of Human Rights through Action to Combat Impunity. They included five
principles on the “preservation of and access to archives bearing witness to
violations,” developed by jurists Louis Joinet and Diane Orentlicher, which es-
tablished norms for victims’, prosecutors’, defendants’, and researchers’ access
to archives containing information about human rights abuses.59
Latin American countries have now taken the Joinet-­Orentlicher princi-
ples and run with them. In 1992, Paraguay’s “Terror Archives”—the records
of its secret police during the Stroessner dictatorship—were discovered, pro-
cessed, and used in the country’s truth commission.60 (In 2009 they were
integrated into the Memory of the World archival register of the United Na-
tions Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [unesco], which as
of that same year also included Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge records, collected by
the Documentation Center of Cambodia and made accessible to researchers
at the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh.)61 In 2008 in Uruguay,
President Tabaré Vázquez created the National Archives of Remembrance to
make accessible records from more than a decade of military rule.62 In Brazil
in 2009, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva ordered the creation of the web-
site “Memories Revealed,” where his administration published declassified
army records from the country’s twenty-­year dictatorship.63 In January 2010,
Argentina ordered the declassification of military records from its Dirty War
and reversed its amnesty law for army officials.64 Also in 2010, Chile’s Mi-
chelle Bachelet inaugurated the Memory Museum; it features a large library
documenting the years of the dictatorship, during which Bachelet herself was
tortured.65
Beyond the Americas, Spanish president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero
passed a decree in 2008, part of his Historical Memory Laws, allowing Franco
victims to retrieve documents about their families from the Spanish Civil War
archives.66 Farther east, the Iraq Memory Foundation today works to compile
and preserve documentation from the long years of Ba’athist repression. (Its
efforts are complicated by the fact that the U.S. military seized great quantities
of Hussein-­era intelligence files upon occupying Baghdad, and more were
destroyed in the fighting.)67 These many recent examples are inter­related,

INTRODUCTION  — 17
as nations at different stages of postconflict reckoning use each other’s best
and worst practices as models for their own approaches, with assistance from
transnational networks of human rights ngos.68 In the wake of the Arab
Spring, activists in Tunisia and Egypt, too, moved to secure the archives of
fallen regimes with an eye toward their future use. One journalist reported
from Tunis that an “unassuming whitewashed building . . . [is] crammed full
of explosive material potentially more damaging, or vital, to Tunisia’s demo-
cratic experiment than any incendiary device. The structure is not an armory
packed with weapons. It houses the long-­secret archives of the country’s once-­
dreaded Interior Ministry.”69
In the Guatemalan case, the National Police archives are a microcosm of
the country’s larger postwar dynamics: their existence denied, their redis-
covery accidental, their future uncertain due to the threats faced by “human
rights” initiatives in the country, their rescue initially completely ad hoc in
the absence of government capacity or political will to exercise its constitu-
tional responsibility over them, their processing funded entirely from abroad.
The conditions of the police records in 2005 offered a sobering snapshot
of the “peacetime” landscape; their recovery has provided another, capturing
the incremental, hard-­fought nature of political change on the ground. The
archives’ double nature thus reflects the tremendous tension of post–Peace
Accords Guatemala. On the one hand, as Guatemalans know well, there has
been so little substantive change; on the other hand, the very existence of the
archival recovery initiative, however beset by challenges it has been, testifies
to how much political opening has been achieved. As one activist commented
to me, “Even ten years ago, they would have killed all the people working in
a project like that.”70
It is partly for this reason that archivist Eric Ketelaar likens archives to both
temples and prisons. “In all totalitarian systems—public and private—records
are used as instruments of power, of extreme surveillance, oppression, torture,
murder,” he writes. “The records themselves are dumb, but without them the
oppressor is powerless.” Following Foucault, he suggests that the panoptical
archive of a terror state serves a carceral purpose, imprisoning society by mak-
ing it known that the state is always watching and always filing; but, he notes,
“paradoxically, the same records can also become instruments of empower-
ment and liberation, salvation and freedom”—they can serve as temples, as
“safe havens,” once the terror state falls.71 This has certainly been the case in the
post facto repurposing of the terror archives kept by, for example, the Nazis,
the Stasi, the Khmer Rouge, or the kgb. However, close ethnographic atten-
tion to the process by which that repurposing takes place reveals the temples/

18  —  INTRODUCTION
prisons dyad to be less black-­and-­white than we might wish. To be able to
resurrect a paper cadaver in postwar Guatemala—to learn what became of
a desaparecido, or identify a desaparecido’s remains, or write and reveal new
histories—is a gift of inestimable value, a temple’s treasure indeed. But for all
that, what is rescued remains a paper cadaver, not a citizen: a testament to the
repression suffered by that citizen, a thin and tragic representation of a once-­
full life, and a less-­than-­liberatory reminder that the military state succeeded
in forcing social struggle off the shop floors and university campuses, down
from the mountains, and into the filing cabinets. To walk the halls of a state’s
prison-­turned-­temple is a worthy goal for any citizenry; however, the salvation
and freedom thus offered can necessarily only be partial, for the deeds chron-
icled in the archives have already taken place. The right to truth is critically
important, but not more so than the violated right to life.
The National Police archives, we shall see, have many stories to tell, and
most are not expressly written on its documents’ pages. They are stories of
politics, of collective action, of painful separations and reunions, of sacrifices
made, of states and of people, of resistance and silencing and loss, of survival.
Those engaged in trying to tell such stories carry out their historical work
with the goal of a more democratic contemporary politics, and even the most
impassioned advocates of a process referred to in Guatemala as “the recovery
of historical memory” know that their efforts at rewriting history look more
to the future than to the past. As Walter Benjamin has written, “To articulate
what is past does not mean to recognize ‘how it really was.’ It means to take
control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.”72 Historical memory
cannot be “recovered” like data in a computer file; by its very nature, memory
is a shape-­shifter, morphing once an analytical gaze is brought to bear upon
it.73 Instead, memory’s recovery is, fundamentally, about power. In this case,
engaging the politics of memory is a way for a battered activist sector to artic-
ulate archival truth claims, seek reparations both material and symbolic, and
reconstruct itself as the country’s political conscience.74 History and memory
allow for the reivindicación (redemption) of the war’s victims and the remak-
ing of its survivors, both essential if Guatemala is to have any hope of building
a more just society.

METHODOLOGY

In writing this book, my goals were twofold: first, to participate in the collab-
orative initiative of revealing new histories of repression and resistance, and
second, to trace and analyze the process by which Guatemalans themselves
made sense of the police records, their memories, their postconflict lives, and

INTRODUCTION  — 19
their visions for an uncertain future. When I began this work, it was not at all
clear that I would emerge with anything. The first week I arrived to do pre-
liminary research as a Project volunteer, in April 2006, unknown individuals
threw a Molotov cocktail into the archives site under cover of darkness, mak-
ing both front-­page headlines and the point that the documents’ survival was
hardly guaranteed (see fig. Intro2). A few months later, a group of uniformed
army generals marched into the pdh, demanding that the Project’s director
be fired and that they be given access to the Project’s personnel information.
These were the sorts of hazards one expected, and they underscored activists’
fears that their archival rescue effort would be shut down for political reasons.
But other threats to the archives’ safety came as surprises. In February 2007,
a hundred-­foot-­deep sinkhole, resembling the crater an asteroid might pound
into the earth, tore open Guatemala City’s Zone 6. The result of poor plumbing
infrastructure, the yawning sinkhole just around the corner from the archives
devoured an entire city block and several area residents overnight. It could
easily have taken the precious police papers along with it. Despite the uncer-
tain outcome, I soldiered on, as we all do when we believe in the importance
of the task.
To reconstruct the U.S. role in producing a counterinsurgent National Po-
lice, with attention to the role of archival production, I used records from the
State Department, the Department of Defense, the cia, the National Security
Agency, the National Security Council, and the U.S. Agency for International
Development (usaid), particularly its Office of Public Safety. It bears high-
lighting that many of the records pertaining to this period and area of inquiry
remain significantly redacted or classified altogether, underscoring the fact
that state secrecy and hermetism where information is concerned are hardly
the sole purview of the global South—as Chelsea Manning and the protagonists
of Wikileaks, among others, might well attest if they were not in hiding or in
prison. On the war more generally, I consulted long runs of Guatemalan news-
papers; military and police publications; insurgents’ communiqués and inter-
nal correspondence; student pamphlets and publications; guerrilla memoirs
and testimonies; presidential speeches and radio addresses; Inter-­American
Court on Human Rights cases; reports from watchdog organizations like Hu-
man Rights Watch and Amnesty International; foreign police training manuals;
and more. I complemented this documentary research with perspectives and
memories shared by the older workers at the archival recovery project.
Much of my research was ethnographic as well, involving extended partici­
pant observation and interviews both formal and informal. I accompanied
the Project as a volunteer worker, observer, translator, and colleague from

20  —  INTRODUCTION
FIG. INTRO2  Early Molotov cocktail attacks at the police archives made front-­page headlines.
La Hora, 11 May 2006.

the spring of 2006 onward. Before doing my own formal research, I worked
full-­time for six months (May–July 2006 and June–August 2007) as a Project
volunteer, the only foreigner to work as an everyday, rank-­and-­file member
of the team. For the first stint, I worked on a historical analysis team gener-
ating preliminary reports on the pn’s clandestine and semiclandestine units
and death squads, including Commando Six (Comando Seis) and the Spe-
cial Operations Reaction Brigade (broe). For the second, I was a member
of the team processing the records of the Joint Operations Center (Centro
de Operaciones Conjuntas), the entity serving as the primary conduit for
police-­military communications. During these months on staff, I was able to
experience for myself the range of emotions engendered by this painstaking
work: the pride and excitement of finding a document of real importance,
the anger and sadness provoked by nonstop reading about violence and vice,
the boredom and frustration of long days spent sifting through bureaucratic
minutiae. It was only after this initial phase, which also included a shorter
visit in January 2007 and volunteer work on a compilation of declassified U.S.
documents sent to the Project by the National Security Archive that same
year, that I began conducting my own research, mostly during the 2007–2008
academic year when I lived in Guatemala City. I thus became, in a sense, a tiny

INTRODUCTION  — 21
part of the story. My early contributions to the historical analysis team were
mixed into the basic building blocks of the Project’s eventual, and much more
substantial, public report on its findings. As a translator, I mediated a number
of the interactions between international technical advisers and Project staff
from 2006 to 2008. Most memorably, in one interview I conducted outside
the Project I received an off-­the-­record tip about a warehouse full of forgotten
police records in the town of Puerto Barrios. Passing the tip along led to the
recovery and incorporation of thousands more documents into the archives
(though not before a suspicious arson incident nearly derailed the process).
Finally, of course, I am also part of the surge of international interest in the
Project, placing me among a cohort whose commitment to assisting the Proj-
ect carried its own imperial baggage and transnational power dynamics, key
elements of the story too.
In addition to the archival research mentioned previously, I conducted doz-
ens of interviews with the Project’s workers and the figures involved in its orbit—
in government, the diplomatic corps, and the human rights sector—and I took
part in the Project’s everyday life for a year and a half, watching it evolve and
struggle and grow. This allowed me to observe the process of reconstituting
the archives, work that expanded Project staffers’ political consciousnesses
and senses of themselves as political actors, contributors to a larger democ-
ratizing initiative, and opponents of an official history that had marginalized
and criminalized popular agency. Many Project compañeros and compañeras
had high hopes for the archives. They also struggled, however, with what Jelin
calls “the labors of memory”—the active, demanding work of managing resur-
gent traumas, psychological burdens, and memories stirred by sorting through
the archives, reading about violence for eight hours daily, and finding loved
ones’ names or photographs.75 My interviews with Project workers took place
all over the city, in bars and cafés and shopping malls and private homes, but
I conducted the majority of them at the archives—a challenging environment
for many reasons, not least of which being that it remains an active police
base. The sounds of gunshots from the adjacent police firing range or barking
dogs from the nearby canine unit are heard throughout my recordings, yet
another testament to the tensions of the Project’s workplace. There are pauses
in the tapes, or moments of hushed whispering, when interviewees would see
an officer walk by or thought one was within earshot. The interviews were
thus conditioned by the same sense of unease and instability pervading both
everyday life in Guatemala City and these amateur historians’ particular line
of work. As such, I have protected their identities; individuals are identified in
the text by pseudonyms and in the notes by interview code number.

22  —  INTRODUCTION
 While I have had the privilege of reading, both as a volunteer and in sub-
sequent visits, many thousands of documents from the pn archives, my work
here does not involve engaging the archives as a historian customarily might.
I wanted to document the process, not to process the documents. This was
why the Project gave me such unparalleled access to its work and workers so
early on, in the spring of 2006. I was allowed to join the team precisely—and
only—because its leaders believed that it could help to have an on-­site foreign
observer present to document its efforts, and because I offered to work at the
service of the Guatemalans’ priorities before following my own. Had I asked
for research access in 2006, or 2007, or 2008, I would have been denied (as
others were), with good reason. Aside from the fact that the archives’ state
of disorder at that time made traditional historical research impossible, the
Project was operating with a very low profile, hoping to avoid the release of
any information that could provoke retaliatory attacks. At that point, even
family members of the dead and disappeared were being refused access to
the records; it was not a queue I was interested in jumping. As a result, all
staffers, myself included, signed confidentiality agreements promising not to
divulge anything about the documents’ contents.76 (Access has subsequently
been opened to the approximately fifteen million documents that have been
digitized; many historical studies will emerge from that body of documenta-
tion in the not-­too-­distant future.)
I constantly struggled with the challenge of making my research useful to
the Guatemalans who had extended me such trust. “We need to have a high
international profile, so that nobody can come and shut us down for knowing
too much,” one Project worker told me.77 I hope I have repaid their faith in
some small sense not only by honoring the confidentiality agreement I was
asked to sign (which is to say, I have not quoted from documents I saw while
the agreement was in effect, though I do use documents subsequently made
public), but by writing a book that argues strenuously for both the historical
and the contemporary relevance of their work. My central preoccupation was
to make the case for this history’s importance, and by extension for the im-
portance of historical and archival knowledge to the conduct of contemporary
politics. I wanted to trace the remaking of these archives from the ground up
because I knew instinctively that once that process concluded, its messiness
and complexity would forever be lost as the archives were transformed into
an institution, a success story—considered a fait accompli, like so many of the
other archives that historians visit. We would have a new historical narrative
about the war—the one being generated by the archive’s rescuers—but no ac-
count of the process by which that narrative was produced or of those actors’

INTRODUCTION  — 23
stake in it, and hence no sense of the powerful relationship between the two
types of history.

STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION

In keeping with the dialectical structure outlined here, whereby I explore the
tension between the two archival logics applied to the National Police doc-
uments over time, this study introduces the circumstances of the archives’
discovery, closely examines both logics, and then turns to the synthesis pro-
duced over time by their opposition. The book is structured in four parts:
“Explosions at the Archives” (chapters 1 through 3), “Archives and Counter-
insurgency in Cold War Guatemala” (chapters 4 and 5), “Archives and Social
Reconstruction in Postwar Guatemala” (chapters 6 and 7), and “Pasts Present
and the Future Imperfect” (chapters 8 and 9).
Chapter 1 narrates the early days of the archives’ reappearance, charting
the beginnings of the rescue initiative and the Project’s evolving ideas about
how to build new knowledge about the armed conflict and the police’s role in
it. It shows how this process was microcosmic of larger questions about war
and postwar political struggle. Chapter 2 demonstrates that rather than being
a stroke of random luck, the discovery and marshaling of the pn archives were
instead the culmination of decades of activism over access to state security
records. These “archive wars,” as I term them, established important prece-
dents that informed how the pn archives would be put to use, and I outline
the trajectory of the archive wars while also assessing the role of archival ac-
cess in authoritarian societies. Chapter 3 returns to the Project, narrating its
conversion from an ad hoc, scrappy effort into the professionalized and more
stable initiative it would become. It attempts to answer the “million-­dollar
question” of why the archives were never destroyed by authorities while they
had the chance.
Chapters 4 and 5 form a pair: by stepping back in time to analyze the role
of the police and their archives in the conduct of the counterinsurgency, they
show how the pn records acquired their power. (As the archivists at the Proj-
ect quickly learned, one must understand the police’s structural history in or-
der to interpret the documents.) Chapter 4 reaches back to a decisive moment
in the history of the pn: the 1954 overthrow of Arbenz and the subsequent
initiation of a large-­scale U.S. assistance program that converted the pn from
a ramshackle assortment of thugs into a professionalized counterinsurgency
apparatus. It examines the construction and use of the police archives histor-
ically, arguing that archival technologies were essential components of the
state’s campaign against civil unrest. Chapter 5 continues the story of the pn

24  —  INTRODUCTION
past the termination of direct U.S. police aid in 1974, arguing that the dramatic
failure of security reform in the postwar era is a function of the pn’s own insti-
tutional history. It traces the structural genealogy of the pn’s militarized, semi-
official wings, demonstrating how these structures were never dismantled and
today continue to participate in extralegal activities like social cleansings and
politically motivated executions. It introduces the term “post-­peace” to de-
scribe Guatemala’s unstable, violent postwar status quo.
Chapters 6 and 7 also form a pair, ethnographically following the experi-
ences of the workers at the archival recovery project. Chapter 6, which fo-
cuses on the experiences of older-­generation leftists working at the Project,
argues that these veterans have played an instrumental role in the production
of new narratives about the conflict’s history. It also explores how working
in the archives has impacted these survivors’ subjectivities, generating new
opportunities for social reconstruction and reckoning while reopening old
wounds. Chapter 7 examines the experiences of the younger workers at the
Project, a large group of under-­thirty individuals who lived the war as children
and who today bridge the conflict and postconflict eras. It shows how their
time at the archives shaped their emerging senses of self, transforming some
of them into lifelong activists. It argues that among the archives’ greatest im-
pacts on Guatemala may prove to be the formación of more than one hundred
politically conscious youth leaders committed not only to postwar justice but
also to privileging archival preservation and historical reconstruction in their
visions for the future.
The final two chapters discuss other archival recovery initiatives, interna-
tional collaborations, legal advances, and educational endeavors sparked by
the Project. Chapter 8 looks at the ontological shift undergone by the police
archives since 2005: from a ragtag project in the process of becoming a usable
archive, through a dangerous historical moment in which the Project was
nearly destroyed altogether, into the established Historical Archive for the Na-
tional Police—an institutionalized state of being. It examines what that shift
both promised and portended for national politics. Chapter 9 discusses the
landmark legal advances from 2010 on to which the police archives contrib-
uted; exceptions that prove the rule, these successful few cases and the her-
culean efforts to secure them suggest that a fuller reckoning with Guatemala’s
history will be hard-­won. The charged debates surrounding these legal cases
speak to the connections between a society’s archival culture, its engagement
with historical knowledge, and its political conditions. They demonstrate both
the possibilities and the limitations of archival thinking.
As one Project worker once told me, “Human beings need to write their

INTRODUCTION  — 25
own histories.”78 This book defends that proposition, while demonstrating that
in delicate postconflict settings where the politics of history remain deadly
serious, the act of doing so represents personal risk, collective courage, and,
above all, a tremendous amount of labor. Project workers have worked, ad-
mirably and against the odds, to resurrect their country’s paper cadavers in
the hope of charting a new path forward. I wrote this book in the service of
that larger aspiration: to resurrect lost archives, lost narratives, and, however
abstractly, lost lives.

26  —  INTRODUCTION
 PART I EXPLOSIONS AT THE ARCHIVES
 on e EXCAVATING BABYLON

While some of us debate what history is or was, others take

it in their own hands.
—Michel-­Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

T
hough today’s National Police archives site gleams with fresh paint
and new flooring, hums with the noise of high-­speed scanners, and
bustles with the energy of young workers and awed visitors, it was
not always so. When investigators from the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Of-
fice (pdh) stumbled upon the archives in July 2005, what they found was,
according to one of the first to see it, “impossible to describe.”1 There was an
aura of decay about the massive unfinished structure, occupied only by small
armies of rats and bats and reeking of mold and mildew, where detainees had
once been regularly tortured to death. It lay in a scrubby field carpeted with
overgrown weeds and ringed by heaps of scrapped cars. The papers it housed
seemed endless, crude bundles by the millions spotted with vermin feces and
cockroach carcasses, their hand-­scrawled labels barely visible beneath years of
dust, with puddles of cloudy water seeping up into the piles of paper and rot-
ting them from within. The space summoned to mind images of entrapment:
a concrete labyrinth, a warren of windowless cells, a zone of haunting and
sepulchre. At the back of the edifice, humidity and neglect had conspired such
that verdant plant life coiled up the walls, sprouted from within the masses of
paper blanketing the earth, and hung down from the ceiling in long fronds.
This last, the Project’s assistant director remembered, “was why we gave that
room the name ‘Babylon.’ ”2
The metaphor was apt, for the archives—even in their putrefaction and in-
credible dimension, and perhaps all the more so for it—represented, to many
Guatemalans, their very own wonder of the world. The archives’ existence had
been denied for years at the highest levels of government, and their reappear-
ance, therefore, came as a shock.3 They seemed at once to confirm long-­held
suspicions and to challenge assumptions about the traces left behind by state
 Photograph by James Rodríguez, mimundo.org. Used by permission of
FIG. 1.1 
the photographer.

terror. Upon hearing of the find, people tended to have one of two reactions:
to assume, based on the belief that such records had always existed and had
been meticulously kept, that the archives would reveal great truths, or else to
wonder why the records had never been destroyed and speculate that their
neglect spoke to their lack of incriminating information. Would the archives
open a new window into the past, or would they disappoint?
To find out, one thing was required: work. To make sense of what was esti-
mated to be eighty million pages of records, all manner of work—in forms un-
foreseen by those who rolled up their sleeves in the earliest days—would need
to be done. Grappling with the archives, a natural flash point for both interest
and opposition, would ultimately require lobbying, funding, training, alliance-­
building, security, technology, staffing, supplies, perseverance, and hope. And
though these varied types of work would eventually be performed by a team
of more than two hundred Guatemalans, using state-­of-­the-­art methods and
aided by an enthusiastic network of international allies and donors, what be-
came the Project for the Recovery of the National Police Historical Archives
began as a tiny handful of volunteers with little more than shovels, an abiding
faith, and a deep sense of their own histories.
Anthropologist Michel-­Rolph Trouillot writes that conventional theories
of history ignore how most history is produced outside of academia; “we are

30  —  CHAPTER ONE

all,” he reminds us, “amateur historians with various degrees of awareness
about our production.”4 The staffers of the Project, over time, became not only
amateur historians but also amateur archivists; these amateur historians and
archivists sought, by rescuing the archives, to illuminate occluded stories from
forty years’ worth of civil strife. With backgrounds in activism, they knew the
road ahead would not be easy. They were painfully aware of the conditions
that had produced them as historians, witnesses, and human rights defenders;
they were, likewise, painfully aware of the difficult conditions brought to bear
upon their attempts to reclaim their histories. As Project workers—many of
them veterans of the gutted Left, or else veterans’ children—rebuilt the ar-
chives, they also built power; in learning to “think archivally,” they came to
claim physical and intellectual control over documents that had once been
used to control them.5
But we have not yet arrived at that part of the story. To get there, we must
follow the messy, uncertain path taken by our small group of volunteers at the
outset, as they repeatedly confronted the same daunting questions: What, in
a place like Guatemala, was to be done with an archive like this? What was
possible, or thinkable, or even dreamable? Could the archives even be saved,
much less put to use? What would it take, and what resources were available?
Precisely because the Project stands, at the time of this writing, as an odds-­
defying success story, one might be forgiven for assuming that the road to such
success, while perhaps long or slow, was mostly straight and linear, and that
its travelers initially set out with a well-­labeled map and the guiding compass
of established precedent. Reality, of course, is rarely so simple—but, at the
very least, it is usually far more interesting. With this in mind, part I of this
book tells the story of the Project, first in its earliest days and then through
its consolidation from an uncertain labor of love into a veritable institution
with scientific bonafides, management hierarchies, an international reputa-
tion, and a critical role to play in a rapidly evolving national conversation
about archives, human rights, and justice. The Project’s journey out of Baby-
lon, chronicled here, demonstrated the dizzying stakes of archives: not simply
collections of dusty papers consulted by the odd professional historian but
rather hotly contested shreds of information and evidence that could make
or shatter families, legal processes, and national histories.6 Along the way,
we see how the erstwhile Cold War logic of these documents—their “prose
of counterinsurgency”—was leveraged through blood, sweat, and tears into
a different logic, one of agency and aperture.7 The archives’ rescue and insti-
tutionalization represent the fulfillment of its workers’ and leaders’ dreams
that they could bequeath to future generations a set of tools that could never

EXCAVATING BABYLON   — 31

be broken and truths that could never be disappeared. But it is the preceding
period, the interregnum between improvisation and institutionalization, that
shows us the fundamentally processual character of historical production. The
rebuilding of the pn archives by activists seeking to make truth-­claims upon
a contemporary state is nothing less than an object lesson in how, as Trouillot
argues, “what history is matters less than how history works.”8

NARRATIVES OF DISCOVERY, ENCOUNTER, AND CONQUEST

Amateur historians emerged as key actors later, but fate smiled upon the Gua-
temalan human rights community the day it sent a professional historian to
investigate reports of improperly stored explosives on a police base. In June
2005, a series of massive explosions at Guatemala City’s Mariscal Zavala mil-
itary base lit up the night sky in Zones 5, 6, 17, and 18, filling the already
pollution-­thick air with toxic smoke. The weapons, more than a ton of projec-
tiles left over from the war, had detonated at a rate of thirty per minute over
four long hours, spurring mass evacuations from the surrounding neighbor-
hoods.9 When the dust had settled and the poisonous gas cleared, the pdh
fielded a raft of complaints from local residents, who lived wedged between
Mariscal Zavala and the National Civil Police’s own arms storage facility, and
into whose homes the blast’s debris tumbled. Fearing a similar explosion at
the pnc’s munitions depot, the pdh immediately filed a request for the pnc to
remove all explosive materials from its Zone 6 warehouse. Three weeks later,
it sent investigators to the pnc installations to verify compliance and conduct
a risk assessment of the surrounding area. It turned out that the explosives
were still on-­site, but they were not all that was to be found there.
The head of the pdh’s investigations unit, Edeliberto Cifuentes, was the
affable former head of the School of History at the University of San Carlos,
a garrulous intellectual writing a biography of Guatemalan historian Severo
Martínez Pelaez in his spare time. “Our standing orders at the Investigations
Unit are to look at everything that can be seen, in order to find what can’t be
seen,” Cifuentes related, sounding like a professor advising a young researcher
on methods. After establishing the pnc’s failure to remove the munitions,
the pdh team set about examining the surroundings, looking for flammable
materials that might increase the blast radius of an inadvertent detonation.
They found heaps of junked cars, many with gasoline still in their tanks; they
identified a school, a health center, and many private homes that would have
been affected by a putative blast; and they saw papers, bundles upon bundles
of papers piled up against the interior windows of the pnc office building. The
thought that jumped first to their minds, which were focused on assessing

32  —  CHAPTER ONE

risks, was that these papers represented a lot of flammable material. When
Cifuentes asked the ranking pnc official there, Ana Corado, what sorts of pa-
pers these were and in what quantity they could be found, she replied, simply,
“These are the archives of the National Police.”
Corado made no attempt to hide the archives from the pdh; instead, she
gave the investigators a full tour, one not unlike the tour today given to visiting
donors and researchers, and explained where different bodies of documen-
tation were stored—high-­impact political cases here, administrative records
there. When Corado led them to the warehouse’s second floor, a vast chamber
brimming with what Cifuentes described as “huge volcanoes of documents”
spilling forth from rusty filing cabinets and buckled wooden shelves, the in-
vestigators realized what they had found. “It was very much an emotional
reaction,” Cifuentes recalled. “Because you can imagine, when one finds a
document, a piece of information that is key in the construction of a case or
a story or an investigation, that’s one thing. But to find all of this documenta-
tion there—you say to yourself, this is a treasure that will help us to construct
enormous histories. . . . My emotional reaction was that of a historian!”10
Cifuentes returned to the pdh and told his colleague Carla Villagrán of the
news; she, the head of the pdh Analysis Unit, went upstairs and shared the
news with Sergio Morales, the ombudsman. The ombudsman’s office, an in-
stitution based around the figure of a congressionally appointed human rights
defender, was created in 1985 as part of the “transition to democracy.”11 The
ombudsman’s mandate included securing evidence related to human rights
abuses and conducting investigations accordingly; Morales understood the
stakes of what his team had found and how his mandate permitted him to
act.12 The pdh could not customarily bring cases before the courts; that duty
fell to the Public Ministry (mp), though the pdh could investigate cases and
present its findings to the mp for its own use in prosecutions. There were,
however, a handful of exceptions to this rule: casos de averiguación especial,
special cases in which prosecutorial authority was ceded to the pdh’s Special
Cases Unit by the Supreme Court in the event of obvious state responsibility.
One such case, the 1981 abduction of fourteen-­year-­old Marco Antonio Molina
Thiessen, provided Morales with proximate cause to secure the archives in
search of evidence.13 The day after the pdh team’s visit to the base, its (un-
armed) members were sent back to guard the archives against any attempts to
enter the site or remove documents until the pdh could take custody of them.
Morales’s judgment call, for the pdh to assume responsibility for the ar-
chives, was bold. He believed that “if we hadn’t taken control of them, the ar-
chives would have remained, discarded, on that site until the moment when a

EXCAVATING BABYLON   — 33

 A National Civil Police agent toils among the documents. Photograph by
FIG. 1.2 
Daniel Hernández-­Salazar. Used by permission of the photographer.
bulldozer or tractor would have been sent to demolish the building and make
way for something new. I think the archives would have been lost.”14 But his
move raised serious questions. There was no precedent in Guatemala—or in
Latin America—for finding such an immense cache of secret state documents.
The pdh had neither funds to contribute nor any staff trained in archival
methods; it was certainly not the proper institution to steward a mammoth
documentary recovery project. However, Guatemala’s national archives—the
Archivo General de Centroamérica (agca), to which the task of rescuing the
records constitutionally fell—was grievously underfunded and understaffed.
The entire country was then home to fewer than ten certified archivists. It was
difficult to know where to begin. Very little was known about the National
Police—its structures, modes of operation, or forms of organization. And the
pregnant sense of political threat, the risk that any attempt to delve into the
police’s past would invite retribution from the same entrenched powers who
regularly attacked human rights defenders, only amplified the uncertainties.15
As a result, competing narratives about the archives’ importance jostled
for prominence from the beginning. State security forces and their represen-
tatives played down the discovery; interior minister Carlos Vielman scoffed,
“Of course we have records. We are the police!”16 Corado, the pnc official in
charge of the archives, was also puzzled by the idea that the papers under her
watch were a momentous “discovery,” though for different reasons. Corado,
soft-­spoken and bespectacled, had been sent to join the team of mostly female
agents toiling at the archives six months before the pdh arrived. This was no
honor; being relegated to the archives, known within the pnc as el basurero,
or “the dump,” was considered a punishment. “I had a superior who didn’t
like me and he ordered that I be transferred somewhere where he’d never
have to see me again,” she recalled.17 Just days before Cifuentes searched her
workplace, Corado had been told by a superior to burn records that were no
longer in use; the day the ombudsman took custody of the archives, the same
superiors threatened her with termination if she gave any information to the
pdh. To her credit, Corado disobeyed both directives.
Despite these efforts to silence both her own voice and that of the docu-
ments, however, she maintained that the archives were never “secret” in the
way that activists claimed. “What happened is that since nobody knew that
this archive existed, that’s why lots of people said it was . . . closed. But this ar-
chive has never been closed, it’s always been open,” she said. She asserted that
prior to the pdh’s arrival, anyone could have solicited access to the records,
though she conceded that the documents’ disorganization rendered “access”
a practical fiction. Nonetheless, the political decision taken by the Arzú gov-

EXCAVATING BABYLON   — 35

ernment to refuse archival access to the un truth commission diverged from
the reality on the ground, in which the records rotted away in neglect. (The
implications for citizens’ access were the same.) Bereft of supplies or training,
Corado and her team scavenged string and cardboard from their own homes
to start bundling the papers, simply assuming that nobody was interested in
the records beyond the group of women consigned to caring for them. “For
me, this isn’t garbage,” Corado attested, “it’s a treasure.”18 She thought she was
alone in her opinion, though, because for her superiors the archives were a
problem—not a political problem, but rather one of storage. Interest in free-
ing up the space occupied by the papers impelled Corado’s predecessor to even
phone the national archives (agca) and inquire about which papers could
legally be destroyed. The agca team, led by its soon-­to-­be director Anna Carla
Ericastilla, was invited to conduct a full assessment of the archives—welcomed
and given unfettered access to the records—more than six months before the
pdh’s arrival on the scene. “So the word ‘discovery’ got my attention,” Erica­
stilla remembered. “I think that the word ‘discovery’ should be used, in this
case as in all others, with caution. Just because I don’t know about something
doesn’t mean that nobody else does.”19 She pointed out, without minimizing
the historical importance of the police archives, that abandoned bodies of
decaying state records were nothing novel in Guatemala—they were the rule.
So was this an earth-­shattering discovery of secret archives, or the rou-
tine appearance of yet another neglected set of administrative papers? It de-
pended on who was being asked, and to whom it mattered. State security
forces minimized the find, even as direct threats against the pdh and the
archives’ integrity in the days following the pdh’s intervention suggested that
powerful actors felt otherwise. To an archivist, the records were important,
but their conditions were no different than the country’s many other aban-
doned archives, and the word “forgotten” was a better characterization than
“repressed” or “secret.” To the police agents working away in el basurero, the
records were a Sisyphean cargo, a punishment to be discharged in obscurity.
But to human rights activists, July 2005 was a watershed. Decades of official
denial had criminalized victimhood, obliterated hope that state documents
would ever be released, and left thousands in limbo about the whereabouts of
their disappeared loved ones. The Arzú government had refused to surrender
records to the truth commission, and though few were fooled into thinking
that archives therefore did not exist, neither could every abandoned build-
ing in the nation be searched to force the question.20 The Mariscal Zavala
explosions had been a cacophonous accident, fortuitously giving investiga-
tors a mandate to access a storage facility they would otherwise never have

36  —  CHAPTER ONE

entered—one whose records would have been partially incinerated if not for
the foresight of one rank-­and-­file agent. The appearance of the police archives
was the product, like so many other linchpin moments in history, of a mix of
felicitous political conditions, longue durée social struggle, and luck. For better
or worse, the pdh began working first, and asking questions later.

EXCAVATING BABYLON

“In the beginning,” assistant director Fuentes remembered, “we had all the
enthusiasm and interest possible, but my impression was that this was a ti-
tanic task.”21 The period from July to December 2005 can be considered the
first phase of the rescue initiative, in which the work was improvisational and
its future profoundly unclear, but in which the stakeholders who would shape
the future direction of the Project came together. To tackle the documents,
the pdh loaned a few of the original seven or eight personnel from its existing
units; the first archivist to work at the site, Ingrid Molina, had just begun
working with Cifuentes’s unit, and other early arrivals were transferred to
archives detail by the pdh because they were considered people of confianza.22
The remainder of the initial group was composed of volunteers from the te-
nacious human rights organizations Security in Democracy (sedem) and the
Mutual Support Group (gam), whose early contributions were crucial to the
initiative’s survival. These Project pioneers had no supplies, besides flimsy face
masks and rubber gloves purchased at a local pharmacy, and they performed
the earliest stage of their recovery work, the rescue of the fichas (file cards),
crouched atop loose concrete blocks in a space choked with dust and vermin.
sedem and gam contributed chairs and tables, the first supplies, and the first
computers; sedem then paid the salaries of more than thirty staffers once
additional individuals were hired on.
These were major sacrifices for such underfunded organizations, but the
justification was clear. sedem, gam, and the pdh had previously collaborated
on the partial rescue of the archives of the defunct Presidential Staff (emp) in
2003 (see ch. 2); the police records, not as obviously “cleansed” of incriminat-
ing information as the emp collection had been, promised more results.23 As
soon as the volunteers began to pull fichas out from beneath the crusted paper-­
pulp promontory protecting them, they saw notations of a political character,
reading “Communist” or “subversive,” scrawled on individual citizens’ driv-
er’s license and cedula (personal identification card) forms dating back to the
1930s. “I was assigned to the crime fichas,” remembered one worker, “and
one of the things that impacted me the most was finding the ficha on Víctor
Manuel Gutiérrez,” an Arbencista and pgt leader murdered by the state in

EXCAVATING BABYLON   — 37

 A Project worker pulls a Guatemalan’s personal identification ficha (file) from a
FIG. 1.3 
heap of decomposing records. Photograph by James Rodríguez, mimundo.org. Used
by permission of the photographer.

1966. “His ficha said ‘Communist #1’ in red letters.”24 In an unsettling echo
of the documents’ original logic of surveillance, police agents shadowed this
early archival work.
These volunteers’ primary concern with justice rather than archival sci-
ence, and the pdh’s lack of technical archival expertise, led some to question
whether it was appropriate for the pdh to shoulder the task. Constitutionally,
custody of the records fell to the agca; Guatemalan law calls for all state
records older than ten years to be incorporated into the national archives
system. But the outdated law, Decree-­Law 17-­68, was never enforced, and
the agca lacked the funding, personnel, or storage space to fulfill its own
mandate. New documents had not been physically incorporated into the
agca’s holdings since the 1960s; Decree 17–68 lacked the strong foundations
a national archives law needed, and the agca had no legal mechanism by
which to compel the surrender of documents. In a country rife with corrup-
tion and impunity, state organs were in no rush to share their paper trails.
Hence, the agca languished, victim to a studied societal indifference to the
importance of archives.25 It was in no position in 2005 to accommodate eighty
million pages of uncataloged records.26
But this did not mean it was unwilling to try. A proposal supported by then
vice president Eduardo Stein and the Presidential Human Rights Commission

38  —  CHAPTER ONE

(copredeh), argued that the state, namely, the agca, should take responsi-
bility for the pn archives.27 (Though the ombudsman post was a congressional
appointment, it was meant to be semiautonomous from the sitting govern-
ment.) The theory was that, thus handled, the archives “would not belong
to one ombudsman or one government” but would instead be incorporated
into the documentary patrimony of the state, while still guaranteeing access
to the pdh for investigative purposes.28 Physical and financial custody would
be assumed by the Ministry of Culture, the agca’s parent ministry, and the
state would raise funds for the task; the technical work of organizing the re-
cords could be contracted out to a private outfit. The argument was that if the
pdh were to simply take care of the problem using international monies, this
would be an abdication of duty by the central government, an intervention
that would let the state shirk its archival responsibilities. It would also politi-
cize the archives. The copredeh proposal was intended to begin a new era of
the agca, strengthening the institution and allowing it to eventually rescue
archives from all state dependencies. But the proposal died in the Ministry
of Culture, which was unwilling to commit to the risk such a project would
entail. “It was a lost opportunity,” reflected then copredeh head Frank La
Rue. “It shows you the weakness of democracy in this country,” he said, sug-
gesting that cowardice and weak institutionality had blocked a timely chance
at state-­building.29 Insiders at the pdh, though, saw the proposal as a tactic
that would, advertently or otherwise, stall their investigation by consigning
the archives to the care of an institution without the resources to guarantee
access to them—or, worse, outsourcing the technical archival work to a third
party, which would regulate access according to its own priorities.30 A long-­
held mistrust of state institutions, exacerbated by the war, contributed too; as
Ericastilla said, “Given the terrible things that public administration and the
state have done to the Guatemalan people, I understand that confidence in
State institutions is very limited.”31
In the end, international donors’ decision to fund a pdh human rights in-
vestigation in the archives settled the question, at least for the Project’s first
years. The pdh already had strong relationships with many foreign govern-
ments’ development agencies, particularly European ones, most of which ran
aid programs in postwar countries focusing on liberal mainstays: transitions
to democracy, access to justice, and promoting human rights. When the pdh,
far richer in political capital than the agca, convened a group of donors in
the fall of 2005 to explore their willingness to support the Project, it found
natural allies who were, because of their own priorities, very much inclined to
assist.32 The international cooperation programs of Switzerland and Sweden

EXCAVATING BABYLON   — 39

were the first to throw their hats in the ring, pledging several million dollars—
a huge sum by local standards—and, more important, their political support.
“Human rights have always been our main priority,” said Åsa Wallton of Swe-
den’s International Development Agency. “Of course when you discover an
archive like that, nobody knows its potential but you have to give support.”33
As was customary with donor commitments to new projects, the decision
by Sweden and by Switzerland’s Program for the Promotion of Peace to par-
ticipate created a domino effect, allowing other donors to justify their own
contributions.34 The German and Catalan development agencies followed
suit, followed by Spain, Oxfam-­UK, the Basque Country, and the Nether-
lands. Most donors channeled their funds through the United Nations Devel-
opment Program (undp) to protect the Project from allegations of financial
mismanagement.35
The donors did not, however, participate due to any particular interest in
archival conservation; international aid agencies are not in the habit of paying
for other countries to organize their old papers. “The interests of the donors
are the same as those of the pdh: they didn’t get involved because they were
interested in archival science,” said the undp’s Christina Elich. “They all saw
archival science as a necessary evil at the beginning.”36 The preservation of
historical documents was considered only a means to an end, imagined to
be useful only insofar as it would allow trial-­minded investigators to marshal
evidence. As one observer at Guatemala’s branch of the un High Commis-
sion for Human Rights told me, “The human rights angle, the investigation
of past abuses, is a big hook for international interest in the project. I can
imagine that that was the angle that was ‘sold’ in order to bring those do-
nors to the table and [have them] sign over such huge amounts of money.”37
Donors’ interest in the human rights aspect of the Project was as strong as
their interest in its archival dimensions was weak, a function of the politics
of international development aid. It highlighted what Louis Bickford iden-
tifies as a major lacuna in most transitional justice efforts: any emphasis on
archives and archival access as critical functions of postwar transitions and
truth-­telling initiatives.38 As Wallton bluntly said, “Funding depends on the
sexiness of the project.”39 Archives, per se, were not seen as sexy; human rights
discoveries were. And the pdh was not merely leveraging the overlap to attract
donors; it, too, was initially uninterested in the work of archival description
and preservation. In fact, these technical dimensions were seen by some as
an obstacle to obtaining the desired information in a timely fashion; as one
donor put it, “Lots of people wanted access, but nobody wanted to deal with
the papers.”40

40  —  CHAPTER ONE

 This dynamic would soon change, and significant credit for that change lay
with certain international actors, who echoed the concerns raised by domes-
tic archivists but who had the clout to make their voices heard. The National
Security Archive, a Washington, DC, research institute devoted to publishing
declassified U.S. documents, had worked intensively in Guatemala for years;
the thousands of U.S. government records its Guatemala Project, directed by
Kate Doyle, obtained during the 1990s were a major contribution to the ceh
report. Doyle visited the archives shortly after their discovery; realizing that
the pdh’s main deficiency was its lack of capacity for handling documentation
in a legally and archivally sound manner, and that its failure to do so would
fatally compromise its human rights investigation, she worked with the in-
cipient rescue effort on analysis and strategy. She connected the pdh with
several experts: the U.S.-­based archivist Trudy Huskamp Peterson, a special-
ist in the preservation of truth commission records, and Ana Cacopardo and
Ingrid Jaschek of the Memory Commission for the Province of Buenos Aires,
an organization devoted to preserving the archives of the Argentine juntas’
secret police forces.41 Their input would confirm that archival science was not
a time-­consuming sideshow but, rather, lay at the heart of the proposed hu-
man rights initiative; it proved to be just the beginning of the assistance that
the Project would receive from abroad. Soon, the pdh assembled an enviable
constellation of international experts and attracted global media attention,
notable when juxtaposed against the minimal play the archives’ discovery re-
ceived inside Guatemala. In part, this was by design—to conduct the work
discreetly, to avoid reprisals or creating unrealistic expectations about what
could be found in the archives. But the relative silence around the Project
domestically, compared with the interest it sparked internationally, spoke to
larger patterns of historical amnesia regarding the war.
The involvement of international specialists raised the question of prece-
dents: What were other contexts in which similar “terror archives” discoveries
had taken place, and what kinds of best practices might be imported into a
Guatemalan setting?42 A unified Germany had inherited the well-­organized
archives kept by East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, or Stasi, a case
often referenced by the Guatemalan activists with good-­natured jealousy. (The
Guatemalans, though, viewed the Stasi archives through rose-­colored glasses;
they were unaware that the Stasi had left behind more than fifteen thousand
large sacks filled with shredded high-­impact documents, and that teams of
German workers would spend more than fifteen years reconstructing them
by hand, a task still ongoing.)43 Germany, eager to reckon with the atrocities
of its past, created a federal authority in 1991 that would administer and guar-

EXCAVATING BABYLON   — 41

antee public access to the records.44 Timothy Garton Ash writes that it came
to represent “a ministry of truth occupying the former ministry of fear,” where
citizens could consult the files kept about them, some numbering thousands
of pages.45 Greece, once its dictatorship fell, used the records produced by its
repressive bodies to compensate victims and lustrate perpetrators. However,
it then elected to destroy the documents, thus eliminating any possibility of
their future use. Spain opted to transfer all political records left behind by the
Franco regime to the National Historical Archives, thus preserving for private
and academic use its files of repression.46 In Paraguay, activists in the early
1990s discovered hundreds of thousands of records detailing the practices
of dictator Alfredo Stroessner’s secret police; the records were collected, or-
ganized, and made publicly accessible as a discrete terror archives in a room
of Asunción’s Palace of Justice.47 Lithuania and the Ukraine both inherited
kgb records, which they integrated into their National Archives. In Argentina,
when the Intelligence Directorate of the Buenos Aires Police was disbanded
in 1998, its records were closed for use in the country’s ongoing judicial pro-
cesses; they were then transferred to the Memory Commission, which opened
them to the public several years later.
Comparative cases would prove useful in the longer run by providing ex-
amples of the sorts of special legislation other countries had drafted to protect
their terror archives and institutional arrangements made for their custody,
care, and access. Nonetheless, Guatemala’s case was unique. Unlike in Ger-
many, the Guatemalan government under President Oscar Berger was hardly
eager to clarify past abuses, and the fact that Guatemala was still controlled
by powerful military sectors ensured a chilly climate at the state level for
such an archival recovery effort. Compared with Paraguay, where the acci-
dental discovery of the records was an important parallel, the dimension of
the find proved a critical difference; the Paraguayan documents, 600,000
pages’ worth, could be accommodated in one room, but the Guatemalan re-
cords would require much more extensive capacity-­building, labor, and fund-­
raising.48 Whereas in Argentina the state had mandated the use of surrendered
records in judicial proceedings, such proceedings in Guatemala were blocked
in 2005, with the government unwilling to step in. The pn records were sim-
ply too numerous, too decayed, and too much of a political powderkeg for
any foreign model to be borrowed. Indeed, their peculiar conditions—their
distinct politics and challenges—were functions of the history that activists
were seeking, through the recovery effort, to clarify. Unlike the other coun-
tries, Guatemala had not completed anything like a “transition to democracy,”
at least insofar as questions of historical memory or justice were concerned.

42  —  CHAPTER ONE

This refusal to reckon with the recent past would reverberate at various levels
of the effort to recover the pn archives.49

CONSOLIDATION, COMANDANTES, AND MOLOTOV COCKTAILS

Once donors had pledged sufficient funding to allow the pdh to envision a
formal recovery project—for which no money came from the Guatemalan
government—the pdh set about addressing staffing. The Project needed a
director: someone with political savvy, the international connections nec-
essary for fund-­raising, leadership experience, and a personal commitment
to the goals of historical clarification and justice. Gustavo Meoño was the
ombudsman’s pick; the two had met during their lobbying efforts for the un
body known as the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala
(cicig).50 Meoño, a strapping, avuncular man in his early sixties, was a well-­
known, polarizing figure with both loyal comrades and bitter enemies. As a
teenager, he became involved with the Catholic student group Cráter, and
his experiences in the countryside moved him to join the insurgency. Rising
through the ranks of the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (egp), Meoño served on
the group’s National Directorate, devoting his life, as he put it, “to fighting for
respect for human rights, to the fight for democracy, to the fight for justice in
this country, for the rule of law.”51 Meoño broke with the egp shortly before
the Peace Accords and then ran the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation for
a decade. He was, serendipitously, already leaving the foundation when the
police archives appeared on the scene. “People with religious beliefs might say
that this was a providential event,” Meoño reflected, “something that arrived at
the exact moment when I was looking for something”—not employment per
se but a means of continuing what he saw as his life’s work.52 “Directing the
archives project fits exactly with what I believe and think,” he told me. “I don’t
pretend to promote impartiality or neutrality. Not at all.”
Meoño’s postwar objectives included the recovery of what he called “demo­
cratic memory”—a focus on the history of political struggle, rescuing and
restoring the stories of those who had resisted dictatorship, even if their al-
ternative visions had failed or been flawed in their execution. Without pro-
tecting this “democratic memory,” Meoño believed, Guatemala would never
construct a democratic national identity; instead, it would continue to crimi-
nalize those who fought for the right to think differently, discouraging future
youth from politics and leadership. “The idea of the rights to memory, truth,
and justice is not an issue of the left or of the right,” he argued. “It’s an issue of
fundamental human rights, independent of ideology or political militancy.”53
Perhaps, but most of those working on questions of historical memory were

EXCAVATING BABYLON   — 43

clustered at one end of the political spectrum. Many who had been involved
on the Left during the war found themselves reconstituted and represented as
a peacetime “human rights sector,” despite the many divides of ideology and
praxis among them. (This essentializing of progressives was usually intended
to discredit them; for example, conservative Siglo Veintiuno columnist Alfred
Kaltschmitt slurred the employees of the government’s National Reparations
Program [pnr] as bitter ex-­guerrillas who had failed to “install their Marxist-­
Leninist Shangri-­La.”)54 As such, the pdh knew that “it could provoke some
controversy” for Meoño to become the project’s figurehead; “we did think
about putting someone less political and less polemical in the job,” Villagrán
said.55 In the end, Meoño’s experience trumped his divisiveness, at least to
the pdh.
With funds from the international community, the rescue could start to be
conceived as a medium-­term Project. The original volunteers and staffers bor-
rowed from ngos could be hired semipermanently, and could grow in number.
Under Meoño, the Project began looking for appropriate individuals to work
on this sensitive project: gente de confianza, trustworthy people who sympa-
thized with its goals and understood the importance of discretion. As will be
discussed in chapter 6, many of those hired under these guidelines were people
already known to the pdh or Meoño, many of whom had strong personal links
to the archives or had lost family members or friends during the conflict. By
December 2005, they numbered more than fifty. They could be counted upon
to honor the confidentiality agreement all Project staff had to sign, stating
that they would not disclose any information contained in the documents.
But other sectors reacted less positively to Meoño’s appointment and to the
entire “human rights” cast of the initiative. In the first days after pdh inves-
tigators found the archives, a delegation from the pnc’s Civil Investigations
Section—its detective force, historically involved in investigations of a politi-
cal character—arrived at the pdh’s central office and shadowed its personnel,
collecting their names and tracking their comings and goings. Days later, a
drive-­by shooting blew out the office’s front windows; while the archives were
the most controversial initiative then under way at the pdh, “neither did [the
gunmen] leave a note saying, ‘this is because of the archives.’ ”56 As with many
threats against human rights advocates in Guatemala, the messages commu-
nicated were ambiguous by design, making it difficult to clearly attribute re-
sponsibility or motive.57
Some attacks on the Project, though, were unequivocal. Generals from the
Association of Military Veterans (avemilgua) visited the ombudsman twice
to pressure Morales in person, demanding Meoño’s firing and information

44  —  CHAPTER ONE

about the other people hired on at the Project.58 (Morales refused both solic-
itations.) María Ester Roldán, the judge who granted the pdh access rights
to the archives, was approached by a police lawyer and offered her price to
reverse the decision. When she refused, she received death threats, her home
was machine-­gunned, and her office was ransacked.59 The same week, some-
one threw a Molotov cocktail at the installation housing the archives, causing
one of several suspicious fires on the site during the Project’s first year.60 Of
course, the flip side of staffing the Project with rights activists and conflict sur-
vivors, as controversial as it was in certain sectors, was that these staffers had
seen worse; their commitment to the initiative would not waver. “You hear
about acts of violence all the time—deaths, murders, disappearances, kidnap-
pings, even though we’re no longer in this war, even though they’ve signed
peace accords,” said one worker. “But this work is part of the path we need to
walk in order to build a different future for our children, for the next gener-
ations.”61 A few Molotov cocktails would hardly change their minds. Rather,
most Project employees felt that the greatest danger they faced was simply
“creating expectations that the archives can’t fulfill”—erroneously giving the
impression that every victim’s case could be solved or every desaparecido’s
whereabouts determined.62
Threats to the young Project were not exclusively political. The physical
conditions of the site posed health risks; respiratory problems due to the
mold and dust plagued workers, who often showed up with hacking coughs
or congestion caused by inflamed sinuses.63 And in February 2007, area res-
idents awoke in the middle of the night to a fearsome rumbling. Overnight,
a city block–sized area just adjacent to the archives was swallowed by the
earth, collapsing into a hundred-­meter-­deep sinkhole that consumed houses,
businesses, and several local residents.64 The disaster required the evacua-
tion of nearly a thousand people; it also plunged the Project into chaos. “The
uncertainty of the hole was terrible,” said the Project’s inventory specialist
and guardian of its archival master location registry. “There were aftershocks,
there was always a risk that it could get bigger. The ground felt like when
you’re going down on a Ferris wheel. Everyone was working, but with a terri-
ble fear!”65 Work teams were reorganized into an emergency boxing convoy,
working extended hours to ensure that as many documents as possible were
packed for potential evacuation. Ultimately the sinkhole stabilized, though
the city did not repair the damage for years. But it did not escape Project
workers’ notice that on top of the political and environmental dangers they
expected at the archives, Guatemala City always offered unforeseen hazards,
now including the possibility that the ground might simply disappear beneath

EXCAVATING BABYLON   — 45

them. “Honestly, habit has made us get used to these sorts of things,” said
Rosario; as such, setbacks tended to strengthen workers’ resolve, or at least to
roll off their backs.66 “In life, you always have to take the good with the bad,”
the inventory specialist reflected, “and look for the silver lining in any human
situation. Because of the sinkhole, many of our documents got put into boxes
for the first time!”67
The drama of the sinkhole was, in retrospect, a minor example of the phys-
ical challenges at play. Before any investigative work could begin, critical in-
frastructural modifications had to be made. From an archivist’s perspective,
the site was a nightmare. The warehouse, planned as a multistory edifice, was
never completed. It was supposedly intended to be a police hospital, though
the profusion of small, windowless rooms inside revealed that patient care was
not its main purpose. Because construction had never progressed beyond the
second floor, what served as the roof was insufficient for protection against in-
clement weather. The ceiling let water pour through like a sieve. Lacking win-
dowpanes, the windows were simply open holes in the walls, through which
rain, debris, and bats passed freely. Some window frames were stuffed with
old, waterlogged eight-­inch computer disks (ostensibly, if implausibly, to help
keep the rain out); these warped, obsolete disks were revealed, much later and
with a tremendous amount of effort, to contain valuable and salvageable data.
The electrical wiring was shoddily strung, presenting yet another fire hazard.
The bathroom facilities could only optimistically be described as rudimentary,
and they were too few to accommodate the team. Several times, the women’s
bathroom flooded the building’s rear, necessitating further emergency moving
of documents and terse meetings among female workers about how to prevent
future plumbing problems that might endanger the records. And as another
rainy season approached in 2006, water continued to seep in and soak more
documents.
Eager to begin case investigations but mindful of these logistical obstacles,
the Project moved to exert physical control over the compound. Staffers ex-
terminated rats and roaches; repaired and expanded the electrical system; did
their best to improve the bathrooms, and later built a new bathroom structure
adjacent to the main warehouse; painted, installed panes of glass to create
windows, knocked down walls to allow air to circulate, and covered the dirt
and concrete floors with vinyl; patched holes and replaced filthy, cracked
skylights to let the sun stream through; cleared out huge quantities of trash;
raised great mountains of documents onto wooden slats; gathered the out-
dated computer disks for later data retrieval; and installed fire extinguishers.
Among the most pressing concerns were the junked automobiles piled up

46  —  CHAPTER ONE

willy-­nilly in the bald fields surrounding the site, in places stacked three or
four high. The fields were the tow trucks’ dumping grounds for all vehicles
destroyed in the city’s traffic accidents; stray dogs lived amid the twisted metal
carcasses, which included decades-­old cars and even the skeleton of a downed
airplane. These wrecks, their tanks half full of gasoline, put the documents at
grave danger of succumbing to fire—a risk made all the more evident after the
Molotov cocktail attacks of May 2006—but the Project did not have the equip-
ment, money, or legal authority to move them. Some of the site’s problems
were particularly vexing; two visiting Swiss conservation experts mused that
while the persistent bat infestation endangered the documents by generating
a profusion of acidic guano on the top sheets of record bundles, the bats also
provided a worthy service by helping control the building’s insect population.
This led the experts to the (only half-­jesting) conclusion that the ideal solution
would be to outfit the winged pests with miniature diapers.68
Security, too, was a concern; how could the pdh guarantee the safety of
both the documents and the workers? Unarmed guards had watched over
the site since the pdh’s arrival, but more substantial security infrastructure
was needed. The Project installed gates both at the entrance to the archives
area and at the entrance to the entire wing of the pnc base. The team of ten
guards—still unarmed—now sat inside booths of glass and poured concrete,
from which they monitored footage rolling in from the newly installed sur-
veillance cameras around the site’s periphery. Thick curls of razor wire now
spiraled atop perimeter fences; inside the building, locking iron gates were
fitted into the doorway of every workspace, ensuring that no police officials
or other intruders could tamper with the Project’s files and notes. These mea-
sures, though an improvement, were undercut by a simple fact: although the
pdh had the right to consult the archives, as assured by the 2005 judicial or-
der, the documents themselves still belonged to the pnc, and the police and
the Interior Ministry could continue to use them as they saw fit.
This point was driven home during the summer of 2006, after Spanish
jurists established a special ambulatory commission as part of their effort to
prosecute eight Guatemalan generals and police chiefs for genocide in Span-
ish courts.69 The event under investigation was the infamous 1980 Spanish
embassy fire, a peaceful protest that ended in a raging inferno killing all but
one of the protesters, who were barricaded inside the burning building by
police. (The surviving protester was kidnapped from the hospital, his tortured
corpse dumped the next day.)70 The day after the Spanish judge arrived in Gua-
temala to hear witnesses, a group of police agents turned up at the archives
and asked Project staff to show them any and all documents relating to the

EXCAVATING BABYLON   — 47

early 1980s police death squad Commando Six. (Commando Six was involved
in the embassy fire, and its then chief, Pedro García Arredondo, was one of
the eight individuals named in the case, along with then director-­general of
the pn, Germán Chupina.) This was an obvious attempt to bully the Project,
but it also suggested that police and military interests understood the value
of the documents and were looking to arm themselves against prosecution.71
Intimidation came in many forms at the Project, most tangibly in the daily
surveillance of Project workers that pnc personnel carried out during the
pdh’s first months on the scene. The police carefully noted which documents
Project staff consulted, what hours they kept, and what they discussed while
they did it. While Meoño and his staff worked to maintain cordial relations
with the police’s own archival employees, tensions initially flared between the
two groups, who hardly shared a history of collaboration. Again, Project staff-
ers’ activist backgrounds provided them with a key attribute—tenacity—that
allowed them to put their heads down and ignore any interference. “When
we started, the police were running around as though they were ‘taking care’
of the documents, but really they were making sure we weren’t touching any-
thing or looking at anything they didn’t want us to see,” said one worker. “But
so we said fine, let’s just work naturally, and talk to them normally.”72
In the end, the task of remaking the archives—re-­creating their system of
organization and archival chain of custody while gaining intellectual com-
mand over their contents—would prove even more difficult than clearing the
logistical and physical hurdles. Fixing up a building, cultivating international
donors, and operating under the radar were things that the Project and its
allies had done before in other contexts. But managing archives, turning a
massive warehouse of decomposing documents into a usable resource, keep-
ing track of the information being found, and decoding how the police had op-
erated in order to decipher the records—these were new frontiers. Mastering
this alien territory would force Project workers to expand their perspective on
the archives, to gaze for the thousandth time at the papers and suddenly see
something different: not just the potential for smoking-­gun individual docu-
ments but, rather, the elaborate bureaucratic logic behind them. They needed
to learn, in Ann Stoler’s formulation, to see “archiving-­as-­process rather than
archives-­as-­things.”73 Walking in the archival footsteps of their former ene-
mies, these amateur historians needed to understand how the pn operated, to
get inside the police’s proverbial head and grasp how the institution thought,
if they were to have any hope of reconstituting its archives. It would not prove
easy, as we shall see in chapter 3.
Working in their favor, though, was the fact that winning the battle for the

48  —  CHAPTER ONE

police records had been no accident of fortune. Instead, it was the product of
more than two decades’ worth of hard-­fought political struggle over archives
and access to information, which had imparted instructive lessons. Beginning
in the mid-­1980s, when family members of those disappeared and killed in
Guatemala City began to organize around the collective demand for infor-
mation about victims’ fates, state transparency and archival access became
important planks of their agenda.74 The fact that activists had spent years at-
tempting to gain access to state security records, with one important success
in 2003, had laid the groundwork for grappling with the pn archives. The
Project would build upon the folk knowledge accumulated over the course of
those skirmishes, which I call the “archive wars,” but it would also confront
the same obstacles—state hermetism, military opposition, and a lack of cit-
izen empowerment vis-­à-­vis state records that mirrored broader patterns of
obscurantism and disenfranchisement. Before we can turn to the develop-
ment of the Project, we must first look back upon how it became possible for
activists to even dream of winning access to state security records. We must
consider how—through the unlikely confluence of long political struggle, pro-
pitious historical circumstance, and good fortune (itself a rare commodity in
postwar Guatemala)—the unthinkable could be made real.

EXCAVATING BABYLON   — 49

 two ARCHIVAL CULTURE, STATE SECRETS,
AND THE ARCHIVE WARS

I leave something written in order to attest to the fact that I did

it—I write that we killed the following people because they were
communists, and here’s the proof. The necessity of leaving some-
thing written about one’s activities is almost inherent in humanity.
To link oneself with the past using proof. This causes archives to not
be destroyed in their entirety, to at least be kept in part or brought
together or even hidden—but not destroyed.
—Esteban, Project worker

A
t the corner of Guatemala City’s central plaza sits the stolid edi-
fice housing the national archives, the Archivo General de Centro­
américa (agca). For years, the agca shared the corner with one of
the rudimentary public urinals found throughout the city, whose metal door
exhorted users to “¡Orine feliz, orine contento, pero por favor, orine aden-
tro!”1 The urinal’s visitors did not always hold up their end of the bargain,
however, and being forced to hop over streams of urine in order to enter the
archives was not an uncommon experience for those who wished to look up a
family tree or a property record. The situation worsened when the urinal was
removed in 2007. The drain had vanished, but the cultural memory of the
corner’s principal use—the idea of the national archives as, above all, a place
for excretion—endured. Such numbers of people started relieving themselves
directly against the side of the building that knee-­height stalagmites of dried
uric acid soon ringed it. The agca was forced to ask its janitors to daily mop
away the results, which obstructed access to the main doors. Windows had
to be kept closed against the stench. One Project archivist was struck that
of all the institutions bordering the plaza—the Metropolitan Cathedral, the
National Palace, the army’s pension authority—the archives bore this burden:
“If they’d put the urinal in front of the cathedral, everyone would have been
outraged—that it’s a violation, it’s indecent, it’s disrespectful—so why is it ac-
ceptable to put it in front of the national archives?”2 She read its placement as
a sign that most Guatemalans did not appreciate the archives’ importance. As
the agca’s director wearily remarked, “It’s as though the people were pissing
on their own history.”3
This unfortunate tale speaks to larger truths about Guatemala’s archival
politics. We have seen how the National Police archives were, after the formal
counterinsurgency concluded, left to neglect and disorder; agents assigned to
the archives, consigned there as a punishment, called it el basurero.4 But they
were not an isolated case. Instead, documents in Guatemala were generally
referred to as basura—trash to be eliminated, not resources to be protected.5
The national archives were distressingly underfunded; from the 1960s on,
state institutions ceased bothering to turn over their records to the agca, de-
spite the constitution’s stipulations. In fact, the dire conditions in which pdh
investigators found the pn archives were, no doubt, replicated in the storage
warehouses of every organ of government (hence why the archivists who first
saw the pn records were comparatively nonplussed). The work of Ann Stoler
and others has shown us that the form and manner in which archives are kept
are as important as the content they reveal.6 What did it mean that archives
were considered garbage in Guatemala? What purpose did this attitude serve,
and what does it reveal about the state’s technologies of rule over time—or
about everyday Guatemalans’ efforts to change them? Scholars of archival and
political science often link the accessibility of state archives to that state’s
levels of accountability; the more archival access, the more democracy. This
observation has some truth to it, but it is not particularly interesting. Such a
simple correlative elides the richness of information about a state’s character—
and the fabric of the relationships between state and citizenry—to be gleaned,
historically and ethnographically, from the attitudes that state fosters about
archives.7
“Castrated in history,” argued one Guatemalan journalist, “we are a people
without knowledge of ourselves.” He distilled into a single scene what he saw
as a disorder afflicting the body politic: “The image which best identifies us
is that of a son, who arrives at the house after his parents die, looks at all the
items his parents had kept, and says, ‘Look at all this garbage they had.’ With-
out sorting through their possessions, he throws them all in the trash, and
cleans out the space with disinfectant.”8 The argument echoed the words of
many workers at the Project, who knew that a long legacy of authoritarian rule
had powerfully and purposefully disconnected society from its own history.
Historical myopia served as a technique of governance and took many forms.
“History,” in school curricula and the Guatemalan academy, referred only to

ARCHIVAL CULTURE, STATE SECRETS   — 51

tales of great men—presidents, ladinos, independence heroes. Archives, which
offered potential routes into what had long been silenced (while, as Trouillot
points out, also creating new silences of their own), were devalued, dumped,
or destroyed.9 And postwar political opinion makers, some of whose hands
were bloodied during the war, promoted two self-­serving myths. One was that
no archives existed to substantiate victims’ claims; the other was that to ad-
vance as a nation, Guatemala needed to turn the page, leave the past behind,
and not succumb to the “sickness” of memory.10
From the mid-­1980s on, however, activists began confronting these myths
as part of their efforts to demand justice for counterinsurgency victims. The
issue of access to state documents was a charged battleground years before
the appearance of the pn archives, and we must place the discovery of those
records in that broader context. The main bone of contention was the concept
of secreto de estado (state secrecy) enshrined in Article 30 of the Guatemalan
constitution. The article stipulates that administrative information is public,
save that pertaining to “military or diplomatic affairs of national security.”11
State authorities repeatedly refused petitioners’ requests for archival access
using Article 30 as justification; complainants challenged the legitimacy of
such denials, often applied to requests having little to do with current national
security.12 In the process, the language of history, memory, and archival ac-
cess became an idiom that war victims used to make claims on the state, par-
ticularly as popular movements were decimated by counterinsurgent terror.
Conservative and counterrevolutionary forces in Guatemala had exploited the
power of archives earlier than had the Left; however, progressives came to ap-
preciate their use-­value as well. This chapter traces the genealogy of their wars
of position, in Gramscian terms, over archival access, which I refer to as the
archive wars.13 Archives in Guatemala, as elsewhere in the Americas, were not
just technologies of rule; they were sites of battle between rulers and ruled.14
Tracing the evolution of Guatemalan archival culture provides a window
into the shifting nature of postwar society. The language of archival access,
and the actual manipulation and rescue of suppressed archives, came to rep-
resent and embody larger processes of contestation surrounding the country’s
postconflict trajectory, the relationship between state and citizen, and the
role of history in contemporary politics. Archival culture is state politics; the
keeping of records, granting of access to them, and denial of access to them lie
at the heart of all systems of government, and examining these practices over
the course of Guatemala’s move out of armed warfare demonstrates the extent
to which the Peace Accords did not much change the exclusionary, militarized
nature of the state. The circumstances of the pn archives were, in many ways,

52  —  CHAPTER TWO

 Family members of the disappeared sought out state records in an attempt to answer
FIG. 2.1 
their shared question: ¿Donde están? (Where are they?). © Jean-­Marie Simon/2012.

the exception proving the rule about the transition to electoral democracy;
rescuing the pn records, and the challenges faced during the process, high-
lighted the poisoned nature of the country’s archival politics. In working to
valorize archives, the Project cast the stakes of fostering a national culture that
defiled its own historical memory into stark relief.

GARBAGE AND NATIONAL PATRIMONY

In December 1992, a Central American woman walked into Manhattan’s

Swann Galleries—the best-­known rare-­document auction house in the United
States—carrying ten documents in a portfolio case that she said had been
passed down through her family. The records she offered for sale, worth tens
of thousands of dollars, included a sixteenth-­century coat of arms for the
city of Santiago de Guatemala, a document bearing the signature of Spanish
conquistador-­chronicler Bernal Díaz del Castillo, and foreign treaties with
Guatemala signed by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and
Queen Victoria. The would-­be archival entrepreneur, María Elisa Rohrmoser,
successfully made the sale, though she was never able to collect her money;
between signing the deal and picking up her check, Rohrmoser was arrested
by customs agents, who had been tipped off that her supposed heirlooms were
actually rare documents stolen from the Archivo General de Centroamérica.

ARCHIVAL CULTURE, STATE SECRETS   — 53

And Rohrmoser was no garden-­variety thief, but the spouse of Julio Roberto
Gil Aguilar, then the director of the agca. It was an inside job.15
The agca’s holdings, along with those of the Catholic Church and the mu-
nicipality of Antigua, have historically been Guatemala’s best preserved and
institutionalized.16 And the idea that a collection viewed by its own director
as ripe for the plunder represents the best of Guatemalan archival practice is
sobering indeed. On the bright side, the records purloined by Rohrmoser and
Gil Aguilar had at least been sufficiently well kept as to remain saleworthy.
In contrast, the Guatemalan Association of Archivists estimated in 2008 that
some 90 percent of the country’s archives were in a state of utter decay or
abandon, and that statistic referred only to those archives still extant.17 It was
so common for outgoing government functionaries to destroy their records
in order to conceal evidence of their own wrongdoing that another archivist
supposed some 30 percent of all Guatemalan documentary patrimony had
already been destroyed.18 That by 2008 only ten archivists had ever graduated
from Guatemala’s only archival science training program was also revealing.
Indeed, in many respects, the agca was a banner achievement in a country
inclined to let documents rot. Founded in 1846 as the Archivo General del
Gobierno just after the consolidation of independence, the national archives
became the premier document collection in Central America, specializing
in colonial records from when Guatemala was an important administrative
center for the Spanish crown.19 In 1920, the Archivo General was placed under
the jurisdiction of what became the Ministry of the Interior. What the institu-
tion lacked in funding and official support was compensated for by the dedica-
tion of its personnel. Beginning in 1935, longtime director José Joaquín Pardo,
who administered the archives for three decades, personally cataloged—
despite his lack of training or expertise—much of the holdings according to
his own ad hoc organizational system, and the eclectic card catalog on the
agca’s second floor today remains the fruit of his labors. Prior to Pardo’s ef-
forts, the few researchers to brave the chaos of disordered documents worked,
as one observer writes, “among mountains of old papers, in open warfare
against rats, spiders, and other pests that infested the pages, prisoners of
woodworms and abandonment. . . . Chance could reward the investigator
with incredible surprises; or else, his time would be wasted uselessly in a
tiring and fruitless search, as though the task of researching our national history
were nothing less than a punishment or a mythic act of supplication.”20
In the 1930s, dictator Jorge Ubico—an early believer in policing a citizenry
using records, and a master centralizer of power—ordered the transfer of state
records held in Guatemala’s departments back to the capital, to be housed in

54  —  CHAPTER TWO

the national mint. The contemporary archives building was erected in 1956,
and twenty-­two linear kilometers of documents were moved there. In 1968,
responsibility for the archives shifted to the Ministry of Education, and the
national archives’ function as the guardian of public administrative records
was enshrined in Guatemala’s first and only archives law to date, Decree-­Law
17-­68. In the same year, the institution was renamed the Archivo General de
Centroamérica, the result of a meeting of the various directors of the Central
American countries’ national archives, who agreed that the Guatemalan ar-
chives, because its colonial holdings spanned other areas of Central America
that had once fallen under the jurisdiction of the isthmian captaincy-­general,
deserved the status of being a Central American archives.21 In 1985, the agca
was administratively shuffled once more, incorporated into the Ministry of
Culture and Sports, where it remains today.22
If 1968 was an important moment of growth for the agca as an institution,
when it enjoyed at least lip-­service support from President Julio César Mén-
dez Montenegro, it was perhaps its last.23 Though the new building erected
in the 1950s provided space for the existing collection, its designers failed
to anticipate the rapid escalation in the state’s bureaucratic output due to
technological advances like photocopiers and computers. It simply ran out
of space to house new documents in the late 1960s, and this coincided with
larger political trends. The 1966–1970 period saw a massive increase in the
militarization of the state, the result of U.S.-­funded fortifications of Guate­
mala’s counterinsurgency apparatus. It was not a time of increased state trans-
parency. Decree-­Law 17-­68, which regulated archival operating procedure for
state dependencies, included no enforcement mechanism for its mandate that
state organs turn over their records every decade, and since the agca building
could not accommodate new records anyway, state dependencies simply left
their files to rot in storage or destroyed those chronicling unsavory practices.
“How does the state see archives? They see them as a site of potential ac-
countability, where they’ll be held responsible for their bad practices,” said
Project archivist Molina. “When you go to consult archives, they don’t see
you as a researcher; they see you as an auditor, looking for the abuses they’re
committing.”24 While security forces built painstaking surveillance archives of
Guatemalans’ political activities, “normal” state archives languished.
It was lazy practice with political consequences. “We archivists know that
there are different factors that cause deterioration, in terms of documentary
conservation, but the worst agents of deterioration are negligence, disinterest,
and lack of knowledge about patrimony,” said Molina. “For state institutions,
all the issues of archival science are reduced to issues of space. An archive be-

ARCHIVAL CULTURE, STATE SECRETS   — 55

comes a problem once the papers don’t fit anymore. So they feel they have two
choices: warehouse the documents or throw them out.”25 Both unsound stor-
age and outright disposal imposed the same barrier to access. Were a citizen to
visit, say, the Ministry of Agriculture and ask to see a particular set of records,
an official might trumpet the ministry’s transparency, directing the individual
to a storage space heaped with millions of disorganized papers and wishing
them good luck. It was archival access in name only. “I’ve come to believe
that this is a deliberate strategy,” said Project assistant director Fuentes—a
cultivated attitude toward documentation that all too conveniently blocked
citizens from exercising their rights. “How can we investigate if there are no
documents? How can we know our history if there are no documents?” He
ruefully recounted finding in the pn archives, along with directives ordering
subordinates to burn certain quantities of records, a “rather grotesque” docu­
ment prohibiting agents from using pages found in the archives as toilet pa-
per, suggesting that the practice was sufficiently common to require a written
proscription.26
The agca’s holdings still largely stop in the late 1960s, though they remain
a rich source for earlier periods. In the absence of a more robust archives law,
the agca’s twenty-­strong staff relies upon a roving commission—a group of
technicians who visit various state dependencies, remind them that the de-
struction of historical documents is illegal, and encourage them to maintain
adequate and accessible archives within their own headquarters. Hanging on
doggedly despite a decimated budget, so much so that their Internet access
was cut off for several weeks in 2008 while bills went unpaid, the agca’s staff
gamely struggled to safeguard historical memory.27 The roving commission,
summoned regularly by state organs hoping for the go-­ahead to burn old pa-
pers, conducted on-­site assessments to help functionaries distinguish between
“administrative” and “historical” records. Administrative records, archivally
speaking, were those in ongoing use; historical records, commonly referred
to as dead archives, were those whose administrative function had expired
and whose primary value was as cultural-­historical resources documenting
institutional life.28 In theory the agca would house and preserve these dead
archives; in practice, it could simply encourage others not to destroy them.
However, the nature of police archives makes it difficult to draw the distinc-
tion between “living” and “dead” records. Because so much of police work
depends on access to individuals’ criminal histories, documents that are forty
or fifty years old retain administrative use, and cannot be considered “dead.”
Decree-­Law 17-­68’s provision that all state records had to be sent to the agca
every ten years, then, made no sense for police records; as Molina put it, “If

56  —  CHAPTER TWO

a citizen, or a judge, asks for a background check on someone, what are the
police going to do? Take a bus to the agca to look up their own records?”29
It was the agca’s roving commission, brought in by the National Civil Police
in January 2005 some six months before the serendipitous arrival of pdh in-
vestigators, that first laid eyes upon the National Police archives. That nothing
came of this initial encounter with the records—that despite years of efforts
by activists to secure state security archives, the archivists tasked with assess-
ing the pn documents never thought to inform anyone of their existence—
spoke to the depoliticized nature of “cultural patrimony” as an official con-
cept of the state. The Law for the Protection of the Nation’s Cultural Patri-
mony (1997) laid out the Ministry of Culture’s standards for what qualified as
the country’s cultural heritage, noting that “it is necessary to legally promote
the rescue, investigation, salvage, recuperation, conservation, and valuing of
those goods which constitute Cultural Patrimony,” whose destruction would
be subject to punishment. Under the law, forms of patrimony both “tangible”
and “intangible”—from Maya archaeological sites to musical instruments, lo-
cal medicinal traditions to underwater paleontological remains, and including
archives—were created equal and would theoretically be protected equally.30
In practice, however, the Ministry of Culture, like the agca beneath it,
was afforded no meaningful enforcement mechanism with which to fulfill
its responsibilities; it operated under extreme budgetary constraints while
charged with too many tasks. This generated all manner of cruel bureaucratic
farces. For example, just a year after the end of a war in which Maya culture
and lifeways were systematically attacked by the state—with security forces
using the destruction of indigenous graveyards, the rape of Maya women, and
other forms of cultural violence to control or exterminate Indian identity—
the cultural patrimony law stipulated that any act degrading Maya culture
would be met with a fine of 5,000 quetzales, or about US$600.31 As long as
efforts to expand access to state archives were shunted into bureaucratic chan-
nels defining them as issues of “cultural patrimony,” one could bet that they
would be met with inaction. To this day, Guatemala has no national registry of
its various archives; without knowledge of which documentary holdings even
existed, how could the agca work to protect them?32
While the preservation of cultural patrimony was rendered toothless by
the weakness of its guardian institutions, not all were blind to the value and
potential of expanding public access to archives, especially those document-
ing the war. While the agca’s struggle to save archives was a war of attrition,
others engaged in direct battle over the issue. To the military, access to infor-
mation had always been political. As Silvio René Gramajo Valdés indicates,

ARCHIVAL CULTURE, STATE SECRETS   — 57

hermetism and information security on the part of the army and the police
were essential components of counterinsurgency strategy, particularly as the
military engineered the for-­show transition to democracy in the mid-­1980s.33
As successive civilian-­led facade regimes performed the trappings of democ-
ratization, power brokers freed themselves from international opprobrium
while tightening their grip on information—always using the secreto de estado
provision as justification.34
This made access to archives a political minefield, generating a crisis of
expectations that would prove difficult to contain. The contested process by
which the state, the military, and civil society negotiated the liberalization of
access to government information highlighted something archivists have long
known, but scholars of transitional justice have, some argue, often ignored: the
link between access to archives and authoritarianism.35 Indeed, the debates over
archival access were, ultimately, debates about the nature, and future, of the
authoritarian and postauthoritarian state. And while ngos and international
donors had devoted considerable effort during the peace process to combating
impunity in Guatemala, they almost never focused on archival access as one of
the anti-­impunity struggle’s key battlegrounds—perhaps because arcana imperii,
or state secrecy, is central not just to authoritarian rule but to democratic rule
as well.36 The military’s use of Article 30, from 1996 on, to refuse solicitations
for access to records provides a sense of how, as Bickford writes, “the vulnera-
bility and lingering authoritarian characteristics of new democracies might be
profoundly connected to authoritarian pasts.”37 In fighting to discover what had
become of lost loved ones, activists combating dictatorship’s legacies came, over
time, to understand the role that archives could play in their struggle.

HABEAS DATA: A GENEALOGY OF THE ARCHIVE WARS

“We’ve always been interested in getting access to all state archives,” Mutual
Support Group (gam) director Mario Polanco told me.38 gam formed in 1984,
the result of encounters between family members searching for disappeared
loved ones at the Guatemala City morgue, and it quickly became a leading ad-
vocate for victims.39 Members of gam were determined to discover what had
happened to the country’s desaparecidos and filed countless writs of habeas
corpus (recursos de exhibición personal) with authorities to ascertain the
whereabouts of those illegally detained, even as the answer was always the
same: sin efecto, without result. The researcher today opening any bundle of
pn records from these years finds it rife with these requests. In 1985 alone,
gam filed more than seven hundred such writs; it recognized that while the
most disturbing acts committed by state security forces were unlikely to have

58  —  CHAPTER TWO

 Protesters discovered these files, of citizens under government surveillance, at
FIG. 2.2 
the house of outgoing interior minister Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz. Guatemala’s major dailies
published photographs of the files in the days following the coup d’état that brought
Efraín Ríos Montt to power. Photograph by Prensa Libre, 27 March 1982.

been documented on paper, police and army records could nonetheless pro-
vide important clues as to what had happened.
The point was brought home just after the military coup of 23 March 1982,
when crowds of anguished protesters stormed the home of outgoing interior
minister Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz and found stacks of files of individuals pre-
sumably targeted for elimination, which they displayed for publication in
Guatemala’s major dailies (see fig. 2.2). The discovery was a one-­off window
into the otherwise closed world of state archival surveillance; an easy way for
military officials to discredit victims’ claims was to note that they were “not
sustained by docu­mentary evidence.”40 In the late 1980s, gam members filed
a complaint with the Guatemalan Supreme Court denouncing the state’s “kid-
napping” of the archives of the police and the army, basing their demands on
Articles 28 and 30 of the constitution. “They never even responded to us,” Po-
lanco recalled.41 Only after the pn archives’ reappearance thirty years later did
gam’s surviving members learn that police officials had, as of 1980, instructed
agents never to share police detention logs with judges, thereby guaranteeing
that no habeas corpus request would ever yield results.42

ARCHIVAL CULTURE, STATE SECRETS   — 59

 Because of public officials’ intransigence, activists put aside the issue of
archival access for a number of years. But in 1993, tensions over documents
twice flared anew. First, in March, personnel from the National Police’s Iden-
tification Bureau (Gabinete de Identificación) anonymously denounced the
plans of pn authorities to destroy the archives of the Department of Technical
Investigations (dit). The dit, in existence from 1982 to 1986, was that peri-
od’s incarnation of the police’s elite detective squad, charged with executing
politically motivated operations. Though the dit was abolished by Vinicio
Cerezo in 1986, renamed, and its personnel supposedly reciclado, or purged,
its successor institutions maintained the squad’s long-­standing notoriety for
carrying out forced disappearances and social cleansings. The dit’s archives
would have offered considerable insight into some of the cases that most con-
cerned the leaders of gam, including those of gam founder María del Rosa-
rio Godoy de Cuevas and her husband, Carlos Cuevas Molina; gam founder
Nineth Montenegro’s husband, Edgar Fernando García; and gam leader Héc-
tor Gómez Calito, all of whose deaths or disappearances in 1984 and 1985 were
subsequently linked to the dit. Therefore, when the Identification Bureau
chief, Luz Hernández Nova, informed her staff of her intention to destroy the
dit’s criminal files, one agent sent a whistle-­blower’s letter to the press.43 It
expressed concern, and not necessarily a left-­wing concern, that the archives
“contain reports on individuals who under previous governments committed
crimes,” and if they were destroyed the criminals “would remain in impunity”;
it indicated that “the information in the archives could serve in the investiga-
tion of acts committed during the tragic years of violence” and urged that au-
thorities not be permitted to “make the documents disappear.”44 When word
of the plan leaked, pn director-­general Leopoldo Guerra insisted that it was
“all a rumor.” In response, gam called on the pn to turn the archives over to
either gam or the pdh, “so that we can review them and be able to investigate
for ourselves whether or not these archives contain any information about
our loved ones.”45 Months later, when the furor had died down, pn officials
shut down the dit archives; another anonymous complaint to the press from
within pn ranks blamed subdirector-­general Fernando Ligorría for the move,
calling it a “virtual amnesty” for the thousands of criminals whose acts were
chronicled in the files.46
Also in 1993, after former human rights ombudsman Ramiro de León
Carpio assumed the presidency, word traveled to human rights groups that
the military had decided to destroy a large number of documents. In response,
gam worked with Nobel Peace Prize laureate Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, an Ar-
gentine activist, to bring a new kind of legal appeal to Guatemala: the writ

60  —  CHAPTER TWO

of habeas data.47 Habeas data holds that an individual has the right to access
any information about herself or her family that is held by her government.
It grants the individual access to, say, military files about the army’s killing of
her brother, just as a writ of habeas corpus would give that same individual the
right to ascertain if her brother was being held in army facilities.48 The con-
cept’s genesis is Latin American, first implemented by Brazil, then by Colom-
bia, Paraguay, Peru, Argentina, and Ecuador, all countries that experienced
internal conflict—and, importantly, forced disappearances—during the Cold
War. (In 2007, the writ of habeas data was exported beyond Latin America to
the Philippines, written into the constitution to address the high numbers of
Filipinos killed and disappeared during years of internal separatist battle.)
In affirming the right to habeas data, the Argentine Supreme Court argued
that the right to information touched upon “the rights to identity and to re-
construct one’s own history, which are closely aligned with human dignity.”49
Taking a page from this initiative, gam decided to import habeas data, if
unofficially, to Guatemala. Seeking to prevent the destruction of the military
records, gam presented its own writ of habeas data to the Supreme Court
and the Constitutional Court “for symbolic value.” Polanco noted that it was
“more of a moral appeal than a legal appeal,” and the military eliminated the
files anyway.50 But the idea of archival access as a central aspect of postcon-
flict justice would endure; the Commission for Historical Clarification (ceh)
included in its final report a formal recommendation that the Guatemalan
state pass legislation enshrining the right to habeas data and penalizing “the
gathering, storage, or concealment of information about individuals, their
religious or political affiliation, their trade union or social activism and any
other data relating to their private lives.”51 (To date, no such legislation has
been adopted.)
The peace process generated another space for contestation regarding ar-
chives. As mentioned earlier in this work, the ceh found its theoretical access
to military and police records stymied. The commission, established in the
1994 Oslo Accord between the Guatemalan government and the urng, was
tasked with “the historical clarification of the human rights violations and acts
of violence that have caused suffering to the Guatemalan population.”52 In or-
der to carry out this mandate, the commissioners needed to examine security
forces’ files, and the Oslo Accord placed no restriction on the ceh’s right to
solicit information from government and military archives. However, it did
not grant the ceh subpoena power, leaving the commission powerless to en-
force compliance. As an initial salvo in what became a prolonged affair, head
commissioner Christian Tomuschat filed a written request to defense minis-

ARCHIVAL CULTURE, STATE SECRETS   — 61

ter Héctor Mario Barrios Celada and President Alvaro Arzú on September 9,
1997, for information on five well-­known “paradigmatic cases”: the case of
“Los 28,” the mass disappearance of some thirty pgt leaders in 1966; the mass
disappearance of six pgt leaders in 1972; the mass disappearance of twenty-­
seven National Workers’ Central (cnt) union members in 1980; the mass
disappearance of seventeen more union leaders later that same year; and the
1989 disappearances of ten University of San Carlos student activists, mem-
bers of the Association of University Students (aeu), five of whose corpses
later appeared bearing signs of torture.53 (Incidentally, the National Police was
directly involved in all five cases.)
What ensued was an increasingly hostile war of letters between Tomuschat
and various Ministry of Defense officials, in which army authorities responded
to the ceh’s requests by buck-­passing, obfuscation, denying the records’ ex-
istence, claiming that such access would violate Article 30’s secreto de estado
provision, and squabbling that the ceh, in investigating the military and po-
lice, was violating the “universal juridical principle” of presumed innocence
and had therefore compromised its objectivity.54 The National Police offered
nothing in response to ceh solicitations, its collaboration “insufficient” and
“superficial.”55 (Later, as Project workers labored in the pn records after their
rediscovery, they found documents with “do not send to the ceh” scrawled at
their top margins.)56
Ultimately, Tomuschat concluded that the commission’s efforts to obtain
archival evidence from the state were “conspicuously unfruitful.” “On the
whole,” he wrote, “one may characterize the contribution made by the Gov-
ernment of Guatemala to the process of clarification as next to nothing. In
particular the armed forces pursued a deliberate strategy of obstruction with-
out admitting this.” After first asserting that the ceh had no right to consult
military archives, the army then contended that “the archives consisted of a
black hole for the period under investigation by the ceh.” Tomuschat con-
cluded that the state’s position “can only be explained by the fact that, during
the long years of democratically elected presidents from 1986 onwards, the
Armed Forces and the Secret Services, which had lost any sense of justice and
equity, were largely able to maintain their roles as major power centers of the
country,” again revealing the connection between archival politics and the
character of the state. The government’s conduct toward the ceh, he argued,
was a “black stain” upon the Arzú presidency.57
It also boded ill for the implementation of the Peace Accords, as the 1996
Accord on the Strengthening of Civil Power and the Role of the Armed Forces
in a Democratic Society (afpc), which abolished the pn and restructured the

62  —  CHAPTER TWO

army, also called on the government to pass a law “regulating access to in-
formation regarding military or diplomatic matters of national security . . .
with an eye toward avoiding any abuse of power and to guarantee respect for
citizens’ rights and liberties.”58 (Ironically, the ceh itself produced voluminous
archives, but the un deemed it too dangerous for those records to remain in
Guatemala, and therefore ordered them sealed in a warehouse in New Jersey
for fifty years. They can only be opened with the written permission of the
un secretary-­general in response to a petition from the Guatemalan state,
and thus far, for reasons that should by now be obvious, no petition has been
made. Archivists are not even allowed in to maintain the records’ condition,
such that by the time they are opened in the late 2040s, the 1990s-­era com-
puter disks and databases may well be obsolete and unusable.)59
The ceh commissioners’ skepticism about the state’s stewardship of its ar-
chives was borne out in 1999, shortly after the release of the commission’s re-
port. In a news item that dominated headlines for weeks, a fifty-­four-­page file
chronicling nearly two hundred forced disappearances and political killings
orchestrated between 1983 and 1985 by the Presidential Staff’s intelligence
unit—auspiciously known as “El Archivo”—was smuggled out of the army’s
archives and given to human rights activists in the United States, who pub-
lished it.60 The victims’ entries featured their photograph, name and pseudo­
nyms, information on their political activities, whether or not they had in-
formed on their comrades during detention, and the dates of their capture and
execution (or, occasionally, release), using the code “300” to indicate death. It
was a gruesome document, in some cases revealing victims’ fates for the first
time. Its impact was explosive. Defense minister Marco Tulio Espinoza denied
that the “Diario Militar,” as it came to be called, belonged to the armed forces,
while pressure from victims’ advocates, who demanded access to the rest of
the military archives along with army personnel registries from the 1983–1985
period, mounted.61 Curiously, Espinoza fell back upon archival science in an
effort to absolve the army of blame, claiming that attributing the Diario Mili-
tar to the army was a misidentification of provenance. He argued that all mili-
tary documents were printed on letterhead, sported an identification number,
and bore an official seal. Since the Diario had none of these features, Espinoza
asserted, it could not be an authentic file.62
But the defense minister was forced to abandon his claim that the file was
inauthentic, as the former leaders of the pgt, far, orpa, and egp came forward
to confirm that the individuals in the Diario indeed had been militants in their
organizations. Instead, the army took a new tack: stating that “we neither ac-
cept nor reject” the Diario as its own, it then alleged that all army documents

ARCHIVAL CULTURE, STATE SECRETS   — 63

FIG. 2.3  By Fo, originally published May 1999. Used by permission of Fo/Prensa Libre.

from the war had already been destroyed, making this one a fake.63 Ex-dictator
Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores, in power from 1983 until 1985, emerged from
retirement to proclaim his innocence, insisting, “I never ordered that anyone
be killed” and suggesting that the media firestorm was “like an Alka-­Seltzer:
it bubbles up for a little bit and then everything calms down again, because
they have no proof, these are false testimonies.”64 Army officials scrambled
to contain the public-­relations disaster; after the National Security Archive’s
Kate Doyle accused Espinoza of destroying records regarding disappeared orpa
commander Efraín Bámaca Velásquez, a spokesman backtracked to announce
that, in fact, the military had never destroyed any documentation from the
armed conflict and had instead dutifully turned it all over to the ceh.65 Defense
minister Héctor Barrios Celada, who preceded Espinoza, was “evasive and ner-
vous” at a press conference when attempting to walk the rhetorical line of nei-
ther accepting nor rejecting the file’s veracity.66 Others were less circumspect:
the director of military intelligence, Colonel Mario Mérida, accused victims’
groups of having fabricated the Diario themselves, and right-­wing presidential
candidate Luis Ernesto Sosa Ávila claimed that those named in the Diario had
indeed been murdered, but by guerrilla leaders, not the army.67
Despite the army’s vigorous disavowals—or, perhaps, because of them—
the Diario Militar represented the human rights community’s first real victory
in the “archive wars” of the 1990s. In the wake of the Diario’s release, family
members of the 183 individuals named in the document called upon Presi-

64  —  CHAPTER TWO

dent Arzú in his role as commander in chief of the army to release more files
from the military archives.68 The human rights ombudsman, Julio Arango,
convened the Multi-­Institutional Authority for Peace and Understanding
(Instancia Multi-­Institucional para la Paz y la Concordia), a group uniting
some sixty-­five human rights organizations with the objective of, among other
things, fighting for archival access as it pertained to justice.69 The Diario gal-
vanized activists and bolstered the claims they had been making for years.
But its greatest impact was, of course, on the family members and friends of
the 183 men and women who stared out from the file. “I remember it very
well, because when this document appeared, I was about sixteen or seven-
teen, and it caused a major crisis in my house,” remembered Camilo, a young
worker at the Project whose parents had both been Communist Party mili-
tants. “My mother was extremely upset—because you could just download
the Diario from the Internet, and in it appeared all her friends from the pgt,”
lost comrades by the dozens, their destinies finally uncovered.70 The dossier
both wounded and soothed. It was traumatic to learn that a fallen compatriot
had, under torture, turned in two compañeros, who were subsequently hunted
down and killed. But finding out that a disappeared brother had, in fact, died
offered new, if bittersweet, possibilities for closure for families forever left in
a state of limbo. The nonagenarian mother of the disappeared trade unionist
Rubén Amílcar Farfán, for example, had left her home’s garage light on for the
thirty years following his 1984 disappearance, so that if her son ever returned
he would find the doorway illuminated and welcoming.71 And the abundance
of evidence contained in the Diario offered promising material for courtroom
justice. In 2007, the Myrna Mack Foundation (fmm) and the Berkeley Hu-
man Rights Law Clinic filed a case before the Inter-­American Commission
on Human Rights on behalf of a group of family members of thirty Diario
victims. (As of this writing, the case was still pending.) In October 2008, the
commission held a hearing specifically regarding the right of victims’ families
to access state documents about their lost loved ones; more than five hun-
dred documents from the police archives containing information about those
named in the Diario were submitted as evidence.
Much as the national conversation about the Diario owed its intensity to
the struggles over access preceding it, so too did it influence the next major
archival flash point: 2003, when the long-­overdue, Peace Accords–mandated
dissolution of the Presidential Staff (emp) presented the question of how to
deal with the organization’s records.72 In fine Guatemalan security-­reform tra-
dition, the emp had its name changed to the Presidential Intelligence Secre-
tariat in 1993 to deflect criticism, but the intelligence service never changed

ARCHIVAL CULTURE, STATE SECRETS   — 65

its shady modes of operation. The ceh and remhi reports fingered the emp,
and particularly its “El Archivo” intelligence unit, as having directed political
terror in Guatemala City; it was responsible for some of the highest-­profile
crimes of the war and postwar periods, including the murders of anthropol-
ogist Myrna Mack and Bishop Juan Gerardi.73 When then president Alfonso
Portillo announced that he would finally disband the emp and replace it with a
civilian intelligence service, the news was warmly received. However, it came
accompanied by whisperings that the emp’s archives would be destroyed in
the process. In response, gam and the Human Rights Office of the Archbishop
of Guatemala (odhag) jointly petitioned to have the emp’s archives saved,
turned over to the pdh, and opened for consultation and analysis. And in
2003, something unprecedented happened, as Portillo was leaving office: the
petition was granted. Investigators overseen by the pdh would be permitted
to enter the Zone 10 military base where the records were kept, under the
custody of the Army General Staff, to photograph the emp papers. It was a
stunning coup for human rights organizations, in a country more familiar
with coups of another sort entirely.
Members of gam, Security in Democracy (sedem), odhag, the Center for
Human Rights Legal Action (caldh), and Sons and Daughters for Identity
and Justice and Against Forgetting and Silence (hijos), sporting pdh jack-
ets, arrived at the military base in February 2004 to begin work. Out of fear
that the army would change its mind—team members witnessed, while at the
base, the destruction of other groups of documents they were not allowed to
consult—they opted to digitize as many pages as possible, as quickly as possi-
ble. After many discussions of how best to proceed, the activists opted to take
pictures first and analyze the documents later.74 Armed with digital cameras,
several dozen workers—extremely nervous about working on an active base,
where “they took your name and your time of entry, you knew they knew
your license plates, where you were coming from, everything about you”—set
themselves to photographing the documents.75 They spent nearly two years,
at varying levels of intensity, taking photos of more than a million pages of
records that were stuffed in grain sacks and heaped willy-­nilly in a leaky cham-
ber.76 “It was very . . . artisanal,” explained one team member.77 Although the
emp archival recovery initiative had indirect support from the international
community—in the form of advising from the National Security Archive and
the fact the ngos that stayed until the end, sedem and gam, were largely
funded from abroad—it never elicited the kind of applied technical assistance,
money, or attention that the Project would two years later. In retrospect, it was
a trial run for the pn archives’ recovery.

66  —  CHAPTER TWO

 Instructive errors were made in the handling of the emp archives. Because
archivists were not included in the process, the emp documents were photo-
graphed without maintaining the original order, ascertaining the provenance,
or preserving the chain of custody of the records. Therefore, in a court of law
it would have been too easy to dismiss the images as fabrications.78 At the end
of the initiative, the pdh and the ngos were left with more than seven hun-
dred compact disks of images, without any sense of the documents’ order or
the spatial relationships between different records, both important tools for
their interpretation.79 Divorced from their original contexts, the documents
would be much harder to analyze after the fact.80 Additionally, when the pdh
was asked by human rights groups to take physical custody of the records—to
which the National Defense General Staff (emdn) actually consented—the
pdh refused, citing financial constraints and a lack of space, leaving itself
with only the disks of disordered images.81 gam and sedem were unable to
fund an analysis of the images; the pdh kept the master disks because it had
the original legal authority to digitize the records, but it never made a serious
attempt to put them to investigative purposes or open them to researchers
from other organizations.82 In fact, the possibility of granting access to the im-
ages down the line was never even considered, which also affected how they
were gathered. As Project archivist Lizbeth Barrientos attested, “Scanning for
scanning’s sake represents a double risk.”83
These pitfalls—the uninformed archival practice, the pdh’s ambivalence,
the improvised nature of the initiative—meant that the opportunity of the
emp records was never fully capitalized upon. Warts and all, though, the expe-
rience with the emp archives laid groundwork for the police archives project
that would follow it. It conferred upon the pdh, gam, and sedem a “certain
level of moral authority regarding these types of archives,” in the words of
sedem’s Iduvina Hernández, establishing these human rights organizations
as “natural” stewards of documents pertaining to the war, even though the
constitution (and professional archival prerogative) assigned that role to
the agca.84
When the pn archives were discovered in 2005, the pdh convened the
Human Rights Convergence, an umbrella group uniting many of Guatemala
City’s major human rights ngos, to devise a strategy for grappling with the
find. And when the pdh asked Convergence members to lend their organiza-
tions’ employees to be volunteers in the nascent police archival rescue, groups
like gam and sedem had natural candidates to offer: those who had worked
on the emp initiative. Over the course of the Project’s existence, easily a dozen
veterans of the emp archives ended up working on the police records, building

ARCHIVAL CULTURE, STATE SECRETS   — 67

upon past experience to help develop better practices for the future. Addi-
tionally, the army’s decision to allow a group of activists onto an active base to
sift through its documentary dirty laundry—an unprecedented move, though
probably indicative of how thoroughly the records had been “cleansed”—
rendered thinkable the idea of launching a project to rescue the police ar-
chives. It created political, intellectual, psychological, and juridical pos­
sibilities. “There was a lot of fear about doing this kind of work,” said one gam
staffer who participated in both the emp and pn initiatives. “Before Portillo,
we never thought we could pull this kind of thing off.”85
The Project, therefore, owed the dedication of its workers and leaders,
as well as the support of domestic and international allies, to twenty years’
worth of struggle over access to archives. It was, ultimately, a contest about
citizenship, competing conceptions of justice, and the nature of the transi-
tional state. This war of position over documents and history—an attempt
not to overthrow the system but to wrest information from it—came into
being just as Guatemala’s war of maneuver, the armed struggle, ended. (In the
mid-­1980s, when gam was founded, the urng had already been effectively de-
feated on the battlefield.). And while the lessons learned over the two decades
preceding the appearance of the National Police archives had been valuable
ones, the Project would, in the following years, confront far thornier chal-
lenges for which no precedents existed. As we have seen, activists jumped at
the opportunity to make use of the police archives, even as their efforts were
bedeviled by the perversities of Guatemala’s archival culture and politics. But
to make headway in the service of a new objective—to actually change Guate-
mala’s constricted archival culture by bringing the documents meaningfully to
bear upon postwar society—would take new levels of creativity, grit, and hard
work. It would require archival thinking.

68  —  CHAPTER TWO

 three HOW­ THE GUERRILLERO
BECAME AN ARCHIVIST

We move around the archives like rats; I move like a rat,

looking for information, looking, looking.
—José Antonio, Project worker

B
y mid-­2006, as the first anniversary of the archives’ discovery approached,
the Project’s staff began thinking not only of short-­term emergency
preservation but also of longer-­term planning. The work had begun in
a comparatively simple, targeted manner with the rescue of the mammoth pile
of encrusted personal identity fichas. It had depended upon the folk knowl-
edge that activists had accumulated over the course of the archive wars. Once
significant headway had been made with the fichas, however, the work became
more complicated. The Project would need a staged work plan, a systematic
approach to archival organization, a speedier way of getting the work done,
and a leadership structure to accommodate a staff that was, thanks to the
sponsorship of countries like Sweden, Switzerland, and Spain, quickly ex-
panding. At least for the moment, and in defiance of its protagonists’ fears, the
Project was free to grow. But how should it grow?
To begin addressing these questions in a more centralized manner, Gustavo
Meoño, the former egp commander in charge of the Project, asked a group of
trusted workers to form a coordinación, or leadership team, which would make
the major decisions concerning day-­to-­day operations by consensus. The exact
composition of the coordinación varied over time, but it consistently included
Meoño himself; the jovial, cherub-­faced assistant director, Alberto Fuentes;
the soft-­spoken archivist, Ingrid Molina; the Project’s historian; and four or
five others. In conjunction with the pdh, whose influence lay more in overall
strategy than in the nuts and bolts of project management, the coordinación
established the priorities for the months to come. The Project would orient
its work toward three fundamental and familiar goals: clarifying the history of
the war, rescuing historical memory, and promoting justice. The investigation
would focus on the period from 1975 through 1985, on the well-­founded hypo­
thesis that it would yield the bulk of the evidence on human rights abuses;
a later statistical sampling of the documents would bear out this decision.1
Because the ombudsman was up for reelection in mid-­2007, the Project had
to assume that its access to the records would last only through his tenure.
As such, the coordinators prioritized the human rights investigation, aim-
ing to work as quickly as possible. But with the exception of Molina, few of
them had experience in working with office documents, much less familiarity
with the precepts of archival science. These were, for the most part, not in-
dividuals who had ever held office jobs, and decoding the bureaucratic logic
of the police’s documentary flow seemed like a distraction from the human
rights investigation. Molina, and the agca’s Ericastilla when she was invited
to give archival training seminars to Project staff in 2005 and early 2006, had
gamely attempted to impart the principles of archival organization to their un-
orthodox group of pupils, who for the most part failed to see their relevance.
Because the police had been a large, sprawling bureaucracy comprising many
substructures, Molina and Ericastilla emphasized that would-­be amateur ar-
chivists had to pay close attention to archival science’s two core concepts:
original order and provenance.
Provenance, the basic principle of any archives, refers to how “records
of one organization that created and maintained records in the conduct of
business must not be mingled with the records of any other organization that
separately created and maintained its records.”2 The files of any individual
record-­creating entity within a larger bureaucracy would become, in an orga-
nized archive adhering to international standards and using official archival
terminology, a “fond”; its substructures’ records would be organized as differ-
ent “subfonds” within it. For the pn, this meant that documents kept by the
Detective Corps, for instance, had to remain separate from documents kept
by the Radio Patrol, or the subdirector-­general, or Procurement Services, or
the Fourth Corps, all mini-­bureaucracies with their own leadership structures
and records, though part of the larger police hierarchy. The postwar archives
needed to be organized exactly as they had been during the war, such that a
hypothetical former police chief, back from the grave, could walk into the
pdh’s reorganized archives and know precisely where to find everything. But
provenance could be difficult to establish. To which fond did a record belong
if it bore no evidence of receipt, or if it was one of six copies sent out by the
director-­general to various subdependencies, or if the sender had not included
its information at the top corner of the first page? Establishing provenance

70  —  CHAPTER THREE

meant learning how to mimetically grasp and reproduce the police’s logic, to
read between the lines.
The second principle, original order, requires respecting the original ar-
rangement given to a body of records by the office that maintained them. If
the First Corps kept its files on sex worker arrests arranged by internal filing
number rather than chronologically, and indexed them accordingly, then re-
specting the original order would mean not rearranging the files chronolog-
ically. This would permit the police’s own index to remain useful in locating
files and would provide clues to how the pn organized its information, what
the relationships between different records were, and how the pn made use
of the voluminous data it kept. It would reveal how the organization thought.3
Preserving the documents’ original order also required an additional meta-­
step: tracking any and all changes made to the physical placement of the re-
cords as staffers moved bundles of papers from unlit back corners to their
worktables. Maintaining a chain of custody within the Project as the inves-
tigators conducted their work, moved boxes, or changed the storage layout
after making infrastructural improvements would ensure that all pdh inter-
ventions into the documents would be accounted for, critical for assuring the
documents’ admissibility in legal proceedings. Any movement of a document
from one room to another had to be recorded and witnessed, its archival path
itself archived.
But archival principles do not exist in a vacuum. Instead, they are pro-
foundly and inherently relational. To understand and deploy the concepts
of original order and provenance, any archivist—amateur or professional—
needed to understand how the pn itself had functioned. The documentary flow
within any bureaucracy reflects that bureaucracy’s structures, relationships be-
tween substructures, and internal hierarchies. A faithful archival restoration—
“respecting records’ creators as the authoritative voice in terms of record or-
ganization,” as an early bible of archival science put it—demanded an un-
derstanding of how the institution and its agents behaved.4 But because the
pn had always worked in relative secrecy, an arm of a national security state
with certain subsquads’ operations unknown even to other members of the
force, outsiders had never known much about how it operated. What was, for
example, the relationship between a corps and the director-­general’s office?
How many corps existed at different moments, and why? What was the role
of the subdirector general? Was Commando Six, an infamous death squad,
part of the Second Corps or a stand-­alone entity? During which years was it
active? What did the number “32,” which appeared handwritten on certain
documents and not others, mean? How did the pn interact with the military

HOW THE GUERRILLERO BECAME AN ARCHIVIST   — 71

and with presidential intelligence structures? Who sent copies of their docu-
ments to whom? These questions had to be answered not only to re-­create the
organization of the documents but to grasp the secrets the archives had to tell.
As Lizbeth Barrientos, hired as the Project’s second staff archivist in 2008,
observed, “An archivist can’t work alone. An archivist needs to work with a
historian.”5 And in the fall of 2005, two specialists (the staff historian and an
external expert in security issues) compiled an internal report based on their
initial findings at the archives, a review of the pn’s general orders, and the
near-­nonexistent secondary materials.6 They struggled to piece together more
than a hundred years of police history, with the archives still a disaster zone.
At the outset, the Project’s historian keenly felt the weight of her responsibil-
ity, exacerbated by the team’s limited time frame; in the early months of the
work, she had nightmares about the road ahead. “One dream I will always
remember,” she recalled, “was one in which I was surrounded by huge piles
and piles of white dinner plates, which I had to clean in a certain amount of
time. And of course what I was really thinking of was the piles and piles of
documents that I was working on every day.”7
Based on their preliminary report, which pointedly noted that “it will not
be possible to conduct a more detailed investigation regarding the police’s
structure if the scope of the investigation is not reduced,” a small historical
investigations team was assembled in early 2006, and for more than a year it
worked to clarify the pn’s shifting structural history.8 I worked on this team
during my first months at the archives, and I quickly came to recognize the
looping scrawl of pn ex-­director Germán Chupina, who ran death squads from
pn headquarters during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Our team’s work was
challenging because the structures we were most interested in investigating—
death squads, rapid reaction forces, and riot police—were mobile and un­
official entities, quickly put together and taken apart, and so they generated
little in the way of a paper trail.9 The riot squad that had opened fire on a par-
ticular group of striking workers in 1981 would have been assembled quickly
with officers culled from elsewhere in the police who then returned to their
regular posts, thus not producing or receiving correspondence as a standard
body would. Nonetheless, the historians advanced in their task over time.
As the police’s structure came into focus over the months, one work team used
the wall of its work space to build an elaborate construction-­paper tree, with
the different branches and leaves representing different pn structures and
substructures—a graphic organigram for workers to consult. New leaves were
added and old ones taken away whenever new relationships between squads
and sectors were revealed, thus charting the Project’s evolving knowledge.

72  —  CHAPTER THREE

 Project workers improvised, and constantly amended, their own organigrams as
FIG. 3.1 
they sought to understand the administrative structures and bureaucratic functioning
of the National Police. Photograph by author.

When the tree eventually became too obsolete in its central assumptions—its
main branches—to be amended, it was taken down, not without some wist-
fulness on the part of the team whose cinderblock walls it had brightened.10
While the historians worked to decipher pn structures, the activists, who
had not yet come around to seeing the use-­value of seemingly abstract archival
principles, set about cleaning documents and organizing them the way that
seemed most natural to them: chronologically. New costales, or grain sacks,
of papers were opened and divided up by year, not by police subunit. Workers
were divided into teams—one per year from 1979 through 1985, one working
on the pn’s ledger books, one each for the Second and Fourth Corps, one con-
tinuing with the fichas from the Identification Bureau, one with the documents
from the Quetzaltenango departmental headquarters, and another working
on the pn’s daily reports.11 The table teams regularly found pages or files that
were badly degraded by mold, water, or time, and they improvised methods
of archival preservation that, they thought, would help preserve documents
for posterity. In this, the staff archivist served as an archival policewoman.
When she informed workers that adhesive tape could not be used to bind
torn pages because the glue would attract insects, they used staples. When

HOW THE GUERRILLERO BECAME AN ARCHIVIST   — 73

they learned that stainless steel staples were not available in Guatemala, and
that the staples they were using would further corrode the pages, they began
replacing rusted old staples by literally sewing pages together with needle and
thread. “Bueno, the men didn’t know how to sew!” one worker remembered.
“And so that was another thing, and we had to teach them how to sew! And
they would say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t, I can’t do it!’ And we would say, ‘Well,
you have to learn, because you need to work!’ And now they know how to
sew.”12 (Once stainless steel staples were imported from abroad, the sewing
was abandoned.)
Before description and filing systems were put in place to record the loca-
tions of important documents, workers would make their own notes on scrap
paper, recording the salient facts of the record and where it could be found
anew. When workers had difficulty recalling which pn code words referred
to which positions (in the coded documents, mainly telegrams and radio-
grams, terms like “Kidar,” “Kobof,” or “Vupom” referred to “chief,” “subchief,”
or “judge”), they made poster-­style memory aids.13 Workers’ methods were
artisanal and collaborative, relying on collective knowledge within teams to
conduct the detective work of interpreting whatever happened to issue forth
from the next flea-­ridden sack of papers. It was a deeply human response to
facing the inner workings of terror’s bureaucratic machinery.
Each day at the archives presented new challenges for which workers
lacked precedents. “If a document is getting wet because there’s water on the
floor, what do I do?” asked one. “I can’t just move the paper because of the
chain of custody. But the document is just getting wetter and wetter. What are
you going to do?”14 When a worker opened one of the large ledger books in
which the pn tracked incoming and outgoing correspondence, and found live
worms contentedly burrowing through the paper, what was the procedure to
be? When one ficha was pulled from the stack bearing, instead of fingerprints,
actual shriveled pieces of dessicated flesh sliced from the fingertips of one
unlucky citizen and stapled directly to the file card, how was that ficha to be
preserved?15
In most cases, questions of archival practice and documentary interpreta-
tion were resolved by collective reasoning, either in meetings or within teams.
One worker, an elderly former egp organizer, reminisced about stumbling
across a file on one of Che Guevara’s lovers alongside several younger employ-
ees, two women in their early twenties, and watching as the younger workers
realized what they had found. “Let me tell you how beautiful it is when some-
one finds a document about a particular event, and they ask the group, ‘How
should I interpret this?’ You get to see how young people from today try to

74  —  CHAPTER THREE

interpret the events of the past,” he remembered fondly.16 These quotidian ex-
changes did more than provide clues about pn operations. They also impacted
the subjectivities of Project workers, who found themselves retrieving their
own dusty memories as they labored over equally dusty papers. “In the mo-
ment when a document appears with X information,” said one, “it gets shared
among the work group, and that generates learning—I can say, ‘Look, I lived
that, I went to that demonstration, and in that photo of the demonstration, I
was marching behind that group you see there.’ That is formative education.
And when you tell them about who marched ahead, who marched behind,
who was there, what was happening—that is political education. Hearing how
this demonstration was conducted, that teaches them something.”17
The communal spirit of the early days was not limited to the exchange of
political and historical understandings, though many older workers remem-
bered these interchanges with deep satisfaction. Staffers also collaborated on
brightening their grim work space and managing the labor’s emotional toll.
When a stray dog, living amid the junked cars surrounding the compound, be-
gan hanging around at lunchtime, workers named her (La Lechu) and looked
out for her by gathering leftover food from the modest comedor where most
staffers ate lunch. The dog, scrappy and good-­hearted, became a mascot. When
La Lechu became pregnant, the 1979 table started a collection fund, raising
money to build a little doghouse for her and her puppies as the rainy season
approached. Soccer was another welcome diversion; to release stress during
breaks, workers played pickup games on the pitted concrete joining the site’s
two warehouses. And to improve the physical work space, which still resem-
bled a dank jail, many pitched in to bring leafy plants, political posters, colorful
textiles, and photographs to spruce up the long gray halls. The archivist banned
the plants—they generated humidity and attracted insects. But later, when
the Project converted a parking lot outside the building into a garden, each
worker was encouraged to contribute a plant to it. Soon, tall, symbolism-­rich
corn stalks and vibrant roses greeted visitors. New bulletin boards featured
photocopies of articles showcasing the Project’s work, and activist posters bore
slogans like “Where There Is Little Justice, It Is Dangerous to Be Right . . . But
When One Is Right, Justice Is Possible.” Individual teams’ work areas came to
feature hand-­drawn announcements of members’ birthdays and soccer season
calendars; older workers brought in art made by their children. Before long the
musty building was, if not exactly a pleasant space, certainly a friendlier one
whose appearance reflected the staff’s personalities and interests.
These holistic aspects of the first year at the archives were highly valued,
both psychologically and politically, by those who were doing the work. It was

HOW THE GUERRILLERO BECAME AN ARCHIVIST   — 75

difficult, traumatizing labor, and the early solidarity of a few dozen workers
served as critical social glue, sustaining them as they faced an uncertain fu-
ture.18 But the Project could not function this way in the long term; the posters
and friendships would remain, but the artisanal methods became obsolete.
Increased funding in 2006 allowed the Project to expand and systematize its
work along three interconnected axes: the archival, involving the description
and organization of the records; the quantitative, a sampling project under
the supervision of the U.S. statistical analysis outfit Benetech; and the inves-
tigative, namely, the research into human rights abuses.19 A year into its exis-
tence, with the foundations for these lines of work established and basic infra­
structural problems solved, the Project would blossom in earnest—though not
without suffering growing pains.

PROFESSIONALIZATION

“It’s easy to imagine that when the Project publishes its first report, someone
could try to discredit it by saying, ‘It’s just a bunch of Commies working there,’ ”
said Jorge Villagrán, the Project’s technology coordinator. “But the most beau-
tiful part about the scientific rigor, about the quantitative elements of the in-
vestigation, is that that risk doesn’t exist.”20 Indeed, the Project—always trying
to anticipate where attacks would originate—embraced scientific methods as
a means of shoring up its credibility. Early allies were members of the Human
Rights Data Analysis Group (hrdag), then a part of Benetech, a California
organization placing technology and statistical analysis at the service of hu-
man rights initiatives around the world.21 Their work with the Guatemalan
truth commission, as well as in the historical accounting of human rights vio­
lations in Colombia, East Timor, Yugoslavia, Burma, Sierra Leone, and Peru,
made hrdag a natural partner of the Project, and an early visit by director
Patrick Ball set in motion a long relationship.22 Ball conducted an assessment
of the archives, developing plans for a multistage random sampling of the
documents and for the safe storage of the sample data at remote foreign sites.23
A quantitative analysis of the pn’s documentary output would eventually yield
statistically sound results.
The random sampling, based on a three-­dimensional topographical map
of the archives site, was taken from computer-­generated location points, to
which trained staff would navigate and extract a preset number of document
units. To generate those points, the computers relied upon an archivist’s tool
called the Master Location Registry (rmu), a global and ever-­shifting three-­
dimensional map of the entire site that accounted for every bundle stuffed
in every cranny. The rmu team preserved the documentary chain of custody,

76  —  CHAPTER THREE

tracking every time a bundle or sack of records was moved from one room to
the next for processing. Randomly extracted documents in hand, a team of
codifiers would capture all the data from those documents: sender; receiver;
any names mentioned (prisoners, criminals, officers); any actions (captures,
releases, deaths) referred to; and all other details. The results were strictly
calibrated using a series of exercises to ensure that codifiers captured the same
pieces of information in the same way, eliminating bias. Villagrán explained
why achieving precision in the quantitative sampling required such extensive
training and standardization:
We’re just taking down the facts from the document; we’re not interested
in doing any interpretation. So if a document mentions that a decapitated
body was found, how do we interpret that? Maybe in the qualitative analy­
sis, one could conclude that this was torture, that this was extrajudicial
execution, or something else. But in the quantitative analysis, the first fact
is that this is a dead body. And then you have issues of consistency even
with that objective fact: maybe to you that’s a death, maybe to me it’s a
cadaver. That means we have zero consistency, that we don’t understand
the fact in the same way. When you have a group of fifteen people, it gets
even more complicated.24
The captured data, once analyzed, would support any number of conclu-
sions: for example, what percentage of the documents contained evidence of
human rights abuses or had passed through the director-­general’s office? Such
data could allow the Project to prove that the high command of the police
was kept informed about all police actions, thus assigning them responsibility
for abuses committed under their watch and kneecapping common protes-
tations that any violations were simply the isolated result of a few bad eggs.
The former director-­general Chupina, pursued for genocide by Spanish courts
until his 2008 death, repeatedly claimed that if the police had ever committed
abuses, he was unaware of them; after Chupina died, his son told reporters
that his father “told us he felt responsible for what the police did, but the way
a father feels responsible for the actions of his children—not directly for what
happened.”25 The statistics would allow—and did allow, upon their publica-
tion in 2011—the Project to debunk such claims by pointing to the archival
chain of command. They would also protect the Project from accusations of
bias. “If someone arrives and says ‘Oh, this codifier slanted the results, so
they’re not legitimate,’ I can point them to the standardization exercises,” said
Villagrán. “Or they can try it for themselves.” This was crucial, politically, as
it rendered the data, and qualitative deductions drawn from them, far harder

HOW THE GUERRILLERO BECAME AN ARCHIVIST   — 77

to discount. “Of course,” Villagrán continued, “the science just provides the
math, the statistics, the method. But the end result is that you have a scientific
process used to draw a political conclusion.”26
Scientific and technical approaches would impact the Project in other
ways, too. With Morales up for reelection in 2007, and hence the Project’s
long-­term viability in doubt, everyone’s top priority was the digitizing of the
records. Digitized, the documents’ contents would forever be available, even
if access to the physical records fell victim to politics. “That’s the only aspect
of this that is irreversible,” Meoño said, “the aspect where no matter what hap-
pens, those documents will never be lost.”27 The first computers were deliv-
ered in mid-­2006, and scanners followed soon behind. (Staffers hotly antici­
pated the arrival of the first scanner, but when the delivery men showed up
with the unwieldy box, they dropped and shattered it, delaying the scanning
process by another precious month.) Setting up a complex server and scan-
ner network in Guatemala, however, was tricky. Given the maintenance that
scanners in constant use would require, they needed to be sourced locally and
covered by local warranties; the same was true of the software for organizing
the digital documents, significantly reducing the range of available options.
Villagrán and his team, looking for machines that would fulfill their very spe-
cific needs, surveyed local scanner users to find the appropriate equipment. It
was in the office of a credit card company where they found the only locally
available brand of large planetarium scanners, needed to scan the giant pn
ledger books. The smaller scanners also required careful consideration: most
makes used a paper feed that pulled pages from above through small wheels
and flipped them out the other side. Such a mechanism would destroy the
archives’ wispy, ultradelicate carbon papers. In the end, the Project opted for a
fleet of small Kodak scanners (without the offending feed mechanism) for use
on letter-­sized documents, developing a work rotation of two shifts—one from
seven in the morning until two in the afternoon, and the other working well
into the evening—of workers feeding papers into ten scanners. The task was
repetitive and boring; workers reassigned to scanning were often disgruntled
at being displaced from analytical, interpretive work to the rote task of feeding
pages into a machine, far too quickly to read any of their tantalizing content.28
The more high-­tech aspects of the rescue work, which most directly con-
fronted the constraints of local conditions, were finessed with significant as-
sistance from the international community. A Swiss expert in digital records
preservation helped set up the scanning system and image databases; hrdag
specialists trained the staffers engaged in the random sampling; U.S. statisti-
cians helped design the statistical analysis. International contributions were

78  —  CHAPTER THREE

not only technical; the foreign experts who made up the Project’s Interna-
tional Advisory Board, assembled in March 2007, advised the Project on com-
parative archives laws, strategic planning, political concerns, and more.29 But
the technical assistance proved especially crucial. For example, the eight-­inch
floppy disks that had been stuffed into open windows to keep out the rain
dated to the late 1960s; they could no longer be read, certainly not by any
computer manufactured in the last twenty years. But a U.S. programmer and
forensic data analyst, Hugh Daniel, cobbled together a complex disk-­reading
system and then shipped it, and himself, to Guatemala. The disks were so old
that they predated the ascii text encoding system, requiring Daniel to build
computer connectors that would “translate” the disks from visidic coding
into ascii before they could be read using a custom-­made hardware setup
composed of scavenged parts from various obsolete, painstakingly sourced vin-
tage machines. After several weeks of trial runs, hardware adaptations, jury-­
rigging, and sheer sweat, Daniel and the compañeros assisting him were able
to render legible copious amounts of data from more than a thousand disks.30
Introducing archival science and international archival standards into the
work rhythm proved more vexing, however, because it could not be managed
by a few specially trained workers as were the random sampling project and
the digitization initiative. Instead, every single worker needed to assimilate
the concepts of original order and provenance, observe the documentary
chain of custody, and master the norms of archival description as outlined in
the International Standard for Archival Description (General), or isad(g).31
They would have to learn, in the words of staff archivist Barrientos, to “think
archivally,” or pensar archivísticamente—a new mode of analysis that would
forever change the way they looked at documents.32 Rather than first reading
what the document actually said, archivally thinking workers’ eyes would im-
mediately scan for clues to its provenance and original order—its sender, any
seals or stamps indicating receipt, how many copies were sent and to whom,
any filing numbers in the upper corners, the document type, notations in the
margins. Additionally, Project coordinators needed to assign archival fonds
and subfonds status to the different record groups, after decoding enough
about the pn’s structure and operations to determine which subentities main-
tained their own filing systems.
The Guatemalan archivists had emphasized these goals since the Project’s
inception. But because the pdh’s gente de confianza did not yet understand
the importance of archival methods to accomplishing their research objec-
tives, the local archivists’ counsel, coming from relatively young Guatemalan
women, fell on deaf ears.33 One young worker particularly impacted by the

HOW THE GUERRILLERO BECAME AN ARCHIVIST   — 79

war—his father murdered by state forces, his mother detained by the army
while pregnant with him—referred to himself only somewhat jokingly as a
member of “the radical anti-­archivists,” an imagined affinity group of those
who saw the archivists’ cajoling and the internal seminars on archival methods
as a waste of time.34 The initial priority for many was to extract damning in-
formation and digitize the documents as quickly as possible, without tarrying
over the details of organizing it all. “It was kind of de-­motivating, because
nobody listened to Guatemalan archivists,” said Barrientos. “The people who
were super gung-­ho to scan everything disregarded the technical advice be-
cause they didn’t want to hear it,” because it was perceived as slowing down
their high-­pressure race for information about human rights violations.35 “The
first staff members were angry when I arrived and told them what to do!”
remembered Molina. “There was tension, there was resistance to the archival
science; people basically treated me like an irrelevant voice who periodically
said things about archives and then they just went on doing things the same
old way.”36
It seemed easier to organize all the documents together chronologically,
minimizing the time spent on understanding arcane new concepts. The prob-
lem, of course, was that such an approach would destroy the documents’ origi-
nal order, muddle their provenance, and thus damage their validity as evidence
in court—with courtroom use of the documents being the entire point of the
Project. The documents’ archival bonds would be shattered. When Ericastilla,
the agca archivist, was brought in for a few training sessions, she noted “the
grave issue of how people weren’t understanding archival science as a criti-
cal tool without which their investigation would be impossible. There was a
strong resistance, that people didn’t want to do archival work, they wanted to
do their human rights work. They didn’t understand that you couldn’t do one
without the other.”37
Here, another foreign specialist—the U.S.-­based archivist Trudy Huskamp
Peterson, whose work with police and truth commission archives had taken
her around the world many times over—played a decisive role in changing the
Project’s course. Peterson, a no-­nonsense midwesterner with a cheery, matter-­
of-­fact manner, wrote a preliminary assessment of the archives in 2005. But
in May 2006 the Swiss government began funding monthly visits by Peterson,
allowing her to provide consistent, hands-­on training in the application of
archival principles to the human rights investigation. And where the exhor-
tations of local archivists were ignored, Peterson’s prestige and voice were
better heeded, resulting in major modifications to the Project’s archival praxis.
Referred to as “La Doctora” and marveled at for her comparatively towering

80  —  CHAPTER THREE

height, Peterson, with the aid of a translator, issued directives, explained
concepts, provided examples, and brooked little resistance.38 It was a slow
and strained process, and to some it was an unwelcome shifting of gears just
when rank-­and-­file staffers had grown accustomed to their ad hoc methods of
archival organization. Though Peterson had more extensive experience than
her Guatemalan counterparts, Ericastilla also chalked the discrepancy in in-
fluence up to “a lack of national self-­esteem, a national insecurity complex”
in which Guatemalans were inclined to revere international experts while
paying less mind to their own.39 “I didn’t have enough experience to force
people to listen to me,” Molina reflected. “Everyone just said ‘yes, yes, Ingrid.’
But with Trudy they couldn’t do that!”40 Molina and Peterson began working
together, joining forces to overhaul workers’ archival practices.
By November 2006, after nearly six months of intensive training, the Proj-
ect was able to shift into a new phase of archival organization.41 The three
hundred boxes’ worth of documents that had been organized chronologically
would be, for the time being, set aside, an albatross of compromised prove­
nance known as the depósito documental.42 Henceforth, all the labor, from
scanning and cleaning all the way up to case investigation, would be reor-
ganized along archival principles, as opposed to simply using techniques of
archival preservation. The table teams organized by year were now a thing of
the past. Working with the archivists and historian, Project leaders assigned
archival fonds and subfonds status to what they now knew were the major
internal structures of the pn: its director-­general’s and subdirector-­general’s
offices, the General Inspector’s office, the Identification Bureau, the Depart-
ment of Criminal Investigations (including the records of its institutional pre-
decessors: the Judicial Police, Detective Corps, and Department of Technical
Investigations), the Joint Operations Center, First through Sixth Corps, all
the departmental offices, and the remaining substructures. Teams were re-
organized to reflect the priority fonds, where they focused on those fonds’
1975–1985 documents. Each team used common reference materials to help
interpret the records distributed to them by the document-­cleaning teams:
the historians’ reports, secondary sources like the ceh report, an isad(g)
manual, and a procedures manual that laid out guidelines for determining
document type, original order, and provenance. The teams identified docu-
ments according to these criteria and then generated technically adequate
descriptions of document series within their assigned fonds and subfonds,
using isad(g) guidelines to structure their descriptions. They began to impose
a standard order upon the records.
“After La Doctora Peterson came,” remembered one older worker, “we had

HOW THE GUERRILLERO BECAME AN ARCHIVIST   — 81

to do our work in a different way. It was difficult to understand.”43 Some com-
plained, arguing that original order and provenance were perhaps important
in well-­organized First World archives, but did not apply to the Guatemalan
records. “Now it makes me laugh, but at the time it made me want to shoot
someone—today they tell you that we’re going to organize the documents in
a certain way, and then four days later they tell you we have to do it another
way,” remembered another.44 In general, younger workers grasped the new
concepts more easily; they were generally more educated and more conver-
sant with modern organizational methods. This created strains during the
transition away from improvisational work practices. As one worker and ex-­
guerrilla in his midsixties said of the youngsters quickest to master the new
approach, “They thought that because they were political science students,
they had the right answers all the time.”45 Older veterans brought in for the
infra­knowledge accumulated through long trajectories of political involve-
ment struggled to apply their life experiences under a new division of labor,
one that made most employees’ daily work into a quota of minute tasks rather
than a broad collective project. Workers in their early twenties were fast-­
tracked into leadership positions; the march of archival professionalization
felt to some like a devaluation of their political acumen and experience.46
Nonetheless, archival thinking took hold in unexpected ways. Once it be-
came clear that archival organization and description practices could improve
workers’ ability to locate and analyze the documents—that archival practice
would expedite the human rights investigation—staffers came to embrace the
logic of thinking archivally. A few of the original doubters even signed up for
university courses in archival science, taught by Molina and Ericastilla, which
they attended evenings and weekends on top of their full workdays. After the
archival fonds were standardized, some workers even found themselves slip-
ping when wanting to reference an arm of the pn—say, the Joint Operations
Center—and referring to it as a fondo, or fond, rather than as a police entity.
(As one told me, “Some fondos of the police were really just used to repress.”)47
La archivística was, as the most die-­hard activists came to believe, the only
way investigative work could successfully be done. “When the archives first
appeared, we said, ‘Okay, there’s the archives, let’s go do our investigation,’ ”
remembered Fuentes, himself a late convert to archival methods. “The first
lesson we learned was that it was impossible to do any kind of research given
the condition the archives were in.”48
Archival categories came to be important lenses through which Project
workers interpreted the police’s structural history. But they also affected the
way that workers understood themselves, the history of the war, and their

82  —  CHAPTER THREE

relationships with one another. Archival thinking was a tool, but it was not
without its own powerful effects—it mediated identity as well, hailing work-
ers as archival subjects in a new and different way from that intended by the
police in the first place. One embassy staffer from a Project donor country
remarked of Meoño that the former egp leader, after enough exposure to find-
ing aids and archival descriptions, began to manifest symptoms of “Stockholm
syndrome, like someone who was so close to his kidnappers that he came to
understand their reality. Now he knows so much about archival science. Trudy
[Peterson] infected everyone!”49 Peterson identified the end of the Project’s
first phase as the moment when, in early 2008, she “heard Gustavo Meoño
give a tour of the archives and explain the concepts of ‘chain of custody’ and
‘provenance’ and ‘original order’ absolutely perfectly. I would guess that three
years ago Gustavo had never heard of those concepts, and today they are a fun-
damental part of the vocabulary of everyone at the Project.”50 The guerrillero,
while in search of paper cadavers, had become an archivist.
Interestingly, integrating archival practices into the Project was no one-­
sided compromise. The idiosyncracies of the archives demanded flexibility
and adaptation from not only the activists but also the archivists. “A group of
archivists,” said Barrientos, “would have identified the fonds first, classified
the papers, organized the papers, described the papers, placed the papers in
their storage locale, and only then scanned them.”51 In such a scenario, need-
less to say, analysis of the documents would come even later, once all the other
steps had been achieved. The question facing the Project was, as the pdh’s
Carla Villagrán put it, “how to introduce the idea of human rights investiga-
tions into a technical-­professional tradition that’s so rigid in this sense.”52 The
specificities of the pn archives—which compared to, say, the Stasi archives,
had been encountered in a frightful state—required Project archivists to ac-
cept a new and unprecedented order of operations. Waiting to clean, orga-
nize, and describe the entire archival holdings before commencing scanning or
analy­sis would have involved a wait of something like twenty years, and would
probably never have happened at all, since foreign governments interested
in transitional justice would never have funded an archives project lacking
an immediate human rights component.53 The Project’s funding, dependent
on the whims of the international community, was then guaranteed only
through the fall of 2007; on top of that, if Morales lost his bid for reappoint-
ment, the pdh would only have two years’ worth of access to the documents.
Because the Project existed in a permanent “emergency situation,” in Walter
Benjamin’s words, it required a more contingent and specific modus operandi,
drawing from both archival and investigative toolkits.

HOW THE GUERRILLERO BECAME AN ARCHIVIST   — 83

 As such, it was necessary to “create a concept, and an innovative metho­
dology, in order to develop both the archivística and the investigation in a
simultaneous and complementary manner.”54 Workers in charge of archival
description were trained to identify documents of interest to investigators,
passing photographs of them along to the investigative team and ensuring, by
accurately identifying the document’s provenance, original order, and rmu
location, that they would be correctly interpreted and located in the future.
Training was constant and ongoing. Meanwhile, the archivists had to adjust
their technical priorities. “It’s not the same to tell a researcher to wait a couple
of months for a document as it is to tell a citizen to wait, someone who has
already waited ten, fifteen, or twenty years to find out what happened to their
loved one,” said Molina. “I think this is very important, and in the field of
archival science this element has really been left to one side.” Although archi-
vists were trained to see all users of archives—and all documents—as equal,
in a country like Guatemala this was not always so.55 For the purposes of the
pdh’s investigation, records from 1975 to 1985 were simply more valuable than
the rest; an archivally sound methodology had to be developed to prioritize
their treatment.
Finally, foreign archival consultants adapted to the political and technical
limitations of local circumstances. “La Doctora comes from a very modern
country with lots of resources and lots of awareness about archives’ impor-
tance and value,” Molina explained. “We wanted the same things here, but
you come up against the reality that, say, there is no acid-­free cardboard in
Guatemala for archival boxes, and we can’t afford to bring it in from the out-
side.”56 Politics intervened into ideal visions of archival practice as well: while
Peterson had initially recommended making copies of mold-­infected records
and then destroying the originals to avoid contaminating other documents,
the pdh did not own the records, and so lacked the authority to destroy
even a single page.57 The investigators came to accept archival science as a
friendly intervention; the archivists came to understand the concerns of those
focused on the human rights investigation and the constraints of the pdh’s
time frame and resources. As Meoño put it, “The documents aren’t an end in
themselves—they’re things that need to be put at the service of people, so that
those people can exercise their rights.”58

THE “MILLION-­DOLLAR QUESTION”

The tools of archival science—conservation practices, modes of document

organization and analysis, finding aids, and instruments of description—
allowed the Project, in rebuilding the archives, to build power.59 As Peterson

84  —  CHAPTER THREE

writes, “The purpose of describing archives is to gain intellectual control over
the records”—a control that, by describing records’ contents, creators, and
locations, would permit researchers to find the answers to their questions,
or defendants to find evidence.60 By restoring the site’s physical infrastruc-
ture, deciphering the pn’s institutional history, and organizing and describing
the documents, Project investigators literally took control of the archives, re-
claiming them from abandonment and putting them at the service of a new
mission. This archival power would allow Guatemala’s beleaguered human
rights sector to envision unprecedented advances in war crimes prosecutions
and historical reckoning, as discussed in chapters 8 and 9. As one staffer re-
flected, “All this work we’ve done on the archives has given us a new vision of
the world. It’s given us many tools—now we can see who had the power. You
just have to sit down and read the documents.”61 The archival and technical
professionalization the Project underwent during its first year and a half rep-
resented, on the one hand, incredible progress—indeed, a new vision of the
world, opened up by the possibilities of archival thinking. “When I arrived,”
recalled one worker, “we were surrounded by garbage; today, that’s been con-
verted into a garden.” 62
On the other hand, however, the journey from garbage to garden, or from
decrepit Babylonian garden to one filled with roses and cornstalks, was lit-
tered with stumbling blocks. While it was a victory in a certain sense—the
guerrillero had become an archivist—it was one born of a constricted set of
political possibilities and the crushing of efforts to win broader socioeconomic
change. Was it, in fact, a good thing that the guerrillero had become an archi-
vist? Did this new identity empower, or enclose? As for the notion that we
may assess a society’s level of democratization by analyzing the conditions of
its archives, the circumstances of the pn archives suggested a mixed “democ-
ratization” indeed. The archives were stumbled upon accidentally, the result
of an investigation into mishandled explosives that typified the sorts of infra-
structural dangers daily threatening lives across the global South. Different
wings of government were indifferent to the records, which were technically
their responsibility, or else wanted to help but lacked the resources and po-
litical will. An outfit with only the barest experience dealing with archives,
the pdh, took on the task of restoring the records—funded entirely, like so
many initiatives related to truth and justice, by the international community
and staffed by private ngos. Dangers both political and structural threatened
the Project; sticky politics, powerful personal interests, and the odd Molotov
cocktail put its survival in jeopardy. More than simply a barometer of the sit-
ting government’s commitment to transparency, the pn archives’ context was

HOW THE GUERRILLERO BECAME AN ARCHIVIST   — 85

a sobering reflection of Guatemala’s postconflict social and political fabric.63
The rescue of the archives was a tremendous step forward in Guatemala’s
benighted postwar landscape. But it was not the sort of change that had, just a
few decades earlier, animated hundreds of thousands of citizens.
Throughout the rescue of the archives, one stubborn question remained
in the minds of most everyone who visited them: Why did the police, or the
military, not destroy the files while they had the chance? At the Project, nearly
all the amateur historians and archivists had an educated guess. Many chalked
the archives’ survival up to a pervasive culture of impunity; as one worker
commented, “Political power in this country can be a little blind, no? And
sometimes when people believe they have power in a given moment, they
assume they’ll retain it for their whole lives.” 64 One analyst ascribed the phe-
nomenon to military shortsightedness: “I think nobody ever thought of it, not
the heads of the military—their vision never went further than their own per-
sonal benefits or their particular job description, and they never thought that
someone, someday, in Guatemala, would break through into their very own
buildings and go through their records. It just never occurred to those little
minds.”65 By this logic, then, military and police officials would have assumed
that nobody would ever intervene to seek out the records, and would have
known that whether or not they did was irrelevant. Because security forces
effectively enjoyed immunity from prosecution, it would not matter whether
the documents came to light. They would never suffer any consequences.66 (In
contrast, Stasi officials spent the two months leading up to the Berlin Wall’s
fall feverishly destroying their high-­impact files—first using industrial shred-
ders and then, when the shredders gave out, tearing apart the records by hand,
aware that the arc of history was bending toward a new era.)
Others, more historically inclined, attributed the archives’ survival to a
fundamental human need to keep records, to leave traces. “The necessity of
leaving something written about one’s activities is almost inherent in human-
ity,” one Project worker said. “To link oneself with the past using proof.”67 And
to the most archivally thinking individuals on the scene—including not only
the archivists themselves but also some members of the Project’s leadership
and international advisory board—the answer lay in the essence of bureau-
cracy itself. “We’ve got to remember,” Meoño said, “that no matter how atro-
cious the acts were, they were administrative measures. And administrative
actions have to be documented. The only way a state functionary can prove
that they’ve done their job is to compile a written record and file it away. . . .
What are for us shameful crimes against humanity, for the perpetrator it’s
simply a matter of complying with patriotic duty.” 68 International adviser Has-

86  —  CHAPTER THREE

san Mneimneh, of the Iraq Memory Foundation, put the matter most crisply:
“Ultimately these files are the institutional memory of the bureaucracy. To
expect a bureaucracy to destroy its files is to expect it to commit suicide.”69
But the best way to answer what Project insiders called the “million-­dollar
question” of the archives’ survival is to page backward in the history book.
Documents both represent power and are power—not in some deracinated,
postmodern sense but all too concretely in their creation, keeping, and use
by political actors.70 As such, they are customarily not destroyed unless they
represent a proximate risk or inconvenience to those who control or produce
them. Police records in particular serve their function of social control long
after the infractions they record have passed; a police background check, for
example, relies upon a large corpus of antecedent documents to generate an
individual’s criminal history. Even though the National Police was disbanded
in 1996, the new National Civil Police needed the former agency’s archives in
order to perform its basic duties. Most acts of policing rely directly, and insep-
arably, upon acts of archiving.
And the National Police archives were rich with information on supposed
“enemies of the state.” Especially since the days of Jorge Ubico’s dictatorship,
police records were used as tools of political control, tracking “subversives”
and “Communists” with a militarized logic of surveillance and ideological
management. In 1954, when the United States backed Castillo Armas’s coup
d’état against Arbenz, cia operatives raided Arbenz’s files, compiled a blacklist
archive of more than seventy thousand suspected Communists, and turned it
over to Castillo Armas’s secret police in order that these enemies of the new
state could be exiled, jailed, or killed. Subsequent generations of pn officers,
under the watchful eye of military intelligence, relied on this blacklist as late
as the 1980s to pick off exiled Arbenz loyalists as they trickled back into Gua-
temala. As the next chapter shows, the pn received additional special training
in records management (again courtesy of the United States), ensuring that
its leadership was well aware of the critical role archives could play in what
soon became the most brutal counterinsurgency in the hemisphere. Crudely
put, in order to kill university students or community organizers, one had to
keep track of who they were, who their friends and relatives were, and what
daily routes they traveled. The history of the armed conflict and of the pn’s
participation in it demonstrates the importance of the police records, which
compiled these very types of intelligence information, to the “successful” ex-
ecution of the counterinsurgency.
Because the Guatemalan peace process represented such an utter defeat
for the urng—as one Project worker put it, “you entered the guerrilla with

HOW THE GUERRILLERO BECAME AN ARCHIVIST   — 87

fifty cents and you left with nothing”—the counterinsurgent mentality among
oligarchs and generals and businessmen never came to an end.71 The heavy
weight of history maintained its dominance over peacetime politics; state ter-
ror had been a tool of state formation, producing a postwar social and political
world in whose creation oppositional voices had not been permitted to partic-
ipate. Well after the Peace Accords, progressives of every stripe continued to
face persecution. The military remained an influential source of political and
financial clout, and a reconstituted police force only exacerbated its predeces-
sors’ reputation for viciousness and corruption.72 Impunity reigned; everyday
violence, sometimes perpetrated by state security forces, terrorized and dis-
tracted the population. Ergo, why bother destroying the archives, such a use-
ful fount of information about those who sought—and continued seeking—
to articulate political alternatives?73 Ignored, and culturally understood as gar-
bage, no old papers could possibly threaten the status quo where forty years’
worth of hard-­fought political militancy had failed.
Or could they?

88  —  CHAPTER THREE

 PART II ARCHIVES AND COUNTERINSURGENCY
IN COLD WAR GUATEMALA

ABBREVIATIONS   — 89
 four BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES

We have, of course, no desire to interfere in the internal affairs

of Guatemala.
—U.S. secretary of state William Pierce Rogers, 1971

S
oon after Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas flew into Guatemala City on
a U.S. embassy plane to oust President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the
strongman sought technical support from his American friends in
intelligence-­gathering and countersubversion tactics.1 Since the 1954 coup,
Castillo Armas had busied himself by cutting a deep swath through Guate­
mala’s democratic Left using a ramshackle assortment of rival security services,
and he was keen to rationalize his crusade. In response, the International Co-
operation Administration (ica), usaid’s predecessor, sent a consultant, Fred
G. Fimbres, to assess the capacities and deficiencies of the National Police
with an eye toward designing a U.S. assistance program. Fimbres’s report
noted his counterparts’ “almost neurotic hypersensitiveness to communist
activity and threatened attack,” chronicling the areas in which local law en-
forcement did not pass muster: vehicle maintenance, radio communications,
interagency coordination, disaster readiness—any and all routine functions
not immediately related to the apprehension of suspected communists.2 This
subordination of civilian policing to partisan political terror did not, in and of
itself, trouble Fimbres; the very purpose of his visit was to evaluate how the
United States could assist in controlling “subversion” in the post-­coup period.
Fimbres’s concern, rather, was that the pn’s sagging infrastructure, organiza-
tional inefficiencies, and budgetary constraints might limit U.S. allies’ ability
to clean house in Arbenz’s wake.
In his report, Fimbres made special mention of the sorry state of the pn’s
general filing and records system.3 At pn stations, he observed “piles of docu-
ments, files, etc. dumped on the floor”; others were heaped in crude bundles
or “arranged somewhat” on the floor, amounting to a central records unit he
deemed “hopelessly inadequate,” falling “far short of its most treasured and
prized objective—that of [being] an aid to the law enforcement function and
investigative process.”4 Fimbres’s gut assessment of the importance of record
keeping was dead-­on. He criticized the archival practices of the amateurish
pn general staff, but when evaluating the Section for Defense against Com-
munism, an elite intelligence unit that “secure[d] evidence in subversive mat-
ters,” Fimbres noted that its archives and record control were “most excel-
lent,” the result of a provision in Castillo Armas’s Preventive Penal Law against
Communism (1954) that required the section to keep files on individuals
linked to “communist” groups or activities.5 Fimbres’s observation implied a
connection between effective record keeping and effective social control, a
connection lost neither on his successors at the U.S. Agency for International
Development (usaid) nor on their Guatemalan pupils. Record keeping, and
the surveillance of “enemies of the state” that good archival practice permit-
ted, would prove indispensable.
In his recommendations, Fimbres advised that U.S. assistance focus specif-
ically on records management, both by providing training—he suggested of-
fering courses in “Police Records,” “Police Property Records and Control,” and
“Police Records and Report Writing”—and by supplying raw materials like
filing cabinets and file cards.6 To build a modern, effective police force, the
Guatemalans would need to learn how to build modern, effective archives. As
U.S. support for the police and military expanded over the course of the Cold
War, the question of record keeping remained in play, with the Americans ever
mindful of how Guatemalan security forces “could improve their operation
through the use of records.”7 Once Fimbres submitted his report, U.S. techni-
cians began conducting daily classes in records management for pn agents,
installed cabinets for safe document storage, and implemented a property reg-
istry so that the pn could keep track of weapons and matériel—the stockpiles
of which ballooned as aid shipments began rolling in.8 In 1959, U.S. advisers
boasted that the “new [police] records bureau” set up by ica’s Public Safety
Division was “probably the greatest and most productive improvement made
by the National Police since the inception of the Public Safety Program.” 9 The
archives later fell into neglect, accounting for their calamitous condition in
2005. But, ironically enough, U.S. intervention deserves some credit for there
being police records left for postwar investigators to find at all.
Lest something so seemingly banal as records management assistance be
dismissed as a neutral component of interstate collaboration, a 1957 letter
from the State Department’s R. Richard Rubottom to a colleague at the ica

92  —  CHAPTER FOUR

spoke to the intentions of U.S. police aid in all its forms. “We do not undertake
programs to improve the efficiency of Latin American police forces per se,”
Rubottom emphasized. “Where we do render them technical and material
assistance, it is for the stated objective of increasing their capability to combat
communist subversion.”10 U.S. intervention in Guatemala is better known for
bloodier feats: deposing a democratically elected president; arming “neurotic”
anticommunists to the teeth; offering political cover for state-­sponsored ter-
ror; and providing technical assistance to security forces while knowing, at
every step of the way, that those forces were using U.S. aid and political capi-
tal to commit crimes against their own citizens. But record keeping, too, be-
longs on that list. U.S. aid impacted both the form of the police (and military)
archives—their comprehensiveness, storage and organizational methods, and
materials used—and their content, the history of repression revealed by the
documents today. The United States led the restructuring of the pn from 1954
until the shutdown of its global police aid programs in 1974, a period that saw
the force transformed into the shock troops of a newly mechanized urban
counterinsurgency. U.S. assistance in matters archival cannot be separated
from U.S. assistance in matters more broadly counterinsurgent, which is why
both subjects are treated together in this chapter.
U.S. support for Guatemala’s twentieth-­century dictatorships, particularly
its military aid, would surely have had even more disastrous ramifications
absent the extensive reporting carried out by a generation of activists, journal-
ists, and academics. Meanwhile, though, aid to the National Police has gone
understudied and underpublicized.11 Army generals were the main architects
of the counterinsurgency, including its genocidal period, 1981–1983, after ur-
ban counterterror forced the insurgency into the countryside.12 But the pn
were direct protagonists in many of the state’s most brazen acts of political vi-
olence: the March 1966 mass disappearance of “Los 28,” the Spanish embassy
fire, the murders of Manuel Colom Argueta and Alberto Fuentes Mohr, the
suppression of the Coca-­Cola bottling plant strikes, the 1980 mass abduction
and disappearance of National Workers’ Confederation trade unionists, the
Mutual Support Group disappearances of 1984 and 1985, and more. To ignore
the pn’s role, particularly in the methodical destruction of the urban labor and
student movements, elides the complexity of Guatemala’s armed conflict. The
police, alas, were no mere sideshow.
This chapter tells the story of how U.S. advisers took a “trigger-­happy” force
with a habit of shooting submachine guns “indiscriminately” into crowds of
peaceful demonstrators, spent nearly twenty years in close collaboration with

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 93

them, and exited the scene under congressional fire in the mid-­1970s.13 They
left behind a National Police with the barest of increased competence in civil-
ian law enforcement, but which had been significantly restructured in the ser-
vice of counterinsurgency priorities. U.S. advisers consistently recommended
and enacted the rationalizing of those operating procedures most central to
U.S. Cold War objectives: assembling a surveillance archive, streamlining
political investigations, encouraging tactical collaboration and intelligence-­
sharing between the pn and the military, and constructing a regional telecom-
munications network that would link the highest echelons of the hemisphere’s
fiercest counterinsurgency apparatus.14 The transformation of the pn during
the war’s first phase began with the transformation of its archives.

POLICING THE AMERICAS

The notion that the United States should advance its geopolitical interests by
training and funding foreign police forces originally drew inspiration from Eu-
ropean colonial practices. The theory became reality during the U.S. occupa-
tions of the Philippines, Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic during
the early twentieth century.15 The long-­term institutional character of U.S.
international police aid, however, was forged slightly later, under Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Roosevelt created the Institute of Inter-­American Affairs (iiaa) in
1942 as part of the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-­American Affairs (ocia).
Both outfits were designed as wartime vehicles for promoting economic de-
velopment and improvements in hemispheric public health, with no prima
facie involvement in questions of security. Their creation was part of the Good
Neighbor Policy and indicative of a U.S. shift, if largely rhetorical, away from
gunboat diplomacy.
The twin menaces of Bolshevism and fascism, though, made maintaining
hemispheric “stability” a high priority, not only for ensuring economic domi­
nance and improving health indicators but also for anticommunist political
retrenchment. In the early 1940s, the fbi began establishing a presence in
Latin America, on the assumption “that surreptitious police contacts could be
used as intelligence sources for keeping track of Nazi activities inside Latin
America”—contacts that could be kept and used to advantage after the end
of the Second World War.16 Both the fbi and the cia pursued covert rela-
tions with Latin American police forces, and although the iiaa was ostensibly
geared toward economic development, it would not avoid the polarization of
the Cold War. The iiaa became the International Cooperation Administration,
the State Department’s economic development agency, in 1955; it also, some-
what counterintuitively for an economic aid outfit, coordinated foreign police

94  —  CHAPTER FOUR

assistance programs. Six years later, the ica became usaid, and the Kennedy
administration’s 1962 move to create the Office of Public Safety (ops), con-
solidating diverse police programs into one administrative unit housed within
usaid, was unpopular among officials who had joined the organization to
build wells, not distribute guns. But despite usaid director Hamilton Fowler’s
position that “a police program had no place in an organization whose mission
was to provide economic and technical assistance in such areas as agriculture,
public health, and education,” and his colleagues’ discomfort with working
alongside “redneck cops and spooks,” the usaid officials were overruled.17
In 1957, when Inter-­American Affairs approved the expansion of the ica’s
existing “Guatemalan project,” it did so only provided that a set of conditions
be met. These included the following:
1. That it be made clear that the ultimate objective of this program is “to
strengthen the capability of internal security forces . . . with the purpose
of enabling them more effectively to counter (communist) subversion”. . . .
2. That the technicians to be sent to Guatemala be briefed to this effect
prior to their departure.
3. That the highly political nature of their work be made clear to the tech-
nicians assigned to Guatemala.
4. That an instruction be sent to Guatemala . . . directing that a special
relationship be established between the police mission and the Embassy
in view of the political nature of its work.18
These directives set the tone for what became a long and dynamic relation-
ship between the United States and Guatemala’s police. U.S. advisers’ work
with the pn involved some initiatives that, divorced from their broader con-
text, seemed perfectly benign—providing extra uniforms, so that working-­
class agents who previously slept in their only uniforms could rotate outfits;
training in vehicle maintenance for safer patrolling; implementing tour-­of-­
duty schedule changes, so agents could spend more time with their families.19
However, these were incidental details within the larger paradigm of a global
strategic program to internationalize police assistance, whose goal was to con-
struct a “combined U.S.-­indigenous defense system” that would deeply involve
Third World police in the effort to contain communism.20 As Martha Huggins
notes, it was no coincidence that the National Security Council’s 1290D police
assistance expansion, which foreshadowed the Office of Public Safety, was
proposed in the very year of the Viet Minh victory at Dien Bien Phu and as
the cia was completing its plans to overthrow Arbenz.21 The escalation of U.S.
international security aid was designed to prevent further such “losses”—and

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 95

to facilitate its own intelligence gathering, the fruits of which today lie in the
U.S. National Archives. The list of receiver countries for police aid programs
reads like a marquee of potential dominoes: South Vietnam, Brazil, Uruguay,
Colombia, Greece, South Korea. In Guatemala’s case, U.S. objectives mapped
all too well onto local elites’ desire to crush any move that stunk, to them, of
the “exotic horrors” of the Revolutionary Spring.22
In 1955, when Castillo Armas first solicited technical assistance with intel­
ligence-­gathering from the United States, the ica identified no fewer than ten
different formal “countersubversion” bodies: the Civil Police, the Secret Police,
the Treasury Police, the Government Investigative Police, the Investigative
Squad of the Civil Police, the Presidential Police, a unit called “Coronado Li-
ma’s Investigative Group,” the Immigration Investigative Service, the Army
G-­2, and the National Committee for Defense against Communism.23 These
groups carried out the post-­Arbenz purges, in which some nine thousand peo-
ple were detained and ten thousand forced into exile.24 Some of these rival
groups were already well known to the Americans, because cia agents had
collaborated with the National Committee for Defense against Communism
in compiling the blacklist, mentioned in the previous chapter, of Arbenz loyal-
ists, pgt members, and other perceived enemies.25 Here, archival surveillance
was consciously being used, and taught, as a technology of social control years
before the war began. When Major Enrique Trinidad Oliva, Castillo Armas’s
coordinator of technical cooperation with the ica and the “number 2 man
in government,” complained to the ica about the absence of a central police
records system, embassy officials pointed out that although they had already
established a file system on subversives—the cia blacklist—“doubtless the
Embassy’s revelation that there were a number of persons with communist re-
cords among a group of exiles cleared recently by the Government for re-­entry
into Guatemala highlighted this problem for Major Oliva.” In other words, the
embassy not only built a hit list for the regime but pointed out when the Gua-
temalans had missed one. But this was apparently not good enough; Oliva’s
central records bureau would materialize too, in short order.
Along with the organized intelligence structures, ica observers noted,
most government ministers and the heads of the aforementioned groups em-
ployed their own confidential agents, many of whom spent “a certain amount
of time spying on each other.” From an efficiency standpoint, this was a mess;
embassy second secretary William B. Connett Jr. characterized the intelli-
gence services as “dispersed, pragmatic, uncoordinated, built to a large de-
gree around personalities, untrained in investigative techniques, hampered
by political intrigue and, in general, relatively ineffectual.”26 Security forces

96  —  CHAPTER FOUR

were brutal but inefficient; zealously anticommunist but poorly trained and
equipped; willing to act but territorial and mistrustful of rivals. The proffered
remedy was, in a word, professionalization, as it would remain for generations
of police reform through century’s end and beyond.
With so many areas in need of “professionalization,” one might imagine
that the incoming U.S. team would hardly know where to begin. But while the
initial phase of U.S. assistance was more limited than at later points, its pri-
orities were clear: special investigations, information management, and the
centralization and streamlining of political policing. These were also Castillo
Armas’s objectives. In 1956, he created the General Directorate for National
Security (dgsn), a secret service that would coordinate and consolidate state
efforts to repress what it considered to be communist subversion. It inherited
the blacklist archive generated by the cia and the National Committee for
Defense against Communism.27 (The dgsn also worked to assemble new lists
of its own, requiring, for example, the proprietors of hotels and inns to nightly
submit their guest lists, to facilitate the tracking of foreigners from “suspi-
cious” countries and individuals on the run for political reasons.)28
Also in 1956, Fimbres recommended that the United States immediately
send a specialist to provide training in physical and technical surveillance
(including records management), interrogation techniques, and the use of
scientific methods in special investigations.29 However, the specialists first
sent, David Laughlin and John Popa, soon realized that they would need to
spend the Public Safety Program’s initial phase undertaking far more basic
forms of professionalization—improving working conditions and trimming
patrol rosters—to strengthen the pn’s “very low morale and lack of esprit du
corps” and boost retention in order to make the training worthwhile.30 The
aforementioned early development of the pn’s record keeping was one of the
principal gains from this first stage of assistance, and the Guatemalans were
quick studies, keeping suspect individuals’ files at the ready if the time to act
arose. The first entry in the police file on social democratic politician Manuel
Colom Argueta, for example, was made in 1957, and twenty-­two years’ worth
of archival surveillance later, Colom was assassinated at police hands.31 By the
late 1950s, the training had made significant inroads in rationalizing police
operations; it was clear who had come to run the show at pn headquarters, and
quickly at that. In 1958, when Major Piloña left his post as the police’s director-­
general, he issued a press release touting seven major areas of advancement
under his tenure. Laughlin noted, in a memo back to Washington, that six of
the seven accomplishments Piloña cited were, in fact, “the direct result of
programs initiated and carried out by the Public Safety Division of ica.”32

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 97

 Though the initial phase of Public Safety Program (psp) assistance was
originally slated for phaseout in 1961, the U.S. Operations Mission decided in
1959 to “wait and see” before shutting down the program, owing to concern at
the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.33 For domestic elites, it was a felicitous
move, as internal unrest swelled with President Ydígoras Fuentes’s decision to
allow the United States to train the Bay of Pigs invasion force in Guatemalan
territory. Ydígoras was widely viewed as a corrupt, weak leader, and his Bay of
Pigs move smacked of opportunism and pro-­U.S. servility. In August 1960—
just three months before the 13 November revolt by army dissidents that
sparked the war—Ydígoras Fuentes went to the United States for assistance in
responding to the “recent disturbances, the probable source of the agitation,
and the threat it poses for the stability of constitutional government.”34 By
suggesting that Soviet-­backed communists were nipping at Guatemala’s heels,
Ydígoras marshaled U.S. support for the repression of legitimate social and
economic grievances. The ensuing recommendations, made by psp adviser
Rex D. Morris, provided the template for continued U.S. security assistance;
the double threat of Cuba and a homegrown insurgency was seen to justify
extreme measures.35 Morris’s recommendations, which were endorsed and
eventually implemented in various forms, became the foundation of security
forces’ urban counterinsurgency strategy for decades to come.

COMMON THUGS AND ASSASSINS

Morris’s 1960 counterinsurgency blueprint called for U.S. advisers to create

within the pn a Special Investigations Bureau and a Central Records Bureau.
The Special Investigations Bureau, to be staffed by specifically trained per-
sonnel, would be constituted by presidential decree and granted authority to
apprehend anyone suspected of “crimes threatening constitutional Govern-
ment.” Its responsibilities would be as follows: “To investigate and be informed
concerning A) political interests of social, business, and labor organizations
as these effect [sic] the government, B) political activities of foreign nation-
als (e.g. communists and other agents with interests adverse to the State’s,
C) Guatemalan citizens with outside political interests and/or allegiances, and
D) Guatemala [sic] citizens who otherwise have political interests contrary
to the interests of the country.”36 An “Intelligence Coordinator,” reporting di-
rectly to the president, would manage the bureau’s activities.
Along with the Special Investigations Bureau, Morris proposed a Central
Records Bureau “for the purpose of collecting, filing, and evaluating all re-
cords pertaining to persons involved in any form of criminal activity, such as
fingerprints, arrest records, photographs, personal descriptions, alias files, and

98  —  CHAPTER FOUR

the like.”37 It would allow the pn to build detailed criminal histories of particu-
lar individuals, track their activities over time, and make full use of a standard
law enforcement tool: the background check. However, what sounded like
routine policing—keeping track of lawbreakers—took on a sinister cast when
designed primarily to apply to those with “political interests contrary to the
interests of the country.” The Central Records Bureau, or central archives of
the National Police, was consolidated in 1967, organizing data to be searchable
both by surname and by crime type.38 For example, in addition to maintain-
ing files on individuals of interest, the police’s Master File Registry indexed
agents’ and informants’ reports by category of interest; these indices included
“Communist Agitators,” “Subversives,” “University Campus,” “Demonstra-
tions,” and “Cadavers.”39
The final recommendation pertained to a favorite cause of U.S. advisers,
though one that would not be implemented until the late 1960s: the integra-
tion of the feared Judicial Police into the organizational structure of the pn.
The National Police was founded in 1881, but the Judicial Police’s particular
brand of social control was a more recent development; the “Secret Police,”
its institutional ancestor, first appeared in 1900.40 Dictator Jorge Ubico fa-
mously relied upon this “auxiliary army,” almost always run by military per-
sonnel, which cultivated its reputation for savage efficiency in the dispatch of
enemies. (For this it was disbanded after the 1944 revolution and reinstated
after 1954.)41 Variously incarnated over time as the Judicial Police, the Judi-
cial Guard, or the Judicial Department, to ordinary Guatemalans its goons,
who were organizationally separate from the pn, were collectively dreaded
and derided as La Judy.42 Its leaders were notorious: one Judicial Police head
under Ydígoras Fuentes, Jorge Córdova Molina, was also a ringleader of Mano
Blanca, perhaps the most infamous of Guatemala’s 1960s death squads.43 Cór-
dova Molina, described in U.S. documents as a “common thug and assassin,”
and other Judicial Police officers had close ties to the far-­right Movement
of National Liberation (mln), itself responsible for numerous extrajudicial
executions of labor, student, and popular movement leaders throughout the
armed conflict.44 When the Judiciales were disbanded (on paper, but not in
deed) in 1966, papers reported on their newly revealed torture chambers at
Zone 1’s La Tigrera compound, from whence screams had regularly echoed
along the thoroughfares outside its gates. Reporters noted that the exiting
jefes had taken their hoods, tins of insecticide (gamexán), garroting cords, and
other torture implements with them upon vacating their positions.45
As the theory went, integrating the Judiciales into the National Police
would eliminate redundancy vis-­à-­vis the “overlapping intelligence and ‘po-

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 99

 A plain-
FIG. 4.1 
clothes judicial
(special agent) of
the Judicial Police.
© Jean-­Marie
Simon/2012.

litical’ functions” they shared. It would centralize political policing and, al-
legedly, separate countersubversive activities from civilian policing.46 It also
provided an opportunity, as recommended by the Americans thereafter, to
create a separate intelligence unit fulfilling Judicial Police functions that
would report directly to the president: “La Regional,” the U.S.-­established
communications network allowing security forces to share intelligence and
collaborate on special ops. Here, however, theory and praxis diverged: the
separate intelligence unit was indeed created, and the Judicial Police were
indeed fused into the pn structure. But the old Judiciales never changed their
ways; rather, they continued to collaborate with military structures in extra­
legal operations.47 The implications of melding the Judiciales and the National
Police were clear for the future of civilian policing. Weaving an autonomous

100  —  CHAPTER FOUR

political force into the pn without bringing it under control would have disas-
trous results. From 1966 on, the Judiciales—“the principal agent of political
repression,” in one newspaper’s words—would operate in close coordination
with a newly resurgent army, from within the heart of the civilian police.48
The moniker of “Judiciales” would be shed, but its modus operandi would not.
The usaid advisers were well aware of the Judiciales’ abuses. In a 1962
memo, public safety chief Herbert O. Hardin noted that “it was not uncom-
mon for the police to open fire on the participants in disturbances on the
slightest provocation, and the results were usually tragic.” Demonstrating the
confused logic of U.S. police aid, Hardin then discussed how “in order to dis-
courage the use of such weapons and tactics, 700 revolvers were furnished
to the National Police in Guatemala in 1957.”49 He went on to describe how
the Judicial Police were sent in ahead of the pn to control the peaceful anti-
corruption protests known as “Las Jornadas de Marzo y Abril de 1962,” or the
Days of March and April 1962. In these demonstrations, thousands of workers,
politicians, and students poured into the streets to denounce the Ydígoras
regime in the largest street protests since Ubico’s 1944 overthrow.50 In one
such demonstration, he wrote, Judicial Police chief Jorge Córdova Molina “en-
gaged in indiscriminate behavior, firing his submachine gun into the mob.
This had a chain reaction on the rest of the Judicial Police who also began
firing indiscriminately at the rioters.” Once the Judicial Police began firing,
the pn rear guard began spraying their own, usaid-­supplied bullets into the
crowd—“directly contrary to the advice and teaching which the police had
received through the US Public Safety Program,” Hardin huffed. Never one
to miss the silver lining on a dark cloud, Hardin believed “that the actions
of the usaid Public Safety Advisor in prevailing upon the National Police to
cease using rifled firearms and rely on depressed fire from riot guns resulted
in the saving of numerous lives and probably lowered the number of casualties
considerably.” U.S. assistance bore no responsibility for the casualties, Hardin
implied, because the psp had not worked with this particular Judicial Police
chief. He neglected to mention that the psp had developed an “interesting
exchange of relations” with the Judiciales two years earlier, providing schol-
arships for its agents to receive special training in Puerto Rico and having an
ica adviser teach a class at its training academy in the very handling and use
of firearms.51
usaid worked with the Judicial Police and other repressive police sub­
entities again and again. A constant problem, in fact, was that the Guatemalan
state was consistently less interested in funding the police than the United
States was. Over the course of the psp, U.S. documents repeatedly lament the

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 101

Guatemalans’ “inertia” when it came to supporting the police, mainly because
the military was loath to fortify its perceived rival, particularly after General
Enrique Peralta Azurdia assumed military rule in 1963. (This, too, occurred at
the behest of the United States, which pre-­cleared Peralta’s seizure of power
to dodge a democratic election that progressive ex-­president Juan José Arevalo
stood good odds of winning.)52 At times, impatient Public Safety officials sim-
ply could not wait for the Guatemalans to get their act together, ultimately
opting not to require the official disbanding of the Judicial Police before push-
ing to create the centralized intelligence apparatus designed to supplant it.
The Guatemalan state was dragging its heels because, “despite recommenda-
tions for abolition of the Judicial Police, each regime has found it expedient to
retain it as an organization to carry out questionable and distasteful tasks.”53
And so, rather than replacing the Judiciales, the new intelligence organization
simply ended up incorporating them into its strategy. As early as 1963, “very
encouraging progress” had been made in establishing a “centralized intelli-
gence organization along [the] lines [of the] fbi [with] some features [of the]
cia.” U.S. advisers ensured that any chief named by the government to head
this unit would be “acceptable to us.”54
In the meantime, popular discontent led to the formation of the Rebel
Armed Forces (far) in 1962. As insurgency filtered into Guatemala City, U.S.
advisers, domestic business elites, and the military finally agreed that it was
indeed worth beefing up the pn’s specialized forces. Serendipitously, John F.
Kennedy had backed a substantial expansion of the Public Safety Program
in 1962, in the form of usaid’s Office of Public Safety, granting it powers
greater than those of any other division of usaid. The president and Robert F.
Kennedy also backed the creation of the Inter-­American Police Academy in
the Panama Canal Zone, later moved to Washington and renamed the In-
ternational Police Academy. In Guatemala, therefore, on-­the-­ground political
escalation dovetailed with an expansion of U.S. police aid worldwide. The
Guatemalan police program would become among the largest and highest-­
profile ops initiatives in the hemisphere.
A 1964 document drafted by the ops’s director spoke to rising concern
over guerrilla incursions into the city, noting that while the preceding two
administrations had “done little” to improve the pn, the Guatemalan govern-
ment “now indicates its desire, with Public Safety assistance, to reorganize
and improve the police.”55 Some of the sense of escalation was manufactured:
usaid adviser D. L. Crisostomo noted in a report that various of the supposed
“terrorist bombings” in the city were actually the handiwork of state forces,
blamed on far guerrillas “in order to preserve a certain climate of tension”

102  —  CHAPTER FOUR

that would justify state terror. Some of the violence was certainly authentic,
but the Guatemalan state used the crimes of a small cluster of insurgents, who
in the Americans’ estimation were nowhere near strong enough to threaten
the existing regime, to justify a broader campaign against urban civil society.56
The government studiously ignored the mounting activity of death squads like
Mano Blanca, fronts for coordinated action between security forces and the
mln against not only suspected communists but also mainstream political
parties like the Revolutionary Party (pr), the mln’s main rival.57 As discussed
previously, Mano Blanca’s commander was a Judicial Police chief, but this
was not the only level of interconnection between the extreme Right, death
squads, the state, and U.S. assistance. As Greg Grandin writes, though the
United States tried to distance itself from growing death squad violence, “the
wrath of these private avengers was just as fundamental to U.S. goals as were
the zeal and enthusiasm of pgt activists to the democratic achievements of
the [1944] October Revolution.”58
This new consensus, based on the police-­military cooperation prioritized
by U.S. advisers since the outset, required the technical means for interagency
coordination. In 1964, psp aide Alfred Naurocki led the creation of a Guatemala
City–based telecommunications network connected to a Central America–
wide system, linking various state security forces with U.S. counterpart facil-
ities in the Canal Zone; Michael McClintock writes that the development of
communications networks within Guatemala’s security forces was the most
significant assistance ever provided by psp personnel.59 Soon after Naurocki’s
arrival in May, Peralta created a “Presidential Intelligence Agency” housed in
his official residence. By October, the agency was fully in operation, culling
intelligence and sharing it with other Central American security forces. It sent
the Judiciales to approach government agencies with requests for informa-
tion on long lists of citizens supposedly belonging to “leftist factions,” seeking
to determine and monitor their whereabouts.60 By the spring of 1966, the
Regional Telecommunications Center, its staff later known as “La Regional”
and eventually as “El Archivo,” connected on a private frequency the leader-
ship of the National Police, Treasury Police, Judicial Police, Interior Ministry,
the presidential residence, and the military communications center. It was
moved next door to the Casa Presidencial and placed at the disposal of the
defense minister and the Army General Staff, becoming the nerve center of
state terrorism. It represented the very streamlining sought by U.S. advisers
and provided a newly empowered military the tools to assume direction of the
war and make use of a restructured National Police.61
As the urban firefight escalated, usaid pulled a crack counterterrorism

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 103

adviser, John P. Longan, out of Venezuela to lend a hand. Longan arrived in
November 1965 with the aim of establishing a pn rapid-­response unit that
could quickly and flexibly handle disturbance control and special operations.
He developed a new raid tactic called the Frozen Area Plan, designed to “force
some of the wanted communists out of hiding and into police hands,” and
trained trusted agents in its implementation. Longan’s oeuvre would come to
be known as Operación Limpieza, a set of March 1966 raids in which security
forces kidnapped and tortured more than thirty labor and peasant activists
before dumping their bodies into the sea.62 Operación Limpieza bestowed
upon the Guatemalan state the dishonor of having invented the forced disap-
pearance, a tactic soon to spread among Latin American dictatorships as anti­
communist terror became both industrialized and exportable. The “Commu-
nist big-­leaguers,” in one U.S. advisor’s words, who were murdered in the 1966
raids, including pgt leaders Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez and Leonardo Castillo
Flores, had been identified more than a decade earlier by cia operatives and
included on the Castillo Armas regime’s blacklist.63
This mass disappearance was a watershed. From 1966 on, state violence
became mechanized, incautious, and seemingly unstoppable—not that U.S.
advisers ever tried to halt it. After the 1966 disappearances, the embassy ran
political cover for the Guatemalan state, denying having information on the
crimes despite having been kept apprised at every step; in fact, in 1965 Longan
had emphasized that it was “a must” to maintain the ability of U.S. personnel
to “influence police operations,” in order to maintain the ability to defend U.S.
interests at a moment’s notice.64 U.S. advisers built the unit responsible for
Operación Limpieza from the ground up; they established and maintained the
telecommunications network allowing the military, the police, and the ops to
share intelligence leading directly to the captures. They kept in close contact
with the Judicial Police, even though (or, perhaps, because) it was Judicial
Police agents who, in coordination with military high command, raided the
Zone 12 house in which Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez—archived as the country’s
“#1 Communist”—was hiding, abducted him, tied a hood over his head, and
ran electric currents through his slim body until his heart stopped.65 Though
the government kept quiet about the killings, the Left knew who bore the
blame: a month after the March 1966 disappearances, the head of the Judicial
Police, Alberto Barrios, was forced into exile by attempts on his life. According
to U.S. ambassador John Gordon Mein, the March abductions were “a consid-
erable success”; the murders, and the embassy’s blithe attitude toward them,
were avenged with the death of Mein himself at the hands of the far two years
later.66 Mein’s assassination spurred increased U.S. engagement. Following

104  —  CHAPTER FOUR

the Mein killing, the number of Public Safety in-­country personnel jumped
to seven from its previous average of three.

“TRANQUILITY AND PEACE”

The 1966–1970 period saw a tremendous escalation in the counterinsurgency

and the military’s consolidation of power, with Colonel Carlos Arana Oso-
rio, the “Jackal of Zacapa,” bringing scorched-­earth tactics to the countryside
for the first time.67 But March 1966 also ushered in a significant expansion
of police assistance and police-­military activity in the capital, as Operación
Limpieza had demonstrated what real collaboration between the military,
the police, and U.S. advisers could achieve. Perhaps no act of stagecraft bet-
ter represented the new counterinsurgency consensus than a blessing per-
formed in front of the Metropolitan Cathedral on 13 March 1967. Under a
high, late-­summer sun, Guatemala’s conservative archbishop, Monseñor Ma-
rio Casariego, sprinkled holy water onto fifty-­four new Ford Broncos and Fal-
cons acquired from the United States for the pn’s radio patrol corps.68 As the
strains of the national anthem bled out into the plaza, the archbishop blessed
each vehicle individually, expressing his pleasure at a purchase that would,
he opined, bring “tranquility and peace” to capitalinos. After receiving the
church’s blessing, the patrol vehicles paraded around the park, across to Sexta
Avenida, and south to the Plaza Italia. In attendance were the vice-­minister
of defense, Colonel Manuel Francisco Sosa Ávila; the entire pn leadership,
including director-­general Colonel Víctor Manuel Gamboa and third direc-
tor Colonel Hernán Ponce Nitsch (later the pn director-­general under Ríos
Montt, a close friend); and Peter Costello, chief public safety officer for usaid
in Guatemala.69 (The year before, the pn had given Costello a special award
recognizing the “useful services” he had provided to the organization.)70
Colonel Sosa, the vice-­minister of defense presiding over the ceremony,
was a major player in the U.S.-­led streamlining of the counterinsurgency. Em-
bassy documents identify Sosa as the Guatemalan “counterinsurgency coor-
dinator,” charged with administering the joint military-­police operations that
had made the late 1960s so productive in the detentions and executions of
supposed communists.71 Sosa, a friend of Méndez Montenegro’s dating back
to their military training in Chile, was an elusive character, deeply enmeshed
in extralegal activities but with a low public profile. He never attained the
notoriety of his contemporaries, though he deserved to. It was a measure of
the pn’s counterinsurgent importance—or, at least, of the importance of cer-
tain pn subsquads—that a figure like Sosa was named director-­general of the
National Police (dgpn) in March 1967. The usaid team was encouraged by

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 105

Sosa’s appointment; over lunch that July, ops chief Byron Engle assured the
colonel that he would be pleased to assist him in arranging “the most ex-
peditious method” of procuring equipment in the United States.72 The cia’s
Special Operations secret intelligence handbook from 1967 also mentioned
the colonel. It noted approvingly that since Sosa’s appointment as dgpn, the
police had “been filling its responsibilities more effectively, particularly its
counterinsurgency role. The police are more active than previously and are
cooperating with the army in forming special counterterrorist squads which
operate clandestinely against leftist insurgents.”73
Translated, this genteel language of productivity meant that Sosa was us-
ing the pn as a base from which to run death squads, and not only involving
the Judicial Police. Within the pn’s corps (cuerpo) structure, four major corps
were responsible for much of the city’s policing.74 Sosa selected the Fourth
Corps (Cuarto Cuerpo) as the institutional home for “a special police unit that
operated largely without reference to legal procedure,” selecting loyalists to fill
its ranks.75 The unit was fully operational just a few months after Sosa began
as dgpn, working with the army’s Special Commando Unit (scuga); led by
Colonel Máximo Zepeda, scuga, established in January 1967, was a key player
in the military’s urban apparatus.76 One of the Fourth Corps’ most significant
hits, besides its takedown of Mano Blanca leader Jorge Córdova Molina in
an act of interagency rivalry, was the abduction, torture, and murder of pgt
leaders Rafael Tischler Guzmán, Cayetano Barreno Juárez, Julio César Armas
González, and Enrique de la Torre Morel.77 By October 1967, the Fourth Corps
was “widely regarded by Guatemalans as the headquarters of the government’s
hush, hush anti-­insurgent squads.”78
Sosa’s effectiveness would have been no surprise to the Americans, given
their knowledge of how in 1966, as vice-­minister of defense, Sosa was respon-
sible for setting up joint army-­police operations in city and countryside. On top
of that, Sosa created the first death squad “phantom groups”—organizations
like the New Anti-­Communist Organization (noa) and the Anti-­Communist
Council of Guatemala (cadeg), propaganda fronts behind which ad hoc
coalitions of retired and active-­duty army and police officers conducted ex-
trajudicial executions. These squads also disseminated literature designed
to terrorize. As one cadeg pamphlet read, “[We] must search until we find
the castro-­communist traitors who must pay with their lives for the crimes
against their country that they have committed by returning [from Cuba],
and without any piety they must die like rabid dogs, and their filthy corpses
should not be given shelter by the blessed earth of Guatemala, but instead
they must serve to stuff vultures’ bellies.”79 That the cia’s special operations

106  —  CHAPTER FOUR

manual of 1967 indicated how “President Méndez is aware of the activities
of these squads and is willing to gamble that they will not get out of hand”
suggests that the embassy, too, was aware of the activities of these squads and
gambled that they would not get out of hand.80 As on other occasions, it was
an unwise, self-­serving bet.81
In the late 1960s, as at various moments throughout the armed conflict,
U.S. advisers tolerated lapses in the legality of covert counterinsurgency opera­
tions, and at times registered their disapproval of same, even as they provided
enthusiastic assistance for the police’s overt counterinsurgency operations.
Though no ops official would ever have claimed to support the seamier side
of antiguerrilla activity, their ongoing cooperation in “legit” operations—at
times barely distinguishable from the extralegal—provided ample cover for
dirty deeds. One instance of ops participation in what Longan referred to as
“overt” counterinsurgency measures was the office’s close collaboration with
Sosa in the development of a 1967 “pilot plan” for implementation in Guate-
mala City’s Zone 5, a working-­class barrio and pgt stronghold.82 In the pilot
plan, more than two hundred foot-­patrol agents and dozens on bicycles and
motorcycles—with “all the equipment to be provided by the Public Security
Division of [us]aid”—would establish “an absolute control over the zone.”83
When Sosa announced the Zone 5 pilot plan in a press conference, he stressed
his desire “that the National Police be a respectable and respected institution,
that the institution provide a full guarantee of citizen safety, and that our cit-
izens feel closer and closer to the police, without any sort of fear.” (Citizens
should well have felt closer to the police, as pn agents were now tracking all
manner of public activities, including local fairs, concerts, lucha libre matches,
church sermons, and community meetings, in order to learn the contours of
daily life in different neighborhoods.)84 In his description of the plan, Sosa
dropped usaid’s name several times.85 When the specially trained pilot plan
agents were honored with usaid diplomas, the U.S. national anthem was even
played at the award ceremony.86 The Zone 5 raids were overt, but what hap-
pened to those detained—not to mention the subsequent uses of the guns,
vehicles, and ammunition provided for the operation—was never made public.
The contortions in logic caused by this apparent disjuncture—and the con-
fusion of the military and police when embassy officials publicly reprimanded
them for “excesses” ops advisers had privately tolerated—were micro­cosmic of
the larger schizophrenia of U.S. development policy. Stephen Streeter writes
that the entire Alliance for Progress initiative in Guatemala was characterized
by an internal contradiction between its “soft” democratization efforts, theo-
retically aimed at developing democratic liberalism, and its massive military

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 107

buildup, devoted to liberalism’s bloody repression.87 A similar tension existed
between U.S. efforts to generally professionalize the pn—by providing filing
cabinets, records training, vehicles, and the like—and U.S. efforts to deploy
the pn as the frontline executors of a war against the segments of civil society
it saw as politically suspect. Ultimately, the former aid not only legitimized the
latter; it was adapted to its purposes. But while there may have been tension
between soft and hard approaches for those on the “soft” side who thought of
themselves as democratizers, in fact, rather than representing an “internal
contradiction,” the two approaches were mutually dependent.
Sosa himself served as dgpn for only a year, until his prestige fell victim to
public outrage over the kidnapping of Archbishop Casariego in March 1968.
Initially decried by the military as an act of the far, the kidnapping was re-
vealed to be a faux secuestro designed to discredit the Left; rumors flew about
the army’s responsibility. Though the archbishop eventually went home un-
scathed, two civilians involved in the imbroglio were taken away in a police
car; in transit the car stopped and the police agents exited, spraying the car
with more than fifty bullets and killing the handcuffed prisoners. The crime
shocked the country, and the resulting scandal spurred even Méndez Mon-
tenegro, a weak leader who ruled subject to a pact giving the military full
discretion over the counterinsurgency, to action. Because the army’s role in
the plot became impossible to deny, the president opted for a symbolic gesture
that suggested a reining-­in of extralegal tactics. The state’s “three top counter-
insurgents”—Sosa, defense minister Arriaga Bosque, and Zacapa commander
Colonel Carlos Arana Osorio—were all packed off to low-­profile diplomatic
positions.88 Sosa was shipped to Madrid as Guatemala’s military attaché to
Spain, supposedly punished for having employed unacceptable tactics.
For a year, that is: in June 1969, Sosa returned to Guatemala, lured back by
Méndez Montenegro and appointed interior minister—head of the ministry
overseeing his former charge, the pn. His return sparked protests from the
University of San Carlos (usac) Association of University Students (aeu),
which issued a statement in El Imparcial condemning how Sosa’s appointment
“condones . . . the bloody acts that have brought mourning to thousands of
Guatemalan homes.”89 The embassy speculated that Sosa was reinstalled to
mollify the mln hard-­liners accusing Méndez Montenegro of being a soft-­on-­
crime leftist sympathizer.90 But mlnistas were not the only ones pleased by
Sosa’s return. Ambassador Davis, who was aware of Sosa’s “illegal operations”
involving the Fourth Corps, noa, and cadeg death squads, wrote that “Col.
Sosa is undoubtedly a stronger figure than his predecessor . . . and may inject
needed vigor into police operations in a time of prospective troubles.”91

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 The dissolution of the Judicial Police, the ops objective nearly a decade in
the making, would prove the first major case of institutional recycling within
the National Police. Méndez Montenegro officially disbanded the Judicial
Police, with great fanfare, in August 1966. Officials promised an end to the
methods of the past: the reviled Judiciales would be replaced by the Detective
Corps (Cuerpo de Detectives), a new squad to be characterized by techni-
cal professionalism, not political revanchism. Yet the Judiciales did not cease
operations until 1970, and when the Detective Corps was finally constituted
in its place, it was evident that the new structure differed from the old in
name only. Army colonel José Vicente Morales, the head of the Judicial Police
until the day of its actual demise in November 1970, continued on as the
inaugural chief of the Detective Corps.92 A number of the former heads of
the Judiciales—themselves living archives of political knowledge, and hence
powerful—were murdered in the years immediately following the switch,
suggesting internal power plays and the continued use of “old” tactics with
which to dispatch not only “subversives” but also rivals.93 The Detective Corps
would achieve its own notoriety in the coming years until 1982, when it was
disbanded, or rather renamed, anew.
The year 1970 was also when Arana Osorio, another of the late-­1960s coun-
terinsurgency directors briefly rotated out of Guatemala by Méndez Monte-
negro, was elected president on the mln ticket. U.S. advisers saw Arana as a
tough, nationalist caudillo with little political acumen and “a reputation for
relentless anti-­Communism [and] political naïveté, a simplistic point of view,
and a willingness to adopt extremist solutions when he feels they are neces-
sary.”94 If forced disappearances and bustling death squad activity had come to
Guatemala under a civilian regime, they would remain under a military one:
the colonel brought his Zacapa allies, the “civilian extremists” who collabo-
rated in the rural antiguerrilla campaign of 1967–1968, to serve as his personal
security force. Their “history of violent, irrational activity,” combined with the
mln’s tight control over Congress and the military’s support for Arana’s law-­
and-­order modus operandi, meant that the terror state would take no quarter
in crushing dissent.95
Arana declared a state of siege in November, suspending the few remaining
civil liberties and imposing a curfew “as complete as ever has been witnessed
in Guatemala.” In the first week of the siege, security forces picked up mini-
skirted girls and long-­haired young men off downtown streets, yanking down
the skirt hems of the former and shaving the heads of the latter. Ponytailed
men, stereotyped as rebels, were a favorite target of Arana: “Is it too much to
ask that people make the temporary sacrifice of going to the barbershop and

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 109

cutting their hair?” the president wondered in a late 1970 speech, entreating
honest Guatemalans to help security forces separate citizen and criminal by
trimming their locks.96 Arana’s army also violated usac autonomy by raiding
university buildings later that month. Arana was particularly loathed on the
usac campus, known to radicals around the university as “El Araña,” or “the
Spider.”97 The usac rector, Rafael Cuevas del Cid, outraged at the invasion,
told his colleagues: “Autonomy does not reside in the university buildings, but
rather resides in human dignity. Dignity that they can piss on. Dignity that
they can massacre. But dignity that will not be destroyed. Intelligence, my
friends, does not die, with buildings or without them.”98 The general, however,
begged to differ. “Some of you already know by now,” Arana intoned in his
1970 Christmas radio address, “that we are disposed to pacify Guatemala now
and not later; that our present actions are like an unstoppable machine, which
is to say, that we must pursue the goal until we achieve it.”99
The U.S. Agency for International Development opted to join the fight.
In 1970, the ops approved significant allocations to the National Police—
$410,000 for the construction of a training academy and $378,000 in “con-
tingency funds” for a Rapid Police Development Project—despite nagging
concerns about the new government’s propensity for the extralegal.100 After
Arana’s ascent to the presidency, and the accompanying spike in extrajudicial
executions of students, journalists, and labor leaders, it became clear to some
usaid and embassy apparatchiks that the United States could not avoid blame,
or at least bad press, for its association with Guatemalan security forces.101
Two years earlier, the outgoing embassy chief of mission, Viron P. Vaky, had
lamented the U.S. decision to condone “indiscriminate” and “brutal” tactics,
arguing that this had irreparably damaged the U.S. image and wondering, “Is
it conceivable that we are so obsessed with insurgency that we are prepared to
rationalize murder as an acceptable counterinsurgency weapon?”102
In March 1970, far operatives abducted Sean Holly, the embassy’s second
secretary. Speculating as to his captors’ motives after his safe release, Holly
reported that they were “particularly unhappy [with], as a matter of fact they
hate, the Military Group and our assistance to the police. They hold us re-
sponsible for the repression by the military and the repression, murder and
torture of their people by the police. They went on to talk about why we were
giving cars, the radio room [Regional Telecommunications Center], and all
this to the Guatemalans when they knew that we knew this was being used for
repression.” Over several hours of free-­ranging debate on the topic between
Holly and the young guerrillas guarding him, the American came to face his
nation’s culpability for how Guatemalan officers had been using their guns

110  —  CHAPTER FOUR

and training. “I think that what we have got to look at here,” Holly testified
subsequently, “is the whole view of theirs that we are responsible for police
repression, and police ill-­treatment of prisoners and for military repression.
It does, at least in my mind, raise the question of our moral responsibility
for this.”103
In May 1970, after reading an embassy report on the Ojo por Ojo death
squad’s murders of several leftists—in which it was noted that Ojo por Ojo
was made up primarily of members of scuga, which had worked closely with
the pn under Sosa—one U.S. official scrawled in the margins of the report,
“This is what we were afraid of with increased Public Safety support.”104 These
voices of doubt within the U.S. advisory corps were important for two reasons:
first, because they showed that there were indeed dissenters within the diplo-
matic community, and second, because they demonstrated that ops officials
cannot claim to have been oblivious to their efforts’ bloody consequences.
It was now obvious to all that the greatest danger to “peace and tranquility”
came not from the Left but from the extreme Right, and usaid was helping
to foot the bill.

ENDGAME

usaid allocated nearly a million dollars in police aid that year, to say nothing
of the larger amounts being funneled into the military by other agencies. The
agency committed itself to funding a new police training academy and also
continued with its regular invitation of selected officials to the International
Police Academy in Washington, DC, for instruction in operations planning,
investigation, public relations, control of civic disturbances, marksmanship,
transit control, and narcotics investigation.105 The idea, charitably interpreted,
was that by funding the academy and training the officers who would become
its teachers, the ops would be encouraging the development of civilian polic-
ing, inculcating in a generation of pn agents a well-­rounded, ethical concep-
tion of a police officer’s duties.
But, as usual, police and military leadership took the funds and training
and adapted them to their own priorities. At the local police academy in 1970,
only 100 officers were trained in “Basic Policing” and 196 in “Driving,” while
393 were trained in “Riot Control and Use of Chemical Agents,” 797 in “Tar-
get Shooting with the .38 Crossman and .38 Special Revolvers,” and 1,200 in
“Military Corps and Section Instruction.”106 Some products of U.S. assistance
would indeed have improved civil investigations—particularly the establish-
ment of a fingerprinting bureau, which was upgraded under U.S. supervision
to the modern “Henry” system of fingerprint recording and analysis from the

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 111

Vucetich system previously in use—had civil investigations been the Guate-
malan state’s main priority.107 (Others were harder to explain, such as the pn’s
1971 decision, pushed by aid’s Arlen W. Gee, to require all Guatemalans ap-
plying for their required cedula identification cards to have their fingerprints
taken and entered into the force’s databases, thus growing the archive of indi-
viduals’ files enormously.)108 And neither, frankly, was civil investigation the
Americans’ priority. Contemporaneously, a U.S. consultant advised hiring a
full-­time weapons technician to advise the pn in firearm use and help the
Guatemalans increase their “hit capabilities.”109
The ops and usaid continued funding the pn despite its violations of its
civilian mandate because, at the end of the day, the Arana regime was accom-
plishing U.S. goals, if with unsavory methods. And not every U.S. official had
come around, like Vaky or Holly, to adjusting his cost-­benefit analysis when it
came to collateral damage. In July 1970, usaid director Robert Cuthbertson
claimed that the Guatemalan Left was composed of “hard-­core communist
terrorists who are criminally oriented and love guns, love to kill.” When
questioned by fellow staffers about whether the United States should asso-
ciate with a regime that so privileged security buildup over socioeconomic
development, Cuthbertson offered a strident defense of Arana’s development
plans, presaging Ronald Reagan’s famous “bum rap” comment about Ríos
Montt fifteen years later.110 Most advisers simply accepted the assertion that
violence was being generated in equal measure by the extreme Left and the
extreme Right.111
In the meantime, however, evidence abounded that U.S. allies were using
U.S. taxpayer dollars to attack unarmed progressive sectors. In October 1971,
the Ojo por Ojo death squad threatened the life of university rector Rafael
Cuevas del Cid; U.S. officials knew that the government itself was behind the
threats.112 (Cuevas del Cid would later lose his son and daughter-­in-­law to state
violence.) On 26 September 1972, Arana’s security forces, in this case mostly
pn agents, captured half of the pgt’s Central Committee, making martyrs of
Bernardo Alvarado Monzón, Hugo Barrios Klee, Mario Silva Jonama, and five
others. The leaders were captured during a meeting in a private home and
taken to the headquarters of the Detective Corps; they were never seen again.
Shortly after the incident, the far kidnapped pn detective Abel Juárez Villa-
toro and forced him to sign a statement revealing the details of the operation.
The eight prisoners had been captured by the clandestine operations team
of Detective Corps subchief Arnolfo Argueta and turned over to the Fourth
Corps’ infamous chief, Juan Antonio “El Chino” Lima López, to be tortured
and killed. As embassy documents indicate, “Police sources privately con-

112  —  CHAPTER FOUR

firmed to us that the statement was essentially true.”113 And in late 1972, a
new death squad appeared: Buitre Justiciero (Avenging Vulture), a front for
the police elimination of common criminals.114 In response to an internal re-
port in October 1972 suggesting that a “Special Action Unit” had been formed
within the National Police “to assume death squad functions,” usaid director
Byron Engle noted, without any apparent irony, that the news was “disturb-
ing,” and that “the time for stopping something like this from developing is
before it gets started.”115
Yet ops advisers were not blind to the problem of state terror. A 1972 memo
notes that the psp’s “major issue #1” moving forward was, “How can the [U.S.
government] best assist the [government of Guatemala] to keep insurgency
in check, while at the same time encouraging it to minimize use of illegal
methods and use of repression against non-­insurgents?”116 But the National
Security Council’s Country Analysis Strategy Paper (casp) for Guatemala in
the 1973–1974 fiscal year clearly stated U.S. priorities. Security aid was de-
signed “to assist the armed force and police to develop as rapidly as possible
internal security capabilities sufficient to deal with the threat posed by vio-
lent opposition from the left,” and “to enable the United States to maintain
influence in the [Guatemalan] military establishment.” (The next paragraph
clarified some of the reasons for the U.S. investment in Guatemalan pacifica-
tion, relating to the purchase of Guatemala’s electrical company and to dis-
puted trade and resource extraction deals involving the nickel-­mining outfit
exmibal, the United Fruit Company, PanAm, and International Railways of
Central America.)117 The casp suggested that the United States “discreetly
use its influence” to discourage the Guatemalan state from committing extra­
judicial executions but provided no clarity on how to obtain results, given that
elsewhere it acknowledged that the United States’ ability “to influence the
political behavior of key power groups” was “marginal.” The casp provided
only slight evidence, a trend projection measured according to “the Embassy’s
admittedly far from perfect index,” for a claim that would release the United
States from moral compromise: “We believe the gog involvement in extra­
legal activity will decline.”118
If U.S. officials were not acting, beyond privately suggesting to the Guate-
malans that they be mindful of their growing image problem, international or-
ganizations began to take notice. In February 1971, Amnesty International first
raised the “disappearances and murders of the opposition” of the Arana gov-
ernment with the Inter-­American Commission on Human Rights, submitting
documentation on hundreds of cases of “extralegal detention and disappear-
ance.” In December of the same year, the Latin American Studies Association

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 113

passed a resolution condemning U.S. support for “semi-­official and official
rightist terror in Guatemala,” singling out police and military aid programs
as signifying U.S. complicity in repression.119 Also in 1971, the U.S. House of
Representatives made early forays into what soon became a larger conversa-
tion. A staff report on Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, evaluating the
effectiveness of U.S. security assistance, noted that this aid’s real impact was
to legitimize state terror. “The argument in favor of the public safety program
in Guatemala,” the report noted, “is that if we don’t teach the cops to be good,
who will? The argument against it is that after 14 years, on all evidence, the
teaching hasn’t been absorbed. Furthermore, the U.S. is politically identified
with police terrorism.”120
By the early 1970s, the relationship of U.S. aid to police terrorism was be-
ing debated in a global context.121 In 1969, the International Commission of
Jurists charged that up to twelve thousand people were being held as political
prisoners in the makeshift jails of Brazil’s da Costa e Silva dictatorship, and in
1970 the Washington Post editorialized that there were “too many reports by
too many reliable witnesses . . . about the torturing of ‘subversives’ for anyone
to doubt that it goes on” in Brazil.122 Senator Frank Church opened a Senate
Committee on Foreign Relations investigation into U.S. police aid to Brazil in
1970; journalists Jack Anderson and Joseph Spear ran an investigative series
disclosing cia ties to the ops, denouncing violence committed by ops-­backed
foreign security forces, and calling for the program’s abolition.123 South Viet-
nam was another flash point, as regular reports of torture and murder com-
mitted by U.S.-­supervised South Vietnamese police sparked further outrage.124
By the time Greek director Costa-­Gavras’s film State of Siege (1973), which
depicted the Tupamaros’ kidnapping and murder of usaid counterinsurgency
trainer Dan Mitrione, was nominated for a Golden Globe, Congress was ready
to act. State of Siege ignited a firestorm among lawmakers, dramatizing U.S.
involvement with Uruguay’s police torturers and offering a strong denuncia-
tion of the International Police Academy, the ops, and the entire principle of
U.S. collaboration with dictatorships abroad. By 1973, the evidence and bad
publicity could not be ignored. Senator James Abourezk (D-­ND) met with
political prisoners and conducted investigations that revealed, among other
pieces of information, that the ops had funded South Vietnam’s infamous
“tiger cage” cells, in which prisoners were hung from their arms in body-­sized
underground cages.125
Abourezk led the charge on two amendments to the Foreign Assistance
Act of 1961, prohibiting foreign police assistance (1973) and banning any U.S.
training of foreign intelligence services (1974). The Office of Public Safety,

114  —  CHAPTER FOUR

which had “trained” more than one million police officers worldwide, was
dismantled in 1974.126 In his presentation to the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, Abourezk decried how “this country is involved in an activity
which is totally divorced from the scope and intention of U.S. foreign aid.
The Office of Public Safety and the International Police Academy mocks the
purpose of other usaid programs and has inflicted an indelible blemish” on
U.S. credibility worldwide.127 An era had ended, though not soon enough. In
many cases, however, the taboo police assistance was merely rebranded as
counternarcotics assistance, which, as historian Jeremy Kuzmarov writes, em-
ployed many former ops personnel. (One Special Forces officer, dispatched to
Colombia with a counternarcotics training team during the 1980s, reported:
“The training that I conducted was anything but counter-­narcotics. It was
updated Vietnam-­style counter-­insurgency, but we were told to refer to it as
counter-­narcotics should anyone ask.”)128 This dynamic would evolve into the
hemispheric “War on Drugs,” but before that, its effects would continue to be
felt in Guatemala.

THE WAGES OF COUNTERINSURGENCY

In 1974, after Congress settled the question, the ops conducted a phaseout
study assessing the Public Safety Program’s impact on Guatemalan policing
over the course of its nearly twenty years. It noted the following achievements:
streamlining the pn from sixty-­six operational units down to thirty-­four, estab-
lishing La Regional, standardizing vehicles and armaments, institutionalizing
riot control techniques, improving the archiving of personal identification
files on more than one million citizens in a country of about eight million,
building a new training academy, and convincing the Guatemalans to properly
maintain their new vehicles. Over the course of the program, usaid directly
invested $4.5 million in training, commodities, and advising for the pn, mak-
ing Guatemala’s police assistance program among its largest—to say noth-
ing of indirect investments in, for example, the training of the army generals
who would run the pn throughout the war.129 In addition, usaid trained more
than four hundred Guatemalan police at the International Police Academy
and more than three thousand more in-­country.130 Indeed, technical improve-
ments were made in the pn’s civil policing capacities. But aid’s primary im-
pact on the pn was not the result of weapons shipments, uniforms, or traffic
management instruction. What McClintock notes about U.S. aid’s principal
effect on the military also holds true for the police: “The U.S. security as-
sistance program’s introduction of sophisticated wherewithal for sowing the
‘counter-­terror,’ such as computers, submachine guns, or helicopters was, in

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 115

its influence on events, secondary to the Guatemalan military’s whole-­hearted
adoption of the U.S. doctrine that it is correct and necessary for governments
to resort to terrorism in the pursuit of certain ends.”131
This would prove to be the only message that stuck. When U.S. advisers
first arrived, they noted that the pn’s operational capacities were woefully
deficient. Indeed, as Fimbres’s initial report indicated, the National Police was
“acutely geared to security against subversive activity and communist attack,
with the primary police function taking a secondary role.” The following ma-
jor problem areas identified by Fimbres in 1956 were:
A lack of professional training, unwieldy spans of control, absence of good
executive management, poor budgeting practices, poor personnel admin-
istration coupled with lack of concept of human relations in management,
very low morale and esprit de corps, improper deployment of line person-
nel, lack of adequate and centralized police records, inadequate office and
housing facilities, and lack of preventive maintenance and care of motor-
ized equipment.132
Assistance from usaid did achieve modest improvements in some of these
fields. But in their more honest moments, psp personnel conceded that the
training in civil policing was not taking hold. Instead, what usaid interven-
tion accomplished was to make the Guatemalans see how its long-­neglected
“primary police functions”—better archives, modern equipment, vehicle
maintenance, professional training, and improved personnel administration—
were, in fact, not separate from the struggle against subversion. Rather, as ops
advisers instructed their counterparts, the struggle against subversion could
be best carried out only once these primary functions, seen by the Armas-­era
leadership as low-­priority pencil-­pushing, were optimized.
Likewise, when the ica first began to assess the pn, it took note of the
mistrust and lack of collaboration between different security forces and intel-
ligence groups. With U.S. assistance, particularly in constructing the techni-
cal means enabling interagency coordination, antisubversive operations were
consolidated under military control, with specialized pn cadres integrated
into a new executive hierarchy of terror. Staffers from ops, who manned desks
in pn headquarters, instructed police and military officers in the benefits of
collaboration, systematizing intelligence, and maintaining the tools necessary
(vehicles, files, guns) to get the job done. U.S. advisers rarely attempted to
“curb the excesses” they observed in the process—and in which they at times
participated directly—at any point during the Public Safety Program’s twenty
years, even as they were uncomfortable with the extrajudicial uses of what

116  —  CHAPTER FOUR

Thomas Lobe calls U.S. “social control aid.”133 As embassy chief of mission
Vaky wrote after leaving his post in 1968, “We have not been honest with
ourselves. We have condoned counter-­terror; we may even in effect have en-
couraged or blessed it. We have been so obsessed with the fear of insurgency
that we have rationalized away our qualms and uneasiness. This is not only
because we have concluded we cannot do anything about it, for we never
really tried.”134
The United States did not invent political polarization, class struggle, or
police brutality in Guatemala. However, in their quest to maintain U.S. influ-
ence, protect U.S. business interests, and contain global “communism,” Public
Safety Program advisers abetted and encouraged domestic elites’ efforts to
obliterate any voices calling for change in society. As Stephen Streeter writes,
for the highest echelons of Guatemala’s power structure, “the communist
threat was in fact a rationalization for bolstering the armed forces against
a popular revolution against the oligarchy.”135 Even John Longan agreed. “It
seems evident,” he wrote, that the Guatemalan security forces “will continue
to be used, as in the past, not so much as the protectors of the nation against
communist enslavement, but as the oligarchy’s oppressors of legitimate social
change.”136
As we shall see in the next chapter, the habits established during the Public
Safety years died hard. Specialized pn units, under the direction of a U.S.-­
fortified military intelligence, continued their frontline involvement not only
against the insurgency but also in the suppression of a broader social world
based primarily in Guatemala City: trade unionists, students, professors, the
urban intelligentsia, the press, and a growing chorus of human rights activ-
ists pushed to risky speech by the tortured bodies turning up in the city’s
gutters and ravines. Thousands of these people never reappeared, damning
their loved ones to indefinitely suspend the grieving process while hoping
against hope—and against the odds—that their family members would one
day return. One of the best known of these desaparecidos was Víctor Manuel
Gutiérrez, the pgt Central Committee secretary-­general kidnapped during
the March 1966 raids and then tortured to death.137 The Project for the Recov-
ery of the National Police Historical Archives cautiously began to reveal some
early discoveries to the media in 2006 and 2007; one of the first documents it
shared with the public was Gutiérrez’s personal file, which was annotated to
read, “#1 Communist of Guatemala.”138
Gutiérrez’s file spoke eloquently to the importance of archives in the coun-
terinsurgency campaign. Though the pn had long maintained surveillance
records, the filing system it used in the lead-­up to the March 1966 disappear-

BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES   — 117

ances was the result of records management training initiated in 1957 and
1958, wherein U.S. advisers set up a “Records Room,” filled it with filing cab-
inets and supplies purchased by the Public Safety Program, and conducted
daily training sessions in record keeping for their Guatemalan students. U.S.
influence over the pn’s archival practice extended to the very size of Gutiér-
rez’s file card and the categories of information it collected about him—his
physical characteristics, address, family members, movements inside and
outside the country.139 Moreover, Gutiérrez had been one of the Arbenz-­era
Communist Party members included in the first blacklist assembled by cia
operatives and handed over to Castillo Armas in the aftermath of Arbenz’s
ouster. As such, Gutiérrez’s personal file, the first of many thousands to even-
tually be revealed by the Project, stands as a documentary artifact not only of
political repression but also of the profoundly important and often neglected
role of archives in processes of social control—the relationship of knowledge
to power. The National Police archives, which reveal the dark nature of the
pn’s institutional history beyond a shadow of a doubt, have this and many
other stories to tell.

118  —  CHAPTER FOUR

 fiv e RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE IN WAR,
PEACE, AND POST-­P EACE

The head of the National Police was named Chupina. One joke
going around was, Did you hear Chupina had a twin brother in the
womb?—Yes, stillborn, showing signs of torture and a tiro de gracia,
a coup de grâce, in the head.

And in another Chupina and General Lucas are fishing, and Lucas
catches a tiny fish and he’s about to toss it back but Chupina says,
Wait, give it to me, and he takes the fish in one hand and starts
pummeling its head with the other, saying, OK, talk, where are the
big ones?
—Francisco Goldman, The Long Night of White Chickens

I
n February 2007, Guatemalans were scandalized by a series of killings so
unusual that they stood out among the capital’s daily grind of homicides.
The Central American Parliament, or Parlacen, was holding its annual
meeting in Guatemala City; on 19 February, three Parlacen deputies, all Sal-
vadoran representatives of their country’s right-­wing arena party, were found
murdered in their car thirty kilometers outside the city. Forensic analysis re-
vealed that before the car’s torching, which burned the bodies so thoroughly
that dental records had to be flown in from El Salvador to identify them, two
of the deputies had been executed by tiro de gracia—a single bullet in the
back of the head. In a coincidence too poignant to ignore, one of the slain
deputies was the son of Roberto d’Aubuisson, arena’s founder and wartime
death squad leader best known for having ordered the 1980 assassination of
Archbishop Oscar Romero.1 Salvadoran president Tony Saca’s reaction was
historically resonant: he claimed that the killings had been “premeditated
and planned by people who don’t want freedom. We are not going to allow
irresponsible people, communists, to achieve power.” He went on to thunder,
“On the list of heroes of arena”—a pantheon of martyrs now presumably
including the murdered deputies—“there are many, many who gave their lives
and blood to move this country away from communism.”2
Despite Saca’s eager leap back to Cold War rhetoric, the culprits fingered
in the killings were no leftists. Instead, authorities arrested four Guatemalan
National Civil Police (pnc) officers, members of the elite Criminal Investiga-
tions Division (dinc) squad, whose patrol car’s gps system had tracked their
trip to the remote murder site. The four agents, one the head of the dinc’s
organized-­crime investigations unit, were apprehended and incarcerated at El
Boquerón prison on 22 February. That night, despite the maximum-­security
conditions and before they were able to testify about the murders, all four
suspects were shot to death. A group of prison gangsters stepped forward to
claim responsibility for the hit, but other inmates testified that a commando
group of masked, armed men had entered El Boquerón and breezed through
seven layers of security to dispatch the policemen. “We mareros [gang mem-
bers] don’t get ourselves involved in politics,” one such whistle-­blower told
the press.3 The plot thickened as more players in the case were suspiciously
slain. The Parlacen killings, credited with overcoming domestic opposition
to the creation of the un’s International Commission against Impunity in
Guatemala (cicig), inspired one journalist to argue, rightly or wrongly, that
Guatemala was “the Somalia of Latin America, or, more precisely, the Haiti of
Iberoamerica”—a failed state. Guatemala’s representative from the un High
Commission for Human Rights agreed.4
The dinc was the pnc’s special investigative unit—a semiautonomous wing
staffed by detectives. When the Parlacen scandal ended the careers of interior
minister Carlos Vielman and pnc director-­general Erwin Sperisen, it also im-
pelled calls to disband the dinc, which the pdh referred to as “a parallel body
within the pnc . . . dedicated to executing individuals with total impunity.”5 The
dinc weathered the storm, but some 60 percent of its agents were fired.6 This
narrative will, by now, sound familiar: an elite investigations arm of the Gua-
temalan police, composed of detectives and deeply involved in extralegal ac-
tivities involving national politics and organized crime, is retooled in response
to public outcry. The force is, supposedly, purged of criminals; the offending
agents are recycled into other divisions; and the tainted unit is allowed to con-
tinue as before once the bad press subsides. One police chief likened attempting
to reform the National Police to being a member of “the salmon club”—since
the salmon, he explained, “is the only animal that swims upstream.”7
Tracing the dinc back through its various cycles of depuración and reciclaje,
or purging and recycling, offers historians clues as to why the dinc was in-
volved in this complex crime at all. Before being repackaged as the dinc during

120  —  CHAPTER FIVE

the Berger administration, the pn’s detectives unit was known as the Criminal
Investigations Section (sic), until Berger was forced to dissolve it due to per-
sistent rumors about its use of torture.8 The sic was created in 1997 as part
of the Peace Accords–mandated transformation of the pn into the pnc, suc-
ceeding the Department of Criminal Investigations (dic), which had a similar
reputation. The dic had been in operation since 1986 and was itself designed to
supersede the notorious Department of Technical Investigations (dit), which
then president Vinicio Cerezo had shuttered and whose officers he had mass-­
arrested in a dramatic raid designed to bolster his reformer’s image, even as
most of the ex-­dit agents were recycled back into the new dic.9 The dit, in
existence from 1982 through 1986, had in turn been conceived to replace the
deeply corrupt Detective Corps, which itself had supplanted the Judicial Police,
as discussed in chapter 4. In short, from an institutional standpoint, the dinc
was the perfect unit to be tasked, on orders from higher up, with carrying out
the Parlacen murders. The police’s detectives unit, under this cumbersome ar-
ray of monikers, had been executing similar crimes since the 1930s.
The story of how the Detective Corps became the dinc is not simply an
acronym soup or a genealogy detailing the evolution of police structures over
time. Rather, it is the social and political history of how a militarized, semi-­
independent force operated within the regular police, and it sheds light on
the development and conclusion of Guatemala’s armed conflict, the perils of
police aid, the hypocrisies of the country’s democratic transition, and the im-
portance of recovering the pn’s archives today. National Police agents were
not the counterinsurgency’s architects; neither, however, were they merely
its handmaidens. The period from 1975, when direct U.S. police assistance
was temporarily terminated, through the war’s end saw the police participate
wholeheartedly in the army’s crusade. (The Project’s decision to privilege the
processing of the police records dating from 1975 to 1985 reflects how urban
violence, and the police’s role in it, accelerated during these years.) As one
former G-­2 military intelligence officer told the un truth commission, “What
the G-­2 says is what the National Police does, they carry out military orders,
only they do it in a more dirty way.”10
The thorny case of the Parlacen murders demonstrates continuity rather
than change, illuminating how and why the very security forces responsible
for human rights violations during the war’s earliest days still perpetrate simi-
lar atrocities. This chapter explores how the pn evolved from a wartime coun-
terinsurgent force into a purportedly civilian National Civil Police, arguing
that the failures of this evolution are emblematic of greater postconflict fail-
ures to build representative institutions, demilitarize, and redistribute power.

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 121

The army’s decision to use “democratization”—relinquishing formal military
rule and establishing the bare bones of a polyarchic electoral system—as a
counterinsurgency strategy in the mid-­1980s had devastating implications for
the nature of the society Guatemalans would inherit.11 Examining this trajec-
tory not only writes the National Police back into recent Guatemalan history
but also destabilizes triumphal narratives of postconflict transition. It is not
the case that “ ‘democracy’ is only a mask for [a] military rule” unchanging
across space and time; indeed, the very existence of the Project speaks to how
dramatically the country’s political landscape has changed.12 However, the
mechanisms used to repress Guatemalans’ attempts to force open democratic
spaces are remembered institutionally within the National Police.
The title of this chapter alludes to a third phase of transition: post-­peace.
Charles Call and William Stanley remind us that it is common, indeed normal,
for violent crime to increase in the immediate aftermath of a peace process,
as in El Salvador and South Africa.13 However, they warn that if meaningful
security reforms are not undertaken in the years following an armed conflict,
longer-­term prospects for peace and stability will be seriously undermined.
Indeed, nearly two decades after the Peace Accords and following a brief early
dip in violence, Guatemala today finds itself in a state of purgatory: neither
in open conflict, nor truly at peace. As of this writing, the country’s homicide
rate stands at 48 per 100,000 nationally and more than 100 per 100,000 in the
capital, exceeding the violent death rates of the war years; only between 2 and
5 percent of crimes result in prosecution; so-­called parallel powers permeate
state institutions; and Guatemalan psychologists declare that the constant
barrage of shootings and murders has driven capitalinos to a state of “collec-
tive neurosis.”14 Morales Ramírez, a rank-­and-­file pnc agent exhausted after a
twelve-­hour shift, told a reporter in 2009 that when faced with such dramatic
civilian insecurity and state impotence, “the only thing left is to entrust one’s
life to God.”15 The discovery of the pn archives, occurring alongside an on-
going debate about security reform, offers a critical opportunity not only to
excavate the lost stories of victims but also to provide historical explanations
for why the National Civil Police, despite millions of dollars in postwar inter-
national aid, remains mired in a paradigm so dark it impels its own agents to
derive their hope from the heavens.

THE POPULAR MOVEMENT RESURGENT

In 1974, usaid closed down its Public Safety Program in Guatemala; no more
official assistance would be given to the pn for the time being, though the cia
remained covertly involved in local affairs. But the United States’ exporting of

122  —  CHAPTER FIVE

policing expertise was not forgotten. A year later, at the inauguration of the
police training academy built with aid funds, defense minister Leonel Vassaux
Martínez praised the U.S. contribution to “a renewed stage of tecnicismo” and
professionalization within the pn. “Fifty years ago,” he lectured, “the city was a
tranquil place of moderate and sober customs, whose inhabitants—peaceful by
nature—were scandalized by any act of delinquency.” No longer, he told his lis-
teners; by 1975, “delinquency [had] assumed alarming proportions,” and demo-
graphic growth had brought “undesirable elements into society.”16 The National
Police, Vassaux emphasized, was prepared for this shift. Some twenty years of
U.S. assistance had produced counterinsurgency-­geared innovations that had
streamlined police operations, particularly the Regional Telecommunications
Center. The pn also created the Joint Operations Center (cocp) in 1972 as a
communications conduit with the National Defense General Staff (emdn), per-
mitting extensive collaboration in the dwindling days of Arana’s state of siege.
But regime change, and the crushing of the far’s first incarnation, brought
a modicum of moderation. General Kjell Laugerud García, a graduate of U.S.
training programs at Fort Benning and Fort Leavenworth, defeated Efraín Ríos
Montt in a 1974 presidential election widely decried as fraudulent. Laugerud
was a “close friend and confidant” of the outgoing Arana, with whom he cut
his teeth in the Zacapa antiguerrilla campaigns of 1968.17 His vice president
was Mario Sandoval Alarcón, patriarch of the Movement of National Libera-
tion (the self-­proclaimed “party of organized violence”) and a Franco-­admiring
hard-­liner who backed death squads during the 1960s. Yet despite the con-
servatism of the new government and the chaos of the electoral campaign,
official anticommunism and antisyndicalism ebbed under the new regime,
at least initially. In early 1974, Laugerud, normally an enthusiastic red-­baiter,
pledged to improve his administration’s relationship with organized labor,
stating that he would “respect trade union freedoms and the organization of
labor guilds.”18
Laugerud was forced into this conciliatory position by organized labor’s
resurgence toward the end of the Arana regime. The mid-­1970s saw significant
growth in popular organizing, union-­based and otherwise, as Arana’s defeat of
the rural insurgency gave him the confidence to cede a slight political open-
ing in his administration’s waning days; this coincided with a surge of popu-
lar mobilization around opec-­related cost-­of-­living increases.19 As the prices
of basic goods spiked, urban government workers, beginning with primary
school teachers, began agitating for wage increases. Their three-­month strike
won a salary hike; more important, it stimulated a wave of new organizing
and the building of a broader labor movement, the National Committee on

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 123

Trade Union Unity (cnus), in 1976.20 In the first two years of Laugerud’s rule,
many small unions achieved legal recognition, and some strikes were allowed
to occur, a palpable change of atmosphere. And it was not only unions that
blossomed in the mid-­1970s; the National Movement of Pobladores (monap),
which worked with shantytown dwellers in the capital, and other popular
organizations, often with a Catholic orientation, took hold. As Deborah
Levenson-­Estrada writes, “What distinguished the Laugerud years was not
that the state guaranteed rights, but that compared to the extraordinary levels
of violence of the 1966–73 period, death squad, army, and police actions killed
fewer people. This definition of a ‘political opening’ may have been peculiar
to Guatemala,” but those progressives who had survived the Arana years were
determined to take advantage of it.21 It was under Laugerud that the “waves”
of terror experienced under Méndez Montenegro and Arana Osorio became
a “system” of terror characterized by selective assassinations—enabled by the
intelligence-­gathering, archiving, and communication capabilities recently
acquired by security forces.22
The lively popular organizing of the early Laugerud years took an unex-
pected turn on 4 February 1976, when a powerful earthquake tore through
central Guatemala. Some thirty thousand died, and hundreds of thousands
more were left homeless. The damnificados of the quake, predominantly the
poor and working classes, took matters into their own hands. Primary and
secondary school students mobilized to rebuild their schools; university stu-
dents self-­deployed into marginal areas to dig latrines, provide medical care,
distribute water, run pirated electricity lines, and generally do the recovery
work.23 As with natural disasters in other contexts, notably Mexico in 1985,
the earthquake galvanized society’s popular sectors, building consciousness
and fomenting solidarity among newly mobilized citizens.24 And the timing of
the earthquake was provocative: not only did it expose the very inequalities to
which the recent spate of organizing had been responding, but it occurred less
than a year after the Guerrilla Army of the Poor (egp) had formally announced
its presence on the national scene by executing landowner Luis Arena, the
“Tiger of the Ixcán,” in El Quiché.25 The egp used the quake’s aftermath for
a call to mass action, interpreting the disaster as just “a tremor for the rich,
[but] an earthquake for the poor.” As one of its pamphlets argued, “The quake
of February 4 dealt its blow to the Guatemalan population disproportionately,
at the same level of magnitude with which control over the means of produc-
tion and wealth among the distinct social classes are distributed. The working
people suffer all the impact.” The article concluded that popular warfare was
the people’s only alternative.26

124  —  CHAPTER FIVE

 It was not only the insurgency that built power during this tumultuous
time. The cnus formed just weeks after the earthquake, hoping to unite
unions and union federations “into a broad coalition that could confront the
state.”27 The next year saw more strikes than ever before, culminating with the
massive Ixtahuacán miners’ strike and march from Huehuetenango to the cap-
ital.28 University of San Carlos law faculty advised new and expanding unions,
while usac students worked on popular organizing projects with the city’s
women, pobladores, and high school students. The Association of University
Students (aeu) developed the capacity to mobilize mass numbers of students,
growing its organizational abilities with help from the clandestine armed Left.
In the countryside, organizing among indigenous campesinos flowered in the
early 1970s as well, the result of rapid rural modernization in the 1960s and
the efforts of Catholic Action and other catechist groups.29 Political polariza-
tion and popular mobilization were rising to proportions not even seen in the
street protests of 1962. A broad consensus of citizens rejected military rule,
explored myriad means of expressing discontent, and, in their best moments,
articulated alternatives. As at other junctures, however, the state and its allies,
sensing danger and fortified with foreign firepower, pushed back against the
winds of change.

THE CITY AS WAR ZONE IN THE AGE OF MARTYRS, 1977–1982

The year 1977 saw tremendous consolidation on the Left. It also saw a marked
escalation in state-­sponsored assassinations, both inside and outside the city,
of those individuals at the forefront of efforts to crack open democratic po-
litical spaces; the Laugerud regime decided that such bold dissent would no
longer be tolerated.30 The growing list of the dead included prominent labor
lawyer Mario López Larrave and student leaders Robin Mayro García Dávila
and Aníbal Leonel Caballeros Ramírez, all assassinated by security forces in
1977. López Larrave was gunned down in his car by a group of armed men in
a red Datsun. Caballeros’s beaten body appeared two days after his abduc-
tion, and even his death did not bring a close to his police file: the pn spied
on his funeral and on those who attended a memorial marking the anniver-
sary of his murder.31 The nineteen-­year-­old García was kidnapped too, his
mutilated corpse dumped on a highway outside the city. Social democratic
sectors, still vibrant during the late 1970s, were able to mobilize massive pro-
tests in response and, in García’s case, a fifty-­thousand-­strong funeral march
in which protesters shouted the slogan “Queremos a Robin vivo” that would
later morph into the demand of desaparecidos’ families, “Porque vivos se los
llevaron, ¡vivos los queremos!” (Because they were taken away alive, we want

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 125

FIG. 5.1  National Police agents confront a demonstration. © Jean-­Marie Simon/2012.

them back alive!)32 A primary target for popular anger was Laugerud’s reviled
interior minister Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz, the titular head of the National Po-
lice, which had maintained López Larrave under close surveillance.33 Banners
at the demonstrations read, “Señor Álvarez Ruiz, you are the one responsi-
ble for the death of Leonel Caballeros,” “Donaldo Álvarez Ruiz, assassin,” and
“The aeu holds the government responsible for all this violence.”34 Battle lines
were drawn between the police and the people.
In response, the pn, like other militarized state institutions, deployed what
Stanley Cohen terms “double discourse.” Official state speech not only denied
actions in which the government was clearly involved but also manipulated
language to construct “a social reality that distort[ed] facts and events,” com-
bining literal denial with ideological justification to “re-­arrange truth.”35 In
his essay “The Police Institution Faced by Defamers,” pn death squad com-
mander Juan Francisco Cifuentes Cano sought to explain why radical youth
were attacking his “glorious Institution,” providing a window into a nationalist
state-­security ideology that saw its own agents as saviors and its opposition
as threats to family, country, and God.36 Cifuentes Cano divided his analysis
into sections, including “Who Attacks Us,” “Why They Attack Us,” and “How
They Attack Us.” He posited that those protesting the pn were “not the best
citizens nor the faithful compliers with the law,” but rather “the enemies of
peace, order, and progress in the country, those painted in various doctrinaire
colors who eternally march in search of a universal dictatorship.” He outlined

126  —  CHAPTER FIVE

a typology of those who considered themselves opponents of the pn, deriding
them as “ambitious people who struggle only for their own economic gain,”
“the same opportunists as always, who lack moral values,” “the bitter ones
who, when political situations come to rise, lose their faculties,” “errant ro-
mantic idealists who see defense institutions as those opposed to the estab-
lishment of the paradise promised by the fathers of socialism,” and “youth
in whom vibrates the desire for adventure and who, when they find it, dye
themselves the color of the moment and call themselves ‘real men.’ ” Cifuentes
Cano dismissed the idea that the popular movements he caricatured posed any
significant risk to the state or its armed institutions; instead, he wrote, “At the
present hour, together with the national army, we form a wall in opposition
to the uncontrolled currents of a world in convulsion.”37
In reality, however, the insurgency’s escalation and the increasing radical-
ization of the middle to late 1970s seriously undermined the state’s ability to
maintain order in the capital. Mario Payeras, founder of the egp, may have
been waxing poetic when he described the early days of the egp’s urban as-
sault as “a ray of lightning which struck where it was least expected,” but he
was right to assert that the armed Left posed a real threat to the Laugerud
regime, and later the Lucas regime, in the city.38 The Otto René Castillo Front,
the egp’s urban wing, carried out its first execution in December 1975 and
began “armed propaganda” missions as early as May of that year, distributing
printed materials in workplaces, educational institutions, and working-­class
neighborhoods. On 12 November, the egp bombed the central offices of the
National Institute for Agrarian Transformation (inta). In April 1976, a raid on
the El Bizonte arms warehouse netted the egp not only a substantial cache of
weapons and ammunition but also press attention, made all the more effective
by the fact that defense minister Vassaux Martínez had indignantly denied
the egp’s existence to the media just a day earlier. Two weeks later, the group
executed Elías Ramírez, a former police chief it deemed “directly responsible
for the kidnapping and assassination of hundreds of revolutionaries.”39 As the
urban insurgency grew, pn agents, officers, and installations were frequent
targets of efforts to destabilize the military state.
But 1978 was a definitive moment of rupture, as the military’s massacre
of unarmed Q’eqchi peasants at Panzós on 29 May shifted the conflict into
a new register.40 General Romeo Lucas García assumed power on 1 July, re-
appointing the much-­loathed Álvarez Ruíz as interior minister and selecting
School of the Americas graduate Germán Chupina to take over as pn director-­
general. The changes in pn functioning as a result of the 1978 leadership rota-
tion closely mirrored the military’s decided turn toward mass violence under

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 127

Lucas. While at other moments the pn played more of an adjunct role in the
counterinsurgency, the Chupina period (1978–1982) was distinguished by the
extraordinary autonomy and direct authorship over urban violence exercised
by pn authorities, all military men. Even the influential General Héctor Gr-
amajo, Guatemala’s defense minister from 1987 through 1990, conceded that
during these years, “there was [great] fear of Donaldo Álvarez Ruíz and Col-
onel Germán Chupina Barahona, who together had control over all the army
and police forces.”41
When the austere Chupina took command of the pn, he informed his offi-
cers that he would tolerate “neither sloppy ones nor lazy ones” among them,
and announced that he would supplement the strength of those in uniform
by creating a “civilian corps of police collaborators” composed of “honorable
people in the different zones of the capital city” who would “inform the police
institution of everything that takes place in their respective zones or barrios.”42
The use of orejas (spies) was, from this moment on, a matter of official pn policy.
Civilian collaborators carried identification carnets, branding them as “Spe-
cial Agents,” issued by the Detective Corps, the handlers of government spies
since the Ubico/Judicial Police days.43 One example of a typical Chupina-­era
oreja report reads as follows:
There is knowledge that the well-­known subversive delinquent patro-
cinio pocon, originally from Huehuetenango, is currently living in the
house of his sister maura pocon de minera, wife of the doctor victor
minera, located at the address 45 Calle 12-­22 Zona 12, Colonia Villa Sol,
and in an apartment that this sister owns at the address 15 Calle Final Zona
21, Colonia Justo Rufino Barrios. Mrs. pocon de minera works in the
Municipal Training School “ecam,” located in Zone 8.44
Such a report would be routed, at the orders of the director-­general and by
way of the cocp, to the pn subbranch that was to be tasked with investigat-
ing the tip (in this case, the Detective Corps). Often, the Presidential Staff
(emp) would be copied on the communication. The pn received informants’
reports directly or from above, handed down by the military to the police for
execution; Chupina himself would write instructions in the margins, indicat-
ing whether a particular lead was to be pursued by the detectives or another
squad. Another representative oreja report contained more details as to the
nature of the accusation:
There is knowledge that the individual known by the name of elmer
toledo pineda, originally from the town of San Mororo in the jurisdic-

128  —  CHAPTER FIVE

 tion of San José Pinula, Department of Guatemala, disappeared from the
area approximately one year ago. It is certain that he was the one who
planned and directed the acts committed at the Chevron gasoline station in
the town of Don Justo, and that he had planned other acts on the same oc-
casion. As such, he is a dangerous subversive element, [and] it is known
that he works at the incesa estandar factory located in Villa Nueva, on
the highway to San Miguel Petapa.45
The year 1978 was also when Commando Six, a special operations unit ap-
pended to the pn’s Second Corps, began operations, quickly becoming known
as a leading executor of political crimes. (Commando Six would, during its
four years in existence, be controlled by some of the pn’s most infamous fig-
ures, including Pedro García Arredondo and Juan Antonio Lima López.) The
cocp, in operation since 1972, was strengthened and more closely incorpo-
rated into the network of intelligence agencies at both the pn and military
levels by Chupina, who dictated a new set of cocp governing regulations
formalizing both its everyday functions and its close coordination with the
Army General Staff (emge), the defense minister, and the emp.46 As well,
Chupina promised a thorough depuración, or purge, of the pn and of its Detec-
tive Corps in particular, so that it would be staffed exclusively with “honorable
persons.”47 Chupina only permitted individuals who had performed military
service to be hired as pn officers.48
Chupina’s vision of police rationalization produced an increase in both
common and political violence. The second half of 1978 saw Guatemala City’s
streets and outgoing highways littered with corpses, their faces smashed in,
hands amputated, backs pierced by bullets.49 Popular movements took in-
creasingly hostile antigovernment positions, inspired both by concrete acts
of repression (for example, the extrajudicial execution of labor activist Mario
Rolando Mujía Córdova that July) and by a broader economic context that
saw urban bus drivers strike for higher wages using the usac campus as their
base. Demonstrations, tolerated during the early Laugerud years, were now
being shut down by the pn’s elite riot-­control squads, who were fond of fir-
ing directly into crowds of striking workers. In October 1978, the pn’s Model
Platoon (Pelotón Modelo) antiriot squad broke up a demonstration of igss
strikers by shooting into the crowd, wounding fifteen, and kidnapping the
strike’s organizers, including Emergency Committee of State Workers (cete)
leader Marco Antonio Figueroa. A day later, the police attacked a meeting of
municipal water authority (empagua) workers debating whether or not to
continue their strike, opening fire on them and wounding ten.50

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 129

 All this served to radicalize unarmed popular sectors, their ire exploding
when the city council approved a hike in bus fares in September. Residents
of working-­class neighborhoods erected street blockades, the cnus declared
a general strike, and protesters engaged with riot police in an increasingly
confrontational manner, throwing Molotov cocktails and setting cars on fire.
As Paul Kobrak writes, “The importance of the 1978 mobilizations had gone
beyond the issue of bus prices. In its slogans and graffiti, protesters advocated
revolutionary change, inspired by a sense of popular power achieved during
the protests.”51 They won the battle—the original bus prices were restored—
but they would soon lose the war. The Lucas government was in crisis; the
specter of a Sandinista victory was on the minds of revanchists and revolution-
aries alike, and the looming threat that the urban mass movement would unite
with the rural strength of the egp and the resurgent far inspired a redoubled
reliance upon death squads by the state.
The Secret Anti-­Communist Army (esa), one such squad allegedly run out
of Chupina’s office, debuted in the second half of 1978, publishing hit lists
of prominent left-­wing and social democratic figures similar to the lists cir-
culated by the mln-­backed squads of the 1960s.52 In press releases, the esa
vowed, “For every anti-­communist who falls in a cowardly attack, we will dis-
pense justice to twenty [communists].” In August 1978, the Christian Demo­
crats denounced the existence of a “Batalion of Death,” which, it charged,
was carrying out political assassinations with the government’s approval.53
In early 1979, another clandestine squad, Organization Zero, began claiming
credit for executions using the slogan “Killing for Justice.”54 The pn reported
that six hundred Guatemalans were murdered in February 1979 alone, most
of them executed by yet another squad, the redundantly named “Escuadrón
de la Muerte” (Death Squad), another secret outfit devoted to eliminating
“known criminals.”55 By March 1979, extrajudicial murder was so public and
frequent that it spawned its own neologism: those slain by clandestine armed
groups were now referred to in press accounts as escuadronados—literally,
“squadded.”56
Among the death squads’ victims in these years stand some of the Left’s
most beloved figures. They included aeu president Oliverio Castañeda de
León, who was gunned down at the anniversary march commemorating Gua-
temala’s October Revolution while pn agents, allegedly including Chupina
himself, stood by and watched.57 The archival record demonstrates that the
police tracked Castañeda’s activism closely before his murder; his name ap-
peared on hit lists kept both by the police and by the Secret Anti-­Communist
Army. The pn’s file on him tracked his presence at demonstrations and in-

130  —  CHAPTER FIVE

cluded several informants’ reports on his activities. (Informants regularly re-
ported on protests, noting carefully which organizations had turned out the
greatest numbers of participants.) Posters and pamphlets from slain activist
Mario Rolando Mujía Córdova’s funeral, for example, were kept in Casta­ñeda’s
file along with an informant’s transcriptions of the slogans on demonstrators’
banners and eleven photographs of the participants. A month before the
twenty-­three-­year-­old’s assassination, labor and popular groups had converged
on the Plaza Italia to express solidarity with Nicaragua; the police archived
another informant’s report on the event along with flyers distributed there by
student groups and by the Central American Glass Industry union (cavisa),
soon to be decimated by extrajudicial executions. In addition to the oreja’s
observations, the report included thirteen photographs of the protesters. One
such photo was enlarged and reprinted to reveal a more detailed image of
Castañeda; on the reprint, a cross was scratched onto Castañeda’s leg, pre-
sumably to identify him among the crowd.58 Little imagination is required to
connect this archival record to its subject’s death.
Next, social democratic politician and United Revolutionary Front (fur)
leader Manuel Colom Argueta—whose police file dated back to 1957 and
whose siblings, family, and friends were also under pn observation—was shot
to death in Zone 9 by the occupants of a car whose license plates would turn
up in the National Police archives thirty years later.59 Progressive economist
and Social Democratic Party (psd) leader Alberto Fuentes Mohr met a similar
fate, mowed down in front of the old Politécnica on Avenida de la Reforma;
his murder and Colom Argueta’s were attributed by cia observers to the
pn’s Commando Six.60 Student leaders Ricardo Martínez Solórzano, Manuel
Lisandro Andrade Roca, Julio César Cabrera y Cabrera, Antonio Ciani, Alejan-
dro Cotí, Ivan Alfonso Bravo Soto, and hundreds more were killed or disap-
peared; new information has emerged from the pn archives on some of their
cases.61 And so many members of the fur and psd parties, the remaining legal
opposition to the Lucas regime, were assassinated that the parties ceased to
exist.62 The United States kept close track of the Guatemalan state’s involve-
ment in this explosion of death squad activity; each of these murders, local
though they may have been, was very much “part of the Cold War,” as Carlota
McAllister writes.63 As if to bring the point home, in the days after Colom Ar-
gueta’s murder, unknown individuals decapitated the bust of Colonel Castillo
Armas in the Guatemala City cemetery, smashing its stone head to pieces on
the asphalt.64
The city had become a war zone, with confrontations between urban guer-
rillas and the pn, Mobile Military Police (pma), or army nightly shattering

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 131

an otherwise cowed silence. But death squad crimes—forced disappearances,
selective executions—were committed quietly, leaving behind little evidence
and few witnesses, hardly marking the cityscape until the moment a corpse
was dumped. Carlos Figueroa Ibarra points out that within the country’s
“geography of forced disappearance,” Guatemala City was a central theater,
particularly during the late 1970s and early 1980s as the mass popular move-
ments of students and workers were systematically annihilated.65 For forensic
historians, though, forced disappearances are difficult cases in which to assign
individual responsibility, as their perpetrators were nearly always dressed in
civilian clothing and therefore less readily identifiable by witnesses. (By con-
trast, army massacres in rural areas were carried out openly by uniformed
troops, facilitating eyewitness identification by survivors.) In Figueroa Ibar-
ra’s study of more than six thousand forced disappearances, he notes that in
some 60 percent of the cases, “unknown men” were reported to have been the
victimizers, a phenomenon he terms “clandestine terror.”66 It is not difficult
to imagine who, broadly speaking, committed these crimes; what remains
unclear is whether a particular disappearance might have been carried out by
Commando Six, the Detective Corps, another police unit, or directly by G-­2
military intelligence, with individual responsibility even harder to pinpoint.
That the pn’s special squads conducted much of their business in plainclothes
is thus one factor contributing to the minimizing, in many accounts of the
war, of the police’s role.
But police involvement in certain other acts of violence was more clear-­cut.
In 1980, the cia reported that the “highest levels of the Guatemalan govern-
ment through the National Police hierarchy” were “fully aware” of a clandes-
tine burial ground, outside Comalapa in the department of Chimaltenango,
used by the Detective Corps to dump bodies. The cia cable, evincing the log-
ical contortions of official denial, contradicted itself: it stated that the dozens
of corpses found at the site were of “common criminals” only, yet elsewhere it
noted that the Detective Corps disposed of bodies there “after interrogation.”67
(Of course, common criminals were unlikely to merit extended interroga-
tion.) The dumping ground, U.S. observers reported, belonged to the detec-
tives alone, and it spoke volumes about the Corps’ modus operandi. In 2011,
a series of human remains were exhumed from the Comalapa mass graves
and their dna analyzed. As of this writing, five victims have been successfully
identified; they were all abducted in 1984 and were all among the detainees
archived in the Diario Militar—the army document chronicling extrajudicial
executions that was leaked in 1999—offering further evidence of close police-­
military collaboration.68

132  —  CHAPTER FIVE

 The year 1980 saw several urban mass murders bearing the pn’s imprima-
tur, the Spanish embassy fire in January, and the abduction of twenty-seven
workers from the National Workers’ Central (cnt) in June, the anniversary
of which is now Guatemala’s annual Day against Forced Disappearances.
In the case of the cnt unionists, a joint military-­police action squad used
a “Frozen Area Plan”—the method taught to Judicial Police detectives by
usaid adviser John Longan in the 1960s—to cordon off the area around cnt
headquarters and ensnare the union leaders in what survivors described as a
“lightning strike” (operación relámpago).69 The pn had been threatening the
cnt for months, and in February 1980 had arrested seven of its leaders. They
followed the June disappearances with another mass disappearance, under
the direction of the Detective Corps’ second-­in-­command: this time, police
detained seventeen members of the usac’s Labor Orientation School, which
Mario López Larrave had led before his assassination.70 The ceh report de-
scribes how those taken were tortured in pn installations just adjacent to the
present-­day site of the police archives. As one U.S. embassy report stated, “It
is believed that Government of Guatemala security forces killed all of them.”71
The pn were just as involved in the Spanish embassy massacre. The inci-
dent began when a coalition of egp-­allied usac students (from the Robin Gar-
cia Student Front, named for the murdered student leader) and Cam­pesino
Unity Committee (cuc) activists occupied Spain’s embassy, demanding an
end to state terror in El Quiché. Rather than negotiating with the occupiers,
security forces stormed the building, provoking a massive blaze that took the
lives of all but one of the demonstrators. (The lone survivor, Gregorio Yujá
Xoná, was abducted from his hospital bed that night and executed, his body
dumped on the usac campus.) The facts of precisely what occurred within the
embassy—how the fire started, whose fault it was—have been hotly disputed,
though the consensus opinion holds that police agents instigated the fire by
launching gas canisters into the building.72 What is not disputed, however,
is that it was the pn’s inspector-­general who received the order from Lucas
to break down the doors and remove the protesters by force, that pn agents
prevented firefighters from entering the building, and that dozens of them
stood by and watched as the thirty-­seven peasants and students within were
burned alive. The Spanish ambassador, who was inside during the incident but
survived, later testified that “the police impeded the departure of all or some
of those who found themselves trapped.”73 The incident resulted in Chupina’s
and Commando Six chief Pedro García Arredondo’s inclusion in an interna-
tional court case brought by Spain thirty years later against eight military and
police officials for genocide and crimes against humanity.

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 133

 The National Police’s participation in these acts did not go unnoticed by
the popular Left; shortly after the embassy fire, the usac’s governing body
wrote an open letter to President Lucas demanding the firings of Chupina,
Álvarez, and Detective Corps chief Jesús Manuel Valiente Téllez.74 Neither,
however, did the pn’s role escape the attention of the armed Left. While the
prevailing postwar narrative about culpability has focused almost exclusively
on the army, the pn’s responsibility was well understood during the conflict it-
self. Police substations were routinely targeted by insurgents in incidents that
almost daily resulted in the deaths of the rank-­and-­file agents on night duty.75
And the armed Left set its sights higher than killing night guards; guerrillas
executed the second-­in-­command of Commando Six, the notorious torturer
José Antonio “El Chino” Lima López, in January 1980.76 (On the day of his
death, Lima López sported a U.S. Army signet ring.)77 In early February, just
after the Spanish embassy fire, one police guard was killed in an unsuccessful
egp attempt to kill the pn’s subdirector-­general at his home.78 In July, egp
cadres from the Otto René Castillo Front assassinated Miguel Angel Natareno
Salazar, the head of the Fourth Corps, along with three other pn agents.79
But the insurgents never won their greatest prizes, though not for lack of
trying. In February, the egp attempted the assassinations of Donaldo Álvarez
(by car bomb) and Germán Chupina, while in July the far announced its
own plans to kill both Chupina and Valiente Téllez in retaliation for the cnt
abductions.80 “These two assassins are profoundly despised by all the workers
of this country, for many reasons,” read the egp’s report on its attempt. “We re-
gret having failed, and we know that the great popular masses regret it too.”81
Interestingly, urban guerrillas were not the only ones targeting police offi-
cers, and pn extralegal activity did not eliminate only leftists. U.S. documents
note that in 1980, “internecine rivalry claimed almost as many policemen
as terrorist actions did,” due both to internal power struggles and to agents’
involvement in the illicit economy.82 One of the most storied feuds in Guate-
malan political history, between Detective Corps chief Jesús Manuel Valiente
Téllez and Commando Six chief Pedro García Arredondo, claimed more than
thirty lives, spelling the beginning of the end for the Detective Corps—in
name, at least. Valiente was well known for both nepotism and butchery; on
the side, he ran a private security firm, Los Vigilantes, staffed by dozens of
members of his own family, which enjoyed near-­total impunity in its settling
of scores.83 García Arredondo, after several years of bad blood between Com-
mando Six and the Detective Corps in which the two frequently tripped over
one another in the course of their clandestine work, decided to launch a hos-
tile takeover of Valiente’s turf. In 1980, numerous members of Los Vigilantes

134  —  CHAPTER FIVE

were murdered and several attempts were made on Valiente’s life, with García
Arredondo narrowly escaping similar aggressions.84 On 22 August 1980, Va-
liente resigned under pressure, returning to the full-­time administration of
Los Vigilantes; however, the violence continued after his resignation, as fired
Valiente loyalists were executed one by one.85 In November, Valiente’s home
was attacked by armed gunmen; in July 1981, his brother was killed while
waiting in a lunch line; and at the brother’s funeral, pn detectives attacked
mourners, gunning down eight members of Los Vigilantes. In early December
1981, Valiente was wounded in a sniper attack; in late December, a sustained
grenade and machine-­gun siege on his home killed his wife and daughter and
left Valiente with only one eye and partially paralyzed.86 Valiente fled to Mi-
ami, where he denounced García Arredondo’s methods and confirmed that
many of the recent murders attributed to death squads were, in fact, carried
out by regular security forces, some under his own direction.87
García Arredondo’s bloody takeover provoked a structural change within
the pn. Previously Chupina, nominally subordinate to interior minister Don-
aldo Álvarez, had reported directly to the president while Valiente, nominally
subordinate to Chupina, had reported directly to the interior minister. Here-
after, the two separate chains of command would be united into one, and for
a brief period, the Detective Corps would be renamed the “New Detective
Corps.”88 “It is called the New Detective Corps,” police public relations offi-
cials indicated, “by virtue of its having been completely depurado [purged],
with a total reorganization of personnel, and the new elements who have been
admitted were selected because they are honorable people with a strong desire
to work on behalf of the citizenry, in this way providing a new image to the
Corps.”89 The depuración and reciclaje pattern appeared here in spades, a func-
tion of internal rivalry, not reform. Those familiar with García Arredondo’s
crimes were unimpressed by the change. As one U.S. embassy report indi-
cated, “If the good news is the removal of a notorious human rights violator,
the bad news is that his replacement, while possibly less venal, is every bit as
ruthless.”90

EVERY BIT AS RUTHLESS:

THE PN UNDER RÍOS MONTT AND MEJÍA VICTORES

Pedro García Arredondo would head the “New” Detective Corps for a year
and a half, presiding over the July 1981 final offensive against the urban insur-
gency that all but obliterated the capital city’s guerrilla presence.91 By March
1982, when the coup d’état took place that saw Efraín Ríos Montt emerge as
junta leader, the state had driven most insurgents out into the campo for a

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 135

battle that would, Ríos Montt threatened, see not “scorched earth” but rather
“scorched Communists.”92 The police dismantled guerrilla safe houses, or re-
ductos, throughout the capital, and each fallen safe house was trumpeted by
the regime as a further shift in the war’s balance of power.93
Upon assuming power, Ríos Montt, an evangelical Protestant, set about
conducting his own depuración of Lucas-­era moral failings.94 “There will be no
more assassinations, and no more corruption,” he proclaimed with millenar-
ian conviction.95 Many Guatemalans, even progressives, had been so horrified
by the Lucas regime that they were relieved, at least initially, to see Ríos Montt
take over.96 The junta deposed and arrested twenty government officials, aim-
ing to curb the police’s death squad activity. Donaldo Álvarez Ruíz, after flee-
ing the country, had his home sacked by Ríos Montt’s troops, revealing an
arsenal of weapons and files; Pedro García Arredondo was removed as head of
the Detective Corps and replaced by International Police Academy graduate
Oswaldo Xolón Yat; and the indomitable Germán Chupina was rotated out
as pn director-­general and replaced by Hernán Ponce Nitsch, a “close friend”
of Ríos Montt and former School of the Americas instructor.97 The Detective
Corps was disbanded, replaced by the Department of Technical Investigations
in March 1982.98 The Detective Corps, the new authorities decided, had been
employing “inadequate empirical procedures” and stood accused of “anoma-
lies in service, poor precedents, and having committed crimes.” Its depuración
involved the firing of some 150 detectives, many of whom reappeared on dit
personnel rosters soon thereafter.99 La Regional, the intelligence-­coordination
service, was renamed the Archives and Support Services of the Presidential
General Staff (agsaemp), or “El Archivo” for short. The nickname was appro-
priate, since within El Archivo, “archive and computer files would continue
to be kept on students, political activists and leaders, human rights activists,
journalists, [and] trade unionists, among others.”100 Ríos Montt seemed de-
termined to rein in, or at least establish his own control over, violence in
the capital, seeking to bring order to a chaotic city. Indeed, an incredulous
El Imparcial ran an unusual headline a few days after the coup, spotlighting a
piece of news so rare that it merited front-­page placement: “No Gun-­Related
Deaths Today.”101
The dit under Ponce Nitsch, however, would not stray far from the coop.
Ríos Montt’s professed commitment to reducing death squad murders would
last only a few months, while state-­sponsored killing in the countryside esca-
lated massively. (One editorial cartoon in the usac’s satirical No Nos Tientes
student publication pictured the 1982 coup as a relay race, in which Lucas
passed forward a baton to Ríos Montt.)102 Ríos Montt’s concern was not, ulti-

136  —  CHAPTER FIVE

FIG. 5.2  Ríos Montt takes power. © Jean-­Marie Simon/2012.

mately, that political homicides decrease; as he warned in July 1982, “Who-

ever is against the instituted government, whoever doesn’t surrender, I’m go-
ing to shoot. It is preferable that it be known that 20 people were shot, and
not just that 20 bodies have appeared beside the road.” Rather, he desired that
it take place according to his own guidelines and priorities.103 Ríos Montt’s
innovation in criminal prosecution was to establish the Tribunales de Fuero
Especial—special closed, Star Chamber–style military courts, to try accused
subversives. But in practice, the process simply provided a thin procedural
veneer for the same arbitrary executions conducted under Lucas. Ríos Montt
instructed his elite operatives from El Archivo to “apprehend, hold, interro-
gate, and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit.”104 Toward that end,
the dictator decreed that the responsibility for administering the pn be trans-
ferred, in early 1983, from the Interior Ministry to the Ministry of Defense,
to render the police’s militarization formal.105 Administration of the “often
unruly” dit was taken over by the Army General Staff; instituting military
discipline was seen as a way for the new regime to distinguish itself “from the
corrupt Lucas García-­Álvarez-­Chupina model.”106
But the lived relationship between the pn and society changed little. In
March 1983, Ponce Nitsch announced that any journalists who wrote news
items “confusing the population” risked indefinite imprisonment.107 Police

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 137

and military operations on university territory, whether under the pretext of
combating narcotrafficking or with no pretext at all, continued under Ríos
Montt even as the urban insurgency had already been all but defeated. Be-
tween July and October 1982, for example, more than twenty usac students
and professors were disappeared.108 To say the urban insurgency had been
all but defeated did not mean that occasional attacks on police substations,
bombings of state installations, or guerrilla interceptions of fm radio stations
did not continue. Nevertheless, the organizational network of safe houses that
had sustained the insurgency through July 1981 had been broken by security
forces, which continued to use the quest against subversion to justify on­going
residential raids and vehicle checkpoints.109 As for internal pn matters, the dit
endured another round of depuración in April 1983, which saw some twenty
officers arrested on corruption charges.110 The phrase used by the U.S. em-
bassy to compare Pedro García Arredondo to his predecessor—“possibly less
venal, [but] every bit as ruthless”—could also have been used to describe the
conduct of the police under Ríos Montt.
Patience for Ríos Montt’s diversions from the military’s pacification plan—
and for his increasingly fervid religious pronouncements—waned quickly,
however, and generals deposed him by coup in August 1983.111 The new head
of state, General Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores, was a military strongman
cut from Lucas García’s cloth, with one difference: his desire for the rein-
statement of U.S. aid, which led him to conduct a public relations campaign
to rehabilitate Guatemala’s reputation abroad. (Under Mejía, the state chal-
lenged Amnesty International, accusing the authors of its reports of having
“an interest in distorting the reality of our country.”)112 This meant backing off
from the “official” killings of Ríos Montt; instead, Mejía Víctores disbanded
his predecessor’s special military tribunals and returned to the practice of
clandestine murder and forced disappearance.113 But Mejía’s pr push was half-
hearted at best. When the United Nations passed a resolution condemning
Guatemala for human rights violations, the government laughed it off. “We
aren’t taking the resolution that seriously,” spokesman Fernando Andrade
Díaz-­Duran shrugged.114
General Héctor Rafael Bol de la Cruz was selected to replace Ponce Nitsch
as director-­general of the pn, and Bol de la Cruz’s pn would be deeply in-
volved in state efforts to crush a new wave of urban organizing that began
in late 1983. That November, usac rector Eduardo Meyer denounced the
disappearances of more than fifty members of the university community in
the preceding weeks.115 As Paul Kobrak writes, “More than at any other time
during the armed conflict, under Mejía Víctores the cruel practice of forced

138  —  CHAPTER FIVE

disappearance became the State’s preferred method of combating the oppo-
sition.”116 Security forces met the resurgence of pgt-­linked labor and student
activism with harsh measures.117 In May 1984, for example, seven members
of the aeu’s Executive Committee were disappeared in quick succession;
earlier that year, several kidnappings took place in which the circumstances
“clearly suggest[ed] they were perpetrated by government security forces.”118
As one U.S. document indicated, the National Police, particularly the dit,
“have traditionally considered labor activists to be communists,” and acted
accordingly.119
The grieving family members of these student and labor organizers, who
met in the course of their anguished visits to the morgue looking for the bod-
ies of their loved ones, came together to pressure the state for their desapare-
cidos’ safe return by forming the Mutual Support Group (gam) in June 1984.120
The group’s demonstrations, meetings with officials, and tireless advocacy
pressured the Mejía Víctores government to make at least symbolic gestures
toward investigating forced disappearances. However, rhetorical attacks on
gam began almost immediately, with Mejía Víctores tarring the organization
as “subversive” and suggesting that many of the disappeared were “perhaps
in some Communist country with some scholarship or in Havana, Cuba.”121
Soon, gam became the target of violence, with the dit being central in ef-
forts to crush the organization. Héctor Gómez Calito, who joined gam after
his brother’s 1982 disappearance, was kidnapped in broad daylight in March
1985. His tortured, burned body appeared soon after, hands tied and tongue
cut out, and it became known that dit agents had been inquiring after Gómez
in his hometown of Amatitlán shortly before the murder. As U.S. accounts
indicated, the body of Gómez—“an extremely non-­violent person”—had been
disfigured to an even greater extent than was customary in state-­sponsored
executions, “to make a point to the gam group.”122 Rosario Godoy de Cuevas,
another gam member whose husband, Carlos Cuevas Molina, was abducted
in 1984 by armed men who self-­identified as dit agents, spoke at Gómez’s
funeral.123 Her eulogy, part of which was broadcast on television, decried his
murder and blamed the state for perpetrating it. Days later, Godoy de Cuevas
herself went missing; dit agents telephoned her parents to inform them that
the bodies of Godoy de Cuevas, her brother, and her two-­year-­old son were at
the morgue. Although the police report claimed the three perished in a “traf-
fic accident,” autopsies showed that the young mother had been beaten and
raped; her infant’s fingernails had been pulled out.124
The “Holy Week murders,” as they came to be known, of these gam activ-
ists shared a modus operandi with hundreds of other killings under the Mejía

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 139

FIG. 5.3  At the funeral of Héctor Gómez Calito. © Jean-­Marie Simon/2012.

FIG. 5.4 Rosario Godoy de Cuevas denounces state-­sponsored executions before her own
state-­sponsored torture and assassination. © Jean-­Marie Simon/2012.
 The Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo protests the murders and disappearances of its members
FIG. 5.5 
in the wake of the murder of Rosario Godoy de Cuevas. © Jean-­Marie Simon/2012.

Víctores regime. They were ordered and designed by military intelligence,

but often carried out by specialized police units like the dit.125 Triangulat-
ing data from the Diario Militar and the National Police archives has since
demonstrated this pattern. Under Ríos Montt and Mejía Víctores, the police
structures relied upon for the execution of such “dirty work”—the dit, the
Fourth Corps, broe/Fifth Corps, and Second Corps, to name the most promi-
nent among them—did not change significantly from earlier periods. The dit,
despite its depuración and the new name it was given in 1982, continued the
work of its predecessors, the Detective Corps and the Judicial Police. For its
role in political killings between 1982 and 1986, the dit would in turn meet
its end, with newly installed civilian president Vinicio Cerezo attempting to
score a public relations coup by disbanding the tainted entity. But the dit’s
institutional successors would not break with its history.

DEMOCRATIZATION AS COUNTERINSURGENCY:
FROM CEREZO TO THE PEACE ACCORDS

As Ronald Reagan suggested to the outgoing Mejía Víctores in a personal let-

ter written in 1985, “successful elections and continued further improvement
in respect for human rights in Guatemala are essential to securing from the
Congress the economic and military assistance needed by your country.”126

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 141

The letter sent a clear message: the Reagan administration was sympathetic to
the objective of crushing communism, but congressional concern over human
rights abuses tied the hands of U.S. hawks who wanted to reinstate military
aid. If the Guatemalans could restore some semblance of democratic rule,
thus solving the country’s image problem, Congress could authorize increased
assistance to its “friend and ally.” “We would like to do more. Unfortunately, at
this moment, the amount of help we can provide is limited,” Reagan wrote. “I
can assure you, however, that we are sensitive to your needs.”127
Within Guatemala, the private sector and reformist currents within the
military had already found that after years of bloody rule by coup, interna-
tional isolation, and mismanagement of the national economy, it also served
their interests to promote a return to constitutional government. As Rachel
McCleary writes, while Arana had maintained good working relations with
the private sector by actively promoting interregional trade through the Cen-
tral American Common Market, Laugerud García and Lucas García had an-
tagonized the private sector by clinging to import-­substituting trade strategies
that transformed the economy into a centralizing patronage system marked by
clientelism, inefficiency, and corruption.128 These regimes ran the economy
into the ground, in the eyes of the power brokers composing the Coordinating
Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associa-
tions (cacif). U.S. assessments put the mid-­1980s economy at its weakest
point in fifty years, and Guatemala’s oligarchs and terratenientes were none
too pleased with the situation, withdrawing their uncompromised support
for military rule.129
On the military side, a group of forward-­thinking officers based at the Cen-
ter for Military Studies (cem) had concluded in 1982 that they lacked a mil-
itary solution to an insurgency that both internal and external analysts esti-
mated as having between 350,000 and 500,000 rural sympathizers. Therefore,
beginning with the social development–oriented regime of Ríos Montt, they
set about incorporating democratizing elements into their long-­term plans
to defeat the armed Left.130 Additionally, the cem strategists saw establish-
ing a democratic cover as necessary to the military’s very survival. While the
army could keep the insurgency contained, it could not muster the strength
to truly defeat it without a significant increase in U.S. military aid, for which
it would need to win over the U.S. House of Representatives.131 The Guate-
malan military was, as one cia report indicated, “stretched to the limits of
their resources.”132 As McCleary notes, therefore, “this return to procedural
democracy did not occur because the military suddenly developed democratic
values.”133 Mejía Víctores, no great proponent of democratic values when it

142  —  CHAPTER FIVE

came to policing the streets of Guatemala City, was reluctantly persuaded to
tolerate the November 1985 presidential elections. He made sure, however, to
pass a general amnesty for military officers in his final days in office, in case
the apertura got out of hand.
The transition to civilian rule, then, was not won by the popular sector. In-
stead, “democratization” was a central plank of the army’s counterinsurgency
plan. As Schirmer puts it, the army “learned to play its electoral-­constitutional
cards internationally while continuing to practice its sui generis counter­
insurgency campaign domestically.”134 This did not escape the Left: in its Ver-
dad newsletter, the pgt pointed out in 1984:
The counterinsurgent project implanted by the imperialists and the army
continues on the march: on the one hand, we have repression and ter-
ror, and on the other hand, the National Constituent Assembly presents
its show of “opening” with the desperate goals of giving a democratic ap-
pearance to the regime’s reactionary, fascist, and pro-­imperialist politics;
legitimizing the counterinsurgency strategy designed by the United States;
re-­establishing U.S. military and economic assistance to Guatemala; neu-
tralizing popular discontent; and stopping the advance of the Popular Rev-
olutionary War headed by the urng.135
The piece ran accompanied by a crude editorial cartoon, in which a leering
general stands beside a ragged-­looking detainee, who hangs suspended by his
feet. The dangling prisoner yells out denunciations of the military’s abuses;
the smug general retorts, “Lies! I’m even putting something about human
rights in the Constitution!”
Such a scheme required a figurehead. Vinicio Cerezo, the first civilian
president in decades, was elected to accolades in 1985’s presidential race.136
Cerezo declared himself to be a “fanatic of democracy,” and by October 1986,
his devotion had netted the desired results: more than $400 million in aid
commitments in the 1986 fiscal year alone, including more than $100 million
from the United States.137 Cerezo went to great lengths to demonstrate his
efforts to gain control over the hard-­liners responsible for extralegal acts in
previous administrations. One of his first decisions as president, in Febru-
ary 1986, was to disband the dit. By presidential order, agents from the pn’s
Special Operations Reaction Brigade (broe)—no saints themselves—were
sent to raid dit headquarters, arresting more than six hundred agents and
officers.138 “We had heard rumors about kidnappings, automobile thefts, and
other crimes being committed by members of the dit,” Cerezo diplomatically
declared to the press in justification.139 (A year later, pn spokesman Carlos

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 143

Rafael Soto admitted that the dit had indeed led death squad activities and
had “even carried out torture in National Palace headquarters.”)140 By gov-
ernmental accord 88-­86, the dit met its end, replaced by the Department of
Criminal Investigations.
But Cerezo’s power was severely constrained, as reflected in his efforts at
police reform. Of the 600 ex-­dit agents detained, 115 were fired from the pn
for “flaws in service,” and some 20 more quit. However, the overwhelming
majority of them, 470 agents, were sent back to the pn’s training school for
reinsertion. Most of the former dit agents were recycled directly into the
new dic, rendering Cerezo’s initiative more show than substance.141 The dit’s
three chiefs were escorted back to their homes, thanked for their service, and
assured that they would not be prosecuted.142 Higher up, Cerezo briefly at-
tempted to appoint as pn director-­general a retired general without active
military ties. But defense minister Héctor Gramajo pushed through his top
choice, the controversial general Julio Enrique Caballeros Seigné—a career
intelligence officer, former head of El Archivo, and close Gramajo associate.
(Caballeros Seigné was described by one newspaper columnist as “a strange
mix of Batman, Ubico, and Ríos Montt.”)143 Military dominance over civilian
policing, then, was not about to change; military intelligence structures like
the G-­2 and El Archivo were left intact, free to continue their muzzling of
politically sensitive investigations and control of counterinsurgency policy. As
one pn detective told Jennifer Schirmer, “Publicly, the spokesperson says we
are not related to the army and that we are in charge of criminal investigations
in Guatemala. But there are always two investigations going on simultane-
ously: that of the police and that of the G-­2 watching the police.”144 As Cerezo
told the foreign press shortly after his inauguration, if he were to attempt too
much change too quickly, “you’ll be interviewing me in Miami.”145
Certain Cerezo-­era innovations in policing had slightly more staying power
because they better served military interests. Over the course of the 1980s,
the U.S. government had become interested in furnishing aid to help fight
narcotrafficking, an easier sell to Congress, and one early focus of restored
U.S. aid to the National Police through the U.S. Criminal Investigations Train-
ing Assistance Program (icitap) was the creation of an elite pn antinarcotics
squad. The Special Investigations and Narcotics Brigade (bien) was estab-
lished under U.S. guidance in 1986, and some of its officers were trained in the
United States.146 Guatemala’s enthusiastic participation in the United States’
hemispheric antinarcotics crusade, which in practice rather resembled the
United States’ hemispheric anticommunist crusade, won it points with the
U.S. military. Indeed, the narcotrafficking angle allowed the Reagan admin-

144  —  CHAPTER FIVE

istration to continue funneling funds to the Guatemalan police, circumvent-
ing congressional restrictions. “In response to your government’s interest in
anti-­narcotics assistance,” wrote assistant secretary for inter-­American affairs
Elliott Abrams to interior minister Rodil in July 1986, “we have approved a
pilot anti-­narcotics training program for Guatemala. This program will pro-
vide funds for vehicles and mobile radios to improve the logistical capabilities of
your specialized police.”147 Abrams, a staunch anticommunist, made clear his
chagrin at the limitations imposed by Congress, writing, “I regret that existing
U.S. legislation severely restricts our ability to provide most forms of police
equipment and basic training.”148
When urban violence, after a brief dip following Cerezo’s inauguration,
began to rise dramatically, the administration implemented another change
that sought to bestow a democratic patina upon ongoing military control. The
Civilian Protection System (siproci) placed police and other civilian security
forces under the direct coordination of the minister of defense and, above
him, the president. This protection system integrated twenty-­six thousand
agents from military intelligence, Civil Self-­Defense Patrols (pacs), the Na-
tional Police, the Treasury Guard, the Mobile Military Police, and the Presi­
dential Guard into joint army-­police patrols, and though it was in theory
controlled by Cerezo, it operated out of the offices of El Archivo and func-
tionally subordinated all internal security matters to the authority of military
intelligence.149 siproci was the result of an ongoing power struggle between
the military and the police. When foreign aid for police reform started to
pour in at the outset of Cerezo’s term, it raised concerns that the government
aimed to strengthen the police at the expense of continued army dominance.
Disgruntled officers made this point clearly when, in a 1989 coup attempt,
they occupied pn headquarters; Cerezo survived the coup by acceding to a
variety of its demands, including the tightening of military control over the
pn.150 Two months later, siproci was inaugurated, and the narrative that the
military needed to participate in civilian security due to pn incompetence pre-
vailed from that point onward. Later, under president Jorge Serrano, the joint
military-­police patrol system would be renamed the Hunapú Task Force—in
the tradition of security forces giving Mayan names to their operations—and
would integrate thousands of ex-­soldiers as “police officers.”151 The joint pa-
trols were most regularly deployed in “cleansings” of street youth and attacks
on student and labor demonstrations, for which the patrols would become a
major target of reformers through the 1990s.152 Though siproci was packaged
as Cerezo exerting control over internal security, siproci’s structure was con-
ceived by the army as a means of leaving Cerezo holding the bag in case any

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 145

abuses made it into the public eye. As defense minister Gramajo laughed years
later, “Within this scheme of ours [siproci], the President is responsible for
everything. I informed Cerezo of all the activities of Intelligence . . . so that he
would take the blame, not me!”153
As these changes were made, designed more to serve the army’s interests
than to improve civilian security, public safety worsened. The “White Van”
(Panel Blanca) murders of the late 1980s, in which Treasury Police officers
were revealed to be abducting and killing usac students, were only the most
blatant example of the state’s ongoing death squad activity, and of the pn’s
inability (or unwillingness) to control common crime.154 Indeed, it suited the
military well to maintain the general forces of the pn in a state of purposeful
neglect, even as it made use of certain pn subgroups as skilled hit squads.
When one U.S. diplomatic attaché visited pn headquarters in 1987, he re-
ported that it “was like travelling back in time about a century. Adjectives that
jumped to mind were old, primitive, inefficient, unresponsive, disorganized,
and hopeless. This organization is at square one and it is now understandable
why the crime wave rages on.”155 Director-­general Caballeros Seigné of the
pn blithely blamed the escalating violence on “alcoholism and transit acci-
dents” and the vice-­minister of the interior attributed it to “the passions of
Guatemalans.”156 But cia observers knew that the spike in homicides was the
handiwork of police and military death squads ambiguously linked to front
groups like “Avenging Jaguar” (Jaguar Justiciero).157 One cia report expressly
linked the practice of police personnel recycling with the existence of social
cleansing squads within the pn, echoing the military’s practice of using reba-
jados (ex-­officers) to conduct especially unsavory work.158 “Former pn officers
who had left the pn for a variety of reasons were rehired into the Department
of Criminal Investigations (dic) of the pn for the specific purpose of captur-
ing and killing individuals with long criminal records,” the cable reported.
“These groups are responsible for the rash of murders recently publicized in
local newspapers.”159 Rather than preventing urban crime, the police were a
root cause of urban crime, and the phenomenon was systemic. As the cable
continued, presaging the dinc’s involvement in the Parlacen case, “given pn
proclivities, it is unlikely that these pn officers are acting on their own. They
must be acting on the orders of the pn chief or possibly a higher authority.”160
The situation threatened to derail the preliminary peace talks between the
Guatemalan government and the urng. The international community viewed
as critically important the twin aims of reducing violence and strengthening
civil policing in order to weaken the army’s chokehold on society. As a result,
the decade between Cerezo’s inauguration and the Peace Accords saw foreign

146  —  CHAPTER FIVE

countries eager to contribute funds, matériel, and training toward profession-
alizing the National Police. The United States reinitiated police aid through
icitap; Chile, Germany, Belgium, and Spain also participated, as did the un
through its minugua mission. Much of this police training included a fo-
cus on sensitivity to human rights concerns.161 But as Marie-­Louise Glebbeek
writes, “Extensive international support . . . did not lead to significant prog-
ress in real reform,” with the police remaining involved in human rights viola-
tions, much of the donated funds being diverted or inappropriately used, and
foreign-­trained agents ultimately deciding to leave the police altogether.162
This new wave of police assistance, much like the United States’ first major
police aid initiative during the 1950s and 1960s, was a failure, at least with
reference to its stated goals. “The general feeling within the U.S. government,”
ambassador Thomas Stroock told Caballeros Seigné, “is that much of our ef-
fort has been wasted.”163 Stroock admired Caballeros and expressed hope “that
he succeeds in turning the police force into something more than a uniformed
gang” but noted that, “unless he gets strong political support from the [gov-
ernment of Guatemala], we have real doubts.”164 The military continued to
maintain “spies” within the pn in order to retain control over police opera-
tions, and the institutional traditions of illegal activity, profiteering, high turn-
over, staff recycling, and the absence of political support for reform plagued
successive efforts to depurar and demilitarize the pn.165 As peace negotiations
evolved, consensus emerged that the National Police was so far beyond repair
that it needed to be scrapped.

THE END(S) OF THE NATIONAL POLICE

The Peace Accords, signed on 29 December 1996 after years of negotiations,

established a broad framework for postconflict transition. Drafted in the con-
text of the urng’s defeat, terms of the accords reflected that power imbal-
ance. Nonetheless, the signing of the accords was a moment of hope for many
Guatemalans. Luisa, a worker at the police archives project who fought in the
egp for fifteen years, remembered that the accords “created a space in which
citizens can speak, can say what we want, can protest—we can have the Octo-
ber 20 protest again, the May Day march. . . . I can tell you that yes, after the
signing of the accords in 1996, yes, there was peace. I can swear to you that
there was peace just a year later—peace, tranquility, a different life.”166
Luisa went on, however, to say that the tranquility did not last. “Another
year later, the collapse began again,” she observed. “Now we’re even worse
off than [during the conflict], with the violence and all that. Today, we’re
screwed.”167 Indeed, one of the most maligned aspects of Guatemala’s transi-

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 147

tion has been security reform, the failure of which has led to the “post-­peace”
environment of insecurity and impunity described at the outset of this chap-
ter.168 On paper, things seemed promising: the National Police was disbanded
and supplanted by the National Civil Police, whose operational framework
was outlined in the Accord on the Strengthening of Civil Power and the Role
of the Armed Forces in a Democratic Society (afpc). “Peace rests,” the docu­
ment’s opening lines read, “upon democratization and the creation of struc-
tures and practices that, in the future, avoid political exclusion, ideological
intolerance, and the polarization of Guatemalan society.”169 The afpc speci-
fied the civilian character of policing, protected human rights in the exercise
of internal security, required that the new pnc reflect Guatemala’s multieth-
nic and pluricultural nature, and barred the military from participating in
internal security. Plans were made to establish new police facilities, a new
training academy, and a close collaboration between international donors and
minugua to oversee significant increases in pnc agent salaries.
So what went wrong? Three key factors contributed to the police reform’s
lack of effectiveness, all of which were deeply embedded in the pn’s institu-
tional history. First, as Susanne Jonas writes, many aspects of police reform
were predicated upon constitutional reforms affecting the military and the
justice system, which themselves were delayed or blocked in their imple-
mentation due to infiltration, corruption, or a lack of political will. Second,
the pnc remained subordinated to the army during the transitional period,
with former soldiers reappearing within pnc ranks and as part of ongoing
joint military-­police patrols. Third, and most important, the depuración/
reciclaje dynamic that had characterized a half century of police reform was
not shed with the signing of the accords. Up to 90 percent of the former pn
agents—whose incompetence and criminality were decried during the peace
process by everyone from the urng to the military—were recycled back into
the pnc. Originally, the Arzú government planned to retrain these agents in a
six-­month program, but when security demand exceeded the supply of trained
officers, the curriculum was slashed to three months. Over minugua’s pro-
tests, more than two hundred former army and Mobile Military Police officers
were also integrated into the pnc, including a sizable contingent of ex-­Archivo
intelligence specialists.170
The Department of Criminal Investigations also died with the Peace Ac-
cords. The afpc stipulated that the pnc’s criminal investigations capabil-
ities be strengthened and regulated by a civilian authority; as a result, the
besmirched dic was replaced by the Criminal Investigations Section in 1997,
which received extensive icitap training.171 But according to a minugua

148  —  CHAPTER FIVE

assessment several years later, the sic was overworked, undersupplied, ill-­
trained, and implicated in political crimes. In short, the sic strongly resem-
bled the old dic—and the dit, Detective Corps, and Judicial Police before
it.172 By 2000, the sic was being critiqued for its infiltration by “parallel pow-
ers” and its use of torture and extrajudicial execution, along with more quotid-
ian crimes like running car theft rings; in 2006, it was abolished in response
to public outcry.173 It was replaced by the Criminal Investigations Division,
which underwent one last depuración of 60 percent of its members—but not
until after four of its antinarcotics and criminal investigation specialists died
mysteriously in El Boquerón prison after the 2008 Parlacen murders.174 The
journey from the Judicial Police, to the Detective Corps, and eventually to
the dinc thus brings us full circle: from Jorge Ubico’s dictatorship, to Castillo
Armas’s soliciting of U.S. police assistance, through the long decades of the
war, and into nearly two decades of its bittersweet peace. As of this writing,
the future of a new police reform initiative, headed for a time by human rights
activist Helen Mack, was uncertain, with president Otto Pérez Molina prom-
ising that his mano dura approach to public safety would prominently involve
a reinvigorated military.
This genealogy of the National Police, and particularly of the stubborn in-
stitutional persistence of its fiercest special squads, reveals much about the
country’s political pitches and rolls over the past half century. David Bayley’s
insight that “the police are to the government as the edge is to the knife”
suggests that larger truths about the relationships between state and society
can be gleaned from examinations of what Egon Bittner calls the “low” and
“tainted occupation” of policing.175 In Guatemala’s case, the survival of the
Judicial Police in its various forms speaks to the unwillingness of military
regimes and, later, of civilian governments, to relinquish their ability to kill
arbitrarily. This expedience—the casual ease of murder, the lazy scorn for
opponents, the vacuum created by impunity, and the seductive sense of power
conjured by terror—proved difficult to surrender. It is what renders deeply
problematic the fact that procedural democracy was instituted in Guatemala
as a counterinsurgency strategy; the persistence of a counterinsurgent men-
tality is a defining characteristic of the post-­peace era. Confronting it is among
the goals of the Project, which has sought not only to rescue the pn’s archival
paper trail but also to deploy the archives in efforts to eradicate impunity. To
accomplish both tasks, the Project has had to exhume the forgotten history of
the pn’s role during the war, the outlines of which I have sketched here and
which other historians will fill in over time.
The National Police did not run the counterinsurgency; it did not, for the

RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE   — 149

 A makeshift memorial to the disappeared in Guatemala City. Photograph by
FIG. 5.6 
James Rodríguez, mimundo.org. Used by permission of the photographer.

most part, decide which political opponents would die and which would live.
But it formed an integral element of a state terror apparatus that left the coun-
try’s social fabric in tatters. The pn’s low-­level agents were overwhelmingly
poor and working-­class, uneducated, poorly paid, and regularly sent into sit-
uations they were not adequately trained to handle. Their histories remain
to be written, and they will emerge from careful study of the eighty million
documents in the police archives. What we know now, however, is that the
pn’s agents, under orders from the generals and colonels who commanded
them, tortured political prisoners; they rounded up street children, addicts,
and other undesirables in social cleansing sweeps; they dumped bodies like
refuse in clandestine mass graves, in the city’s ravines, or at the entrance to
the University of San Carlos; they were ambushed, blown up, shot, and hunted
by urban insurgents; and they abducted young idealists from grocery stores,
hospital beds, public buses, and high schools. They were, too often, the plain-
clothes hombres desconocidos who, with a few moments’ scuffle and a plateless
Ford Bronco, set parents, lovers, siblings, and children on long and desperate
searches for, to borrow Carlos Figueroa Ibarra’s phrase, “los que siempre es-
tarán en ninguna parte” (those who will always be nowhere). For this, the
National Police must be remembered and its records painstakingly combed,
for what remains to be learned page by disintegrating page, by the hopeful.

150  —  CHAPTER FIVE

 PART III ARCHIVES AND SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION
IN POSTWAR GUATEMALA

ABBREVIATIONS   — 151
 si x REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES

I want to tell you that when I arrived at the archives, it had a strong
psychological effect on me. I began to remember many things,
things that had happened during the time of the repression, the
time of my participation in the movement. Many, many things
began to bubble up, things I thought I had truly forgotten. And so
I started to see the archives as a possibility, as a way to tell future
generations that this happened—and not just because some person
here or there said so, but because there is now documentary proof
of how it took place.
—Gregorio, Project worker

I
n the Project’s early days, conditions at the archives were precarious at best.
Lacking chairs, workers sat hunched over for eight hours daily on concrete
blocks; they inhaled clouds of dust and assorted molds, which lay heavy and
bright across the rotting pages like strokes of paint; and they were exposed to
the waste of rats, bats, and other vermin. Riskiest of all, in light of the retribu-
tion faced by other activists who sought to plumb the depths of the state’s war-
time abuses, they affiliated themselves with a potentially dangerous initiative
whose future was uncertain.1 One might wonder why anyone would endure
such circumstances, or what might qualify one to do this sort of work. In a
country with fewer than ten trained archivists, previous archival experience
was impossible to demand; no available training, whether in criminology or
history or forensic science, would have been adequate preparation for the un-
precedented task of rescuing eighty million documents under such dramatic
constraints. Instead, the original volunteers and workers were evaluated by
one measure: confianza. In this setting, confianza’s literal translation as “trust”
was a thin description; its deeper connotation was a certain level of dedication
to human rights work and memory politics. Confianza, explained the Project’s
assistant director, was not easily quantified, but it essentially meant “that the
people are referred to us by people or organizations we trust; that we know
their trajectory, their level of commitment; that they’ve been linked to the
causes that are worth fighting for in this country.”2
As such, the initial volunteers and workers at the archives—later to be-
come a minority as the team grew—were no average citizens plucked off the
streets. Some had been combatants or clandestine actors in the organizations
composing the urng; others had been active in the student movement, or
trade unionists, or community organizers. Some were born into families with
histories of activism stretching back to the Revolutionary Spring; others had
their political consciousnesses forged in the mass strikes of the 1970s, the 1976
earthquake, or simply by growing up as campesinos.3 (As one worker told me,
“We didn’t fight because it was in style. I fought because I was poor and had no
chance to go to school, and that either kills you from hunger or kills you from
ignorance.”)4 They had lost family and friends; they had moved in and out of
exile and clandestinity. The experience of working to rescue the archives was
thus distinct for them, and the reconstitution of the archives was conditioned
by their living knowledge. As Raúl, a Project case investigator, put it, “What
affects me most is that the area of the archives in which I work, and the years
which I work on, are years in which I wasn’t just a witness—I was an actor, a
victim, a part of all of it. And the victims who you find in the archives were
your friends, your compañeros, your neighbors.”5 Rosa, a longtime egp com-
batant who joined the insurgency as a teenager, attested that “those of us who
were metidos in the conflict, metidos in it full-­time, we have a different vision
of the archive.”6 These workers’ life histories were inextricable from their la-
bor at the Project, an essential dimension of the archival rescue process.
This chapter explores how these individuals, ranging in age from their early
forties to their early seventies, underwent and understood the work of pro-
ducing and reproducing the pn archives. My discussion suppresses and alters
details about informants’ identities for their protection, but it does not omit
information about the nature of their past political participation, experiences
they universally remember with pride.7 They worked as amateur historians,
archivists, conservationists, and detectives. However, they did so informed by
powerful personal histories of loss and militancy, which made being in the ar-
chives a complex experience indeed. The work challenged established knowl-
edges and memories at the individual level for those workers who daily read
records written, in part, about themselves. As María Elena, an ex-­guerrilla,
recalled:
It’s impossible to describe how I felt when I first saw the archives. . . . It of-
fered the possibility that, for the first time, we could come to see ourselves

154  —  CHAPTER SIX

 from a distant point of view, from the perspective of the Other—to learn
what the Other thought. . . . How was it that we young people, whose only
desire was social justice, came to be considered a problem of the State, a
problem of state security? It’s impossible to see yourself, from your own
perspective, as a delinquent or as a terrorist, if everything you did was
in the hopes of creating a better country, a more harmonious and equal
society.8
Many reported that working in the archives had provoked the resurgence of
long-­repressed memories and the recurrence of dreams or nightmares. Gre-
gorio, the odd-­job man around the Project, said that his “contact with this
history, manipulating these documents,” acted as a finger in the wound, com-
pounding pains still acutely felt: “There were times I didn’t want to show
up at work, times when I cried there. It makes you re-­live many things.”9
But while the labor made workers vulnerable, it also engendered processes
of social reckoning and reconstruction. Workers found themselves learning
about facets of the war never before understood, and they grew accustomed
to sharing stories, debating the unfolding of the war, and working side by side
with once-­reviled police officers. These survivors’ embodied encounters with
state documents occasioned new and sometimes frustrating forms of engage-
ment with their pasts. Not only did they reread their own histories from the
“Other’s” perspective; they worked to write new chapters with an eye toward
justice, finally confirming with documentation experiences long denied by the
state’s “double discourse.”10
It was not a linear process. Sociologist Stanley Cohen notes that “memory
is less a filing cabinet that we open to examine a pre-­selected file (my child-
hood, the war) than a book we are writing and editing.”11 This was especially
true in a setting where survivors’ memories did not necessarily square with
the omissions, silences, and bureaucratic language of the documents. The
rescue of the archives thus offers several levels at which to consider these
dynamics of memory making and history writing—all of them profoundly
contingent, messy, and incomplete, as history and memory necessarily are.
After reading the surveillance file kept on him by the Stasi, Timothy Garton
Ash wrote of “how a file opens the door to a vast sunken labyrinth of the
forgotten past, but how, too, the very act of opening the door itself changes
the buried artifacts, like an archaeologist letting in fresh air to a sealed Egyp-
tian tomb.”12 This chapter explores how the act of opening that door not only
changed these workers’ buried artifacts but also marshaled them for renewed
use in the present.

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 155

CONCIENCIA AND COMMITMENT: WORKERS’ MOTIVATIONS

Guatemala’s tendency toward silence regarding the war and present-­day cli-
mate of violence deterred many citizens from engaging with history. But a
small number of people refused to succumb to this oblivion, even as it re-
quired them to spend their days on a filthy police base, echoing with the
martial soundscape of gunshots and barking dogs, sifting through the dusty
remembrances of atrocities past.13 Given their backgrounds, these older Gua-
temalans’ interest in the archives was hardly surprising. “The archive really
got my attention,” Luisa told me in a near whisper, afraid that the pnc agent
nearby might hear. “I was interested in working here, because we have family
members, friends, acquaintances—many people who were disappeared, who
were captured, and we never knew what happened to them. With that, I don’t
want to say that I had the idea that I could ‘do something’ about that, but at
least, within that history, I wanted to learn what happened, how they died,
who took them.”14 Luisa had spent much of her adult life as a combatant in
the egp, which she called her “first school.” She fought, married, bore chil-
dren, and learned to read during her time spent serving in two of the guerrilla
group’s rural fronts. She was not alone in hoping to learn what had happened
to lost loved ones there; while this was rarely workers’ sole motivation, it
was never far from their minds. Dolores, an ex-­egp case researcher who grew
up steeped in the Rebel Armed Forces (far) militancy of her stepfather and
uncle, reported that “even people who are new at work, they come with pho-
tos of their husbands, the same way I have a photo of my brother, and they tell
me, ‘I want to find out what happened to my husband.’ ”15
Others were drawn to the archives by a more general commitment to his-
torical clarification and justice; they remained pessimistic about the possi­
bility of solving specific cases. “I think that the things that happened here in
the war years can’t be found in those archives,” Rosario said. She had been a
trade unionist in the capital during the 1970s and early 1980s and was driven
into a decade-­long exile for it. Though she was normally reserved, volunteer-
ing few details about her experiences, discussing the archives made her voice
swell with emotion. She marveled about how, back in la época, “we never
would have thought that one day we’d have access to these papers. This is
back when it was terrifying to even speak of the police. And to think that
we’d be working there on a police base, with those papers in our hands.” She
was amazed at the luck of the archives’ survival but knew that the answers
the documents offered would be only partial.16 Jacinto, a younger veteran of
what remained of the urban student movement of the 1980s, shared Rosa-

156  —  CHAPTER SIX

 A Project worker sifts through the files. The labor was both physically and
FIG. 6.1 
emotionally taxing. Photograph by James Rodríguez, mimundo.org. Used by permission
of the photographer.

rio’s doubts about solving specific cases—including the case of his own dis-
appeared brother—and tempered his expectations accordingly. “I’ve never
looked to find documents about my brother,” he said. “I arrived hoping to find
documents that could serve society.”17
Humberto, a case investigator, envisioned his participation as part of a
broader compromiso—a fundamental moral position, a political consciousness
linked directly to his decades of involvement in the far and the egp: “It was
purely a question of conciencia,” he said. His militant past meant that he “al-
ready had the conciencia to do this kind of work, I already sympathized with
these types of projects.”18 Conciencia was what all the initial Project staffers
had in common—a sense of moral engagement forged during the war that
sustained them through months of volunteer labor before the international
money began to flow. Conciencia was the electric connection between past
struggles and the present day.19 Rosa, who fought in the egp until demobili-
zation in 1996, felt she could not refuse the opportunity to volunteer in the
archives, even in tough economic times: “I decided that it was fine . . . be-
cause I felt something there, like a hope, that this could contribute to Guate-
mala. I feel like I am working toward the same goals, but now with different
conditions.”20

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 157

 It was common for these older staffers to speak of the recovery work as
un regalo de vida (the gift of a lifetime).21 They used words like “precious,”
“beautiful,” and “marvelous” to describe a daily labor that involved thumbing
through grisly photos of decaying cadavers, scanning seemingly endless lists
of police duty rotations, and other tasks both morbid and mundane that few
outside the Project might ever imagine as marvels. However, the opportunity
to act in the service of one’s conscience after the revolution’s defeat seemed,
indeed, a great gift. Esteban, a former student activist and pgt militant, made
the link expressly:
It’s very gratifying [to work at the Project], because in these difficult con-
ditions, we continue doing the same work, but in a different form. That’s
how some of us consider it. This work is a continuation of what we did
before. We’re subverting orders, no? And we continue. Maybe not with
the explosive, incendiary effect of the past. But at that time, we were the
youth; now, we’re not so young anymore. And yes, it’s been very rewarding
to see it that way. Those of us who are still around are here. We’ve always
been very few. If there had been more of us in this country, our conditions
would be very different. They never let us be many, but those of us who are
still here continue on the same path—if not here in the archives, then we
do it in an ngo, or a committee, or by being teachers or clandestine actors
in our communities. Ahí está la gente, siempre.22
Working at the Project offered those who defined themselves as bearers of
conciencia an opportunity at political participation independent from post-
war party politics, viewed widely as craven and corrupt. The regalo de vida
concept highlighted what for progressives was a bitter postwar truth: aside
from the problem of high unemployment across the board, ex-­militants in
particular had a difficult time finding paying work that conformed to their
ethics and engaged their histories. Demobilization was a shock for some who
were not yet prepared to lay down arms; even more difficult, particularly for
those who had joined the insurgency at a young age and had no conventional
job experience, was reintegrating into normal life and finding safe spaces in
which to express their convictions.23 Edeliberto Cifuentes, the historian and
pdh investigator who stumbled across the police archives in 2005, told me,
“There are a lot of people who are unemployed in Guatemala because they
aren’t willing or able to work in anything except human rights. I include my-
self in that group. I can’t find anywhere to work besides the academy or human
rights—I can’t work in just any part of the government. And I think that hap-
pens to a lot of us.”24 The difficulties of the reinsertion process belied the idea

158  —  CHAPTER SIX

that a “postwar transition” could occur neatly, the fruit of top-­down decisions
that instantly erased wartime divisions. Instead, dissidents’ histories, and their
own condition as living archives of an armed conflict, continued to contour
their anything-­but-­“normal” lives. “The private sector would never have me!”
exclaimed one worker and ex-­pgt militant. “I’m in a bunch of photos from the
’80s, lighting buses on fire with Molotov cocktails. And in the private sector,
they have connections and they can easily find out who you are. You think
[Project director] Gustavo Meoño could get a job in the private sector? What
a joke!”25 Ex-­militants were naturally drawn to the Project, but they were also
pushed into it by the dearth of compelling alternatives.

DEATH, ARCHIVES, AND MEMORY WORK

History, conciencia, and necessity brought these workers to the archives; once
there, however, many found that their experiences challenged their expec-
tations, and that the archive’s necessary relationship to death and history
haunted them in ways that were difficult to bear.26 Achille Mbembe writes of
the archival/historical reconstruction process that “following tracks, putting
back together scraps and debris, and reassembling remains, is to be impli-
cated in a ritual which results in the resuscitation of life, in bringing the dead
back to life by reintegrating them in the cycle of time.”27 But resuscitating the
dead—a process operating concretely here at levels beyond those considered
by Mbembe, Derrida, or other theorists of archives—is dangerous business,
and it puts a tremendous burden on human rights workers who are, by virtue
of their own sacrifices, victims too. If traditional manipulations of archives
bring the dead back to life, then for former militants, working at the Project
brings their dead back to life.
An example: Esperanza, as a lower-­middle-­class young woman in the early
1970s, began her political life as an organizer in Guatemala City’s secondary
school system. She was radicalized in the aftermath of the 1976 earthquake,
which laid bare the deep poverty and exploitation lived in marginal sectors
of the capital. From that point on, she incorporated herself into the pgt, put-
ting up a “communication barrier” between herself and her family and de-
voting herself to organizing students in night classes “to achieve change in
our country, to build a society with different values, different principles.”28
She worked as a pgt organizer for nearly a decade, interrupted by a brief
period of exile provoked by a botched attempt to kidnap her from the school
where she was based. Esperanza was no stranger to exile, having spent the
first ten years of her life there as a result of her father and uncles’ opposition
to the Armas regime. To exile she returned in the mid-­1980s; during this fi-

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 159

nal exile, her father and uncles were murdered. When she returned for good
after the signing of the Peace Accords, she and her husband sought to avoid
politics, opening a small restaurant. But they found themselves unsatisfied
by apolitical life, closing the restaurant and reengaging with their histories.
When Esperanza arrived at the police archives in 2005, she found the work
of constantly reading about violence to be an immense strain; for her, it was
easier to “see the pages as nothing more than just papers that I was cleaning,
cleaning, cleaning,” shutting herself off emotionally from what she was read-
ing. But after some time spent working in this manner, Esperanza decided one
day that she would begin to read again, actively attempting to prevent herself
from becoming desensitized by the sacks and sacks of files about death. “So
all of a sudden, I decide to return to the reading,” she said, “and I open a new
bundle of papers, and it turns out that the very first sheet I find is the report
from when the bodies of my uncles were found.” Her two uncles, beloved
elders in her family, were together when they were shot. Though the report
Esperanza had uncovered contained no new information on the case, simply
stating that her uncles had been killed by desconocidos, the shock of finding
their names archived stirred her anger and sorrow anew. “That day, for me,
was a horrible day.”29
Esperanza was not alone in finding information about a murdered family
member during a regular workday; others also found references to dead or
disappeared parents or siblings.30 Most commonly, ex-­militants would stum-
ble across the name of a former compañero in a writ of habeas corpus (recurso
de exhibición personal), filed by family at the time of a disappearance. In the
majority of cases, mentions of loved ones did not bring new information but
simply offered an “official” version of what had transpired—that an individual
was killed by “unknown individuals,” or else nothing more than a brief men-
tion of the name. “I have found documents about my closest loved ones dead,
their photos, very painful things,” María Elena told me, trailing off in tears as
gunshots from the police firing range pounded in the background. “But with-
out necessarily finding any truths; sometimes you find nothing more than the
stamp of repression upon their bodies.”31 New truths or not, no snippet of in-
formation was without value, even if it offered no new leads. As Raúl attested,
“Many of the things the documents say weren’t secrets to us. We knew them.
What we didn’t know was the details of exactly what had happened. . . . Now
we have all the details, and better, we have confirmation. If I go and claim
that the police kidnapped X person, nobody will listen to me; but if one day,
all of this is documented, people won’t want to believe it, but they will have
to. That’s the difference.”32

160  —  CHAPTER SIX

 While Raúl was clear about the potential gains of working at the archives,
the work still took its toll on him, as it did for the others. He spoke of how
the stress generated by the work had physiological effects (“your spine hurts,
and it means that your whole system is altered. . . . It sends off physical alarm
bells”) and emotional consequences (“it affects you; at times, it alters your
character. Involuntarily you get irritable sometimes, you get angry. It’s a per-
manent struggle not to let yourself get carried away by these feelings”).33 An-
other worker described how she had been trying to “put everything that had
happened behind me,” but when she began at the Project, the memories “hit
me like a giant headache. . . . I felt that it was very hard, psychologically, for
a human being to do this work.”34 Jacinto, the younger pgt activist, became
enraged after finding a document mentioning an erstwhile neighbor, a fellow
student activist assassinated during the 1980s: “It makes me so angry to see
the documents attesting to how they followed X or Y person. You say to your-
self, look at this whole structure, all lined up against one person. It makes
you angry, because it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t one-­on-­one—it was a structure.
Hundreds of people against one. It’s frustrating and it makes me so angry.”35
Workers struggled not only with the content of the documents but also
with the physical space in which the documents were housed: la isla, as it was
called in the 1980s when the police used it to detain and torture dissidents.
One area of the site in particular, the prison-­like laberinto (labyrinth) men-
tioned in chapter 1, was especially difficult to handle with its windowless, dirt-­
floored rooms, suspicious small holes blasted in the walls, and sections fitted
with what appeared to be brackets for manacles or other bindings. “Entering
that space gives you a sensation like...a life experience,” Gregorio recalled.
“Like one of your friends had been there, that this was where they had been
tortured, that maybe there were bodies buried there. . . . There were subjec-
tive elements in that space that could lead someone to say, ‘Here is where my
friends were tortured,’ and that affected us very much.”36 When Leonora, a
case investigator, was summoned to the cramped space on her first day, she
found herself with “the urge to get up and run right out of there.”37 Evinc-
ing the undercurrents of guilt and disempowerment infrequently discussed
openly by former militants, Gregorio spoke of how “the fact of entering this
place made me remember, it makes you remember and it makes you think
that your friends were once there, and you couldn’t help them, you couldn’t
do absolutely anything for them.”38
To a certain extent, the emotional strain was inherent to the work. Spend-
ing eight hours daily reading not only about political repression but also about
sexual assaults, armed robberies, accidental deaths, and other “archival sliv-

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 161

 A warren of windowless, cell-­like rooms at the warehouse’s rear
FIG. 6.2 
spoke to the site’s former use as a detention and torture center.
Photograph by author.

ers” of violence would tax the coping skills of even a disinterested reader.39
As José Antonio, the Project’s inventory specialist, told me, “When you read
something, you visualize it, you visualize the suffering of this person in your
head, you see in your head where they fell. You see the suffering of the widow,
the children.” He spoke of recurring dreams he began having after he started
working at the Project, in which identical scenarios to those in the documents
would replay in his mind with his own children as the subjects.40
In the case of these war survivors, however, this strain was compounded
many times over by the fact that the names appearing in the documents were
theirs, belonging to their friends, their acquaintances, their schoolmates, their

162  —  CHAPTER SIX

loved ones. Guatemala is a small country, and even a well-­informed foreigner
does not have to spend much time skimming through the records before rec-
ognizing a name. Humberto, in stumbling across a reference to a fallen com-
pañero from the egp, found that “it brings sadness to remember a friend, even
though you already knew what had happened to him. . . . And when you find
the name there, you react; you read the report where it says that he was shot
repeatedly, but it’s reported as an act of common delinquency, you don’t know
why. You find it there like whatever murder.”41 And some workers learned from
the documents, for the first time, how a close relative was killed. “In there, I
found out how my brother had died,” Dolores told me. “I had never known.
And still today in my house, my mother, my siblings and I, we can’t talk about
our brother. We’ve been living with this for twenty years, and we still need to
learn how to talk about him as he was. . . . I was one of the lucky ones, to have
been able to learn this.”42 Reencountering the war through the Other’s eyes
blurred comfortable distinctions between present and past, memory and his-
tory. In Esperanza’s words, the archives were “a space where we all return to
the past, and we all come to relive the pain or to awaken what’s asleep inside
each and every one of us, and to face the reality of what we lived.”43
Wartime activists who in peacetime labored for justice bore a double bur-
den. Not only were these individuals themselves victims, having lost family
or friends to state repression and revolutionary campaigns, but they continu-
ally relived past experiences while performing contemporary memory labor.
They simultaneously wrestled with and reified their losses, all while seeking
to marshal them for the purposes of effecting change in the present. This dy-
namic was by no means unique to the Project; the Guatemalans who worked
on the ceh and remhi projects, for example, were deeply impacted by the
pressures of taking victims’ testimonies, as many had themselves suffered
gravely.44 Fredy Peccerelli, director of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation
of Guatemala (fafg) and a member of the Project’s advisory board, pointed
out that survivors often actively sought out such work as a dynamic way to
grapple with their wartime experiences. “You don’t do this sort of work for
professional advancement,” he noted.45 Neither, though, did they do it out of a
desire for vengeance. As one Project staffer put it, “I am interested in bringing
[perpetrators] to justice, but not in treating them the same way they treated
us, because that would be sinking to their level, becoming their equal, and I
never want to be equal to them.”46
A similar dynamic pervaded the Project, where workers often sublimated
their emotional reactions in order to get the job done. Luisa, cited earlier as
saying that resurgent memories hit her “like a giant headache” upon starting

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 163

 Work at the Project involved frequent contact with grisly images of decomposing
FIG. 6.3 
cadavers, many exhibiting signs of violence or torture. Photograph by James Rodríguez,
mimundo.org. Used by permission of the photographer.

to work at the Project, remembered: “My head hurt so much. But I told myself
that we had to work as hard as we could, because this work needs to get done.
If I want to learn the history, I need to do this work; I just need to throw my-
self into it, and once I do, I’ll get accustomed to it. And so it was.”47 Survivors,
drawn to memory work because of past experiences, found themselves both
aided and constrained by those same experiences; this double-­edged sword
took its toll. And because these individuals were employees, instead of pri-
vate citizens visiting a public archive to seek specific information, they had to
daily press ahead with cleaning and ordering the documents, despite whatever
pain the papers brought—eight hours a day, five days a week. As Esperanza
observed, “It’s not as though I can leave my baggage at the door, like they tell
you in some jobs, ‘You came here to work, so leave your problems at home and
concentrate on what you have to do.’ That’s not possible anywhere—much less
in this kind of job.”48
Project workers deployed a variety of strategies to manage the strain. The
simplest, of course, was talking: talking at the worktables, sharing experiences
with coworkers, venting frustrations over a cigarette or a cup of instant coffee
at la refa, the midmorning break. But talking was never enough, and some
did not feel sufficiently comfortable with their colleagues to do so. After a

164  —  CHAPTER SIX

year and a half of operation, when the collective strain became palpable, the
Project instituted group discussion–based, mandatory, monthly mental health
workshops. In terms of group approaches, however, the Project’s most effec-
tive means of managing the burdens of the work was soccer. At every refa
and lunch hour, boisterous workers—male and female, young and old—would
take over the pitted concrete mall between the two archives buildings and play
hard-­fought games of pickup fút, which everyone else watched and cheered.
“Because of the way the games are played,” commented one member of the
scanning team, “you know that people are there for catharsis. Many of the peo-
ple yell, they fight, they kick, they laugh, precisely because it’s a way to escape
from the tensions provoked by this routine, which is a routine of violence.”49
The Project’s coordinators encouraged the informal games and the more com-
petitive rotating tournaments they led to, well aware of their workers’ need for
release.50 Others, less athletically inclined, found relief by focusing on the end
goals of the Project: Luisa, who was older and suffered from chronic health
problems, told me that what had helped her “get through” was imagining how,
someday, there would exist an archive where Guatemalans would be given
the opportunity to search for their family members. “It’s something beautiful,
like a daydream,” she said. “It lifts your self-­esteem, it lifts your energy, it lifts
your desire to do your work and accomplish all the things we’re accomplishing
today. That’s how we talk about it among ourselves—that one day there will be
a real archive here. That is our collective thought process, and it helps us keep
ourselves working as we should.”51
Some were more inclined than others to embrace the darker thoughts oc-
casioned by the “routine of violence.” Rosa, whose immediate family suffered
no fewer than five disappearances, conceded that it made her heartsick to find
lists of detainees, or to read about locations where a safe house had fallen or
a botched propaganda-­distribution activity had led to a capture. “But still, I
say: what a good thing that some information remains about these people, and
that someday we’ll be able to clear up what happened to them,” she enthused.
“What a good thing that we have the chance to do this work, because we knew
these people. If someone just reads a name and doesn’t recognize it, they keep
reading and everything remains the same. For me, it’s different. So that makes
me think that the small contribution I can make in the archives, even if it’s
really very small, has a huge value.”52 Similarly, when I asked Esteban if it was
difficult for him to read so much evidence of violence, he replied:
No, it’s fascinating! I’ve taken advantage of that opportunity; for those of
us who continue to live the past, reading these papers allows our latent

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 165

 traumas to flower, allows us to remember that one of these cadavers we
see in the photos could have been a compañero who had been at one’s side.
Because all of the cadavers that turn up as xx or unidentified, all of those
cadavers had names. And they were killed, and things were done to them,
and that was because they had names. It wasn’t because they were name-
less. To see that, it causes old traumas to surface anew. . . . But that’s a very
good thing, because it doesn’t permit them to accumulate, it doesn’t permit
them to bottle up and create strong pressure; rather, it means you can re-
lease some of the pressure from time to time.53
In Esteban’s interpretation, the reencounter with the companion via the docu­
ment could provide both relief and vindication: relief in the sense of offering
a release valve, and vindication (reivindicación) in the sense of reassigning
agency, subjectivity, and identity to the dead.54 The police archives brought
these workers’ dead back to life; once revived, how might they be put to rest?

TRUTH-­VALUE AND TRUTH’S VALUE

The reivindicación, or restoring of honor and agency to the dead, was a major
motivating force for nearly all the ex-­militants with whom I spoke. Even in the
face of the testimonial and forensic evidence compiled in the ceh and remhi
reports, the Guatemalan air still hung thick with a homegrown holocaust de-
nial: the charge that the genocide of the 1980s and the urban counterinsur-
gency were the invention of “subversives” seeking to discredit Guatemala on
the international stage. Efforts by the state, business elites, and some journal-
ists to discredit and attack war victims had always drawn their strength from
the idea that nobody could “prove” the truth-­value of the events in question,
and therefore the victims were making it all up. Victims and testimony givers
were accused of lacking patriotism—of being “traitors to the homeland”—or
being too stupid to realize that their “disappeared” husbands had probably
just taken up with other women outside the country.55 In 1986, after the Mu-
tual Support Group (gam) had spent several years advocating for the live re-
turn of their disappeared loved ones, the military released a statement calling
gam’s accusations slander precisely because—importantly, in light of the pn
archives—they were “not substantiated by documentary proof.”56 Ex-­president
Alvaro Arzú, once a member of the ultra-­right-­wing Movement of National
Liberation, rejected the hardest-­hitting conclusions of the ceh’s final report;
at the report’s presentation ceremony, the generals in attendance turned their
backs to head commissioner Tomuschat as he announced the findings.
The state’s constant expressions of contempt for the Left (armed or other­

166  —  CHAPTER SIX

wise), for socialism, for intellectualism, and for the families of the disappeared
were part of its counterinsurgency strategy, and these tactics affected popular
movements from without and within. In peacetime, similar language was used
to discredit those who continued seeking justice, often based on the charge
that victims had no “proof” of what they claimed. Esperanza emphasized the
extent to which militants internalized the state’s disdain for their ideals: “We
played the game too, feeling that what we were doing was subversion, it was
clandestine, it was something not accepted by society, and so we’ve been car-
rying this around like a burden of guilt ever since. I would even say it’s a shame
that we carry, a shame that we’ve built up over time.”57 A daily reading of
the terror archives, however, renewed ex-­militants’ resistance to such tropes
by providing new evidence of the state’s disproportionate responses to their
activism—in the state’s own hand. As Raúl said, “We shouldn’t have to feel
shame for what we did. We got involved because we saw injustice, and the
injustice was so great that it could not be tolerated. The very word ‘subversive,’
which was seen as an insult, as a serious charge, really isn’t such a bad thing.
Because if the system doesn’t work, you have to change it, you have to subvert
it.”58 Workers who participated on the Left were generally clear, proud, and
defiant about their reasons for having taken part in efforts to resist military
rule. “I didn’t join the egp to screw around,” Victoriano said. “The dignifying
of the guerrillero, not of the assassin—that is where the archive will contrib-
ute.”59 Raúl explained how this idea motivated him:
I hope we can at least reveal that the person who was accused of being
a criminal, a delinquent, felt obligated to do what they did, and that any
other person would have done the same if they’d been there in that mo-
ment, faced with all the shame and dishonor that we’ve now documented.
It will be impossible to say that we were lying, because we have the proof
in the documents. It will restore the histories and memories of so many
people who were dismissed as being metido en tonteras, people who were
written off by others who said, “If they’d just stayed at home, nothing
would have happened to them.” People need to know that these people
who were called dangerous delinquents were very noble, people who did a
duty knowing that their commitment would cost them their lives. They had
no egoism. . . . The papers don’t say it, but I lived and worked with some
of the people in these documents, and they were people who would give
up their own food so that others could eat. Their commitment was real.60
The abiding need to restore honor to the armed conflict’s victims—and,
by extension, to themselves—inspired Project workers’ daily labor of sift-

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 167

ing through gruesome photos and endless pages of bureaucratic minutiae in
search of nuggets of evidence. Rosa, who happened to stumble across sev-
eral documents about a particular desaparecido, was assigned the task of con-
tinuing to look for information on this person, whom she had never known
personally but whose case was high-­profile. She found searching for records
about this specific person to be a “beautiful” experience, because “you say
to yourself, this is a person who was fighting because they wanted to change
this country. It’s a person who has the same ideas and the same beliefs as you
about living in this country, wanting it to develop, wanting it to be different.”
(Her comment was a post facto gloss over the very real factional divisions that
characterized the wartime Left.) “And so when you become aware of these
elements linking you to another person, it gives you a very strange feeling,
but at the same time it makes you very interested in continuing to search for
information,” she said.61 Rosa’s interaction with these documents was insepa-
rable from her own history—in fact, it made her feel more connected to her
history—but not strictly in the sense of “learning about the past.”
Particular documents and cases aside, the simple fact of the archives’ ex-
istence, and the assumption that it “proved” a set of truths known to the Left
all along, was seen to finally deny nonbelievers the ability to write off jus-
tice seekers’ truth claims. “In this sense,” a pdh analyst told me, “there is a
profound satisfaction in being able to say, ‘I did not invent this. This is how
it happened. And I can prove it with documents that the state itself gener-
ated. . . . You told me all this was a lie but no, it was true.’ ”62 The potential
for corroborating what was already known about the war, to say nothing of
revealing new information, offered the powerful hope of vindicating testi-
monies long discredited. It could not right the errors of the armed Left, nor
could it restore the lives of those who fell in the service of a more utopian
Guatemala. But resurrecting paper cadavers—demonstrating with the state’s
own records the extent of its repressive security structures—brought com-
fort to those who had upended their lives for political change. “It gives value
to people’s struggle. We weren’t wrong,” said Jacinto, defending his move-
ment’s goals even as he regretted aspects of their execution and felt engañado,
or cheated, by its leadership.63 “We were deceived, maybe, but we weren’t
wrong.”64
The notion of proof value, however, was more complex than it seemed.
Even a supposedly “normal” archive’s ontology is complicated by the fact that
“what is recorded is never simply ‘what happened,’ ” and that what one finds
there is necessarily incomplete, unreliable, and/or indefinite.65 At the pn ar-
chives, relatively few “smoking gun” documents were ever unearthed. Rather,

168  —  CHAPTER SIX

most case investigation rested upon complex processes of triangulation among
multiple sources. This challenge was exacerbated by the fact that researchers
regularly encountered amateurish and occasionally indecipherable records
scribbled by semiliterate police agents and informers on unsigned scraps of
paper, not to mention the pages obscured by mold and rot. As discussed earlier
in this book, these records’ legal proof value depended on how effectively the
Project workers “constructed an archives,” and maintained the documents’
archival bonds, in the midst of the chaos of their discovery site. But even at the
level of the individual document, researchers were thwarted in their efforts
to “prove” what they “know” happened—to square their memories and histo-
ries with a police force’s institutional memory and its ill-­kept, partial (as both
self-interested and incomplete) history.
A particular aggravation for workers was reconciling their memories of
the conflict with the lacunae, silences, and bureaucratic euphemisms of the
documents. The very life experiences that workers cited as a motivating force
dogged the task of soberly interpreting each document according to the Proj-
ect’s abstracted methodology. “I might know something, but if the document
doesn’t actually say it outright, then I can’t speculate,” complained Jacinto,
who worked as a document codifier. “I struggle with that, I struggle with it
very much. Because sometimes, even if a document doesn’t explicitly say
something, it’s still obvious!”66 An example was the scores of documents that
referred to mass detentions of individuals for public drunkenness. During the
early 1980s, pn squads regularly reported entering particular zones of the city—
often those known, like Zone 5, for being hotbeds of guerrilla activity—and
emerging a short time later with hundreds of people in custody, all supposedly
for being drunk.67 “Bueno,” Jacinto exclaimed, “el chapín es bolo, pero siempre
la suspicás!” Guatemalans might indeed like to drink, he joked, but such mass
arrests were highly suspect.
The codification methodology in particular, quantitative in nature, was
designed to literally transform each document into a set of data points. It
allowed workers only to record what the document actually said, not what
they thought the document implied or euphemistically suggested. It could
not capture a former militant’s infraknowledge, revealing the tension between
the quantitative and qualitative aspects of the investigation—between the ob-
servations of a professional researcher and the convictions of an aggrieved
victim. One worker spoke of how he had come to see the documents as “hypo­
critical,” after reading multiple reports on well-­known assassinations stating
that the individuals in question had been shot to death by gente desconocida,
“even though everyone knew that the police were the killers.”68 “You don’t

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 169

know, in the long term, whether or not the methodology will end up revealing
what you know, with the experience that you have,” Jacinto concluded.
More commonly, though, the disjuncture between scientific methodology
and lived experience simply translated into frustration at the worktable: for
example, the shock of reading that Oliverio Castañeda de León had been exe­
cuted by desconocidos, even though multiple witnesses attested otherwise.
Such official turns of phrase served the same function as what Hannah Arendt
has called the “language rules” of Nazi Germany, wherein the bureaucratic
terminology of extermination (“deportations,” “special actions,” “cleansing”)
was both brutally clear and purposely euphemistic, intended to sow feelings
of doubt and disempowerment.69 That survivors still struggled with these lin-
guistic strictures decades later spoke to the enduring strength of terror’s dou-
ble discourse. Stanley Cohen, following Michael Taussig and Marguerite Feit-
lowitz, outlines terror states’ strategy of simultaneously denying responsibility
for atrocities, denying that atrocities are occurring at all, and maintaining “the
hermetic mythology about the dangers posed by ‘subversives,’ ” thus ensuring
that even external criticisms serve only to “make the denials stronger and the
ideology more sacrosanct.”70 In this sense as in others, being a former militant
at the Project was a double-­edged sword—it implied a privileged knowledge,
but not always one that found a technical use, as researchers were forced to
depend upon and, ultimately, to reproduce the chilling linguistic traps used
by the National Police.

THE LABORS OF MEMORY

Elizabeth Jelin writes eloquently about the labors of memory, which she de-
fines as the active psychological efforts made by survivors of violence in order
to, in a Freudian sense, “work through” their past traumas.71 At the Project,
such labors were inseparable from the larger enterprise, as discussed earlier.
However, the Project was more than a space for individuals to work through
their memories. It took the notion of “labors of memory” to a whole new level
because it was also a workplace with salaried employees, management hier-
archies, productivity targets, and divisions of labor—which often conflicted
with the private, personal emotional work Jelin describes.
The secrecy of the coordinators regarding the investigation, arguably a ju-
dicious discretion with information given Guatemala’s ongoing political in-
stability, proved challenging for some older workers, who had waited decades
for the truth to be made known. José Antonio, who administered the archives’
Master Location Registry and therefore had some of the most universal access
to documents of anyone at the Project, felt his patience tested upon finding

170  —  CHAPTER SIX

“good documents” and then being told to keep quiet until the time was right
to reveal them, rather than trumpeting the discovery to the nation as his heart
might wish. “I move around the archives like a rat,” he told me, “looking for
information, looking, looking, looking.” Once, when he found a document of
high investigative importance, he was instructed to simply note its location
and put it back without telling anyone else about it. At the time, the Project
had been trying to avoid giving “them”—right-­wingers, the Partido Patriota,
the Otto Pérez Molina campaign—any ammunition during the run-­up to the
2007 presidential elections. The rationale was that if information leaked to
the public about any particularly revelatory documents it could provoke retali-
ation against the Project. Fair as the reasoning may have been, it was still diffi-
cult for workers to tolerate, forcing them to juggle both strategic interests and
personal desires. “I felt deceived, disappointed,” José Antonio said. “I wanted
to go public, but it wasn’t possible. . . . It’s hard to wait. Sometimes it makes me
want to leave this job, because I’m so curious and I get lost in the documents
and it’s so hard to be patient. I know that as a professional I have to wait.”72
Others, relegated to what they saw as the baser tasks of the archives—scan-
ning, or codification—resented that these positions did not allow them to
apply their life experience to the job. As the Project professionalized, its divi-
sion of labor became much starker, and those at the bottom of the hierarchy
were resentful. They almost universally spoke of the case investigators and
researchers, who got to work analytically with the documents, with jealousy.
And the verticality of the Project’s organizing structure, particularly its case
investigations, meant that the workers not integrated into the investigative
structure felt shut out—as though the very infraknowledge for which they had
been hired was being wasted. Gregorio, once the head of an important work-
table but later transferred to building maintenance, insisted that he would
serve in whatever capacity he was needed. He admitted, however, that he
“would have preferred to continue working in contact with the documents.”73
Those with backgrounds in militancy were drawn to the pn archives, but they
wanted those backgrounds to factor into their daily labor. They wanted their
opinions to be heard, they wanted to be kept abreast of where the case investi-
gations were headed, and they wanted access to what José Antonio called “the
most precious things”—incriminating documents. They were not always sat-
isfied with their positions as the Project expanded; operating the photocopier
for eight hours daily, or feeding sheet after sheet of fragile carbon paper into a
scanner so quickly that there was no time to read them, wore upon those eager
to bring their analytical skills and mental databases to bear upon their work.
The division of labor affected the morale of older workers in other ways.

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 171

While in its earlier days the Project’s operating structure had been collabora-
tive and horizontal, the Project became increasingly streamlined and hierarchical
by early 2007. Initially, everyone in the relatively small group of workers had
thought of themselves as peers and had participated more or less equally in
the daunting task of designing a way forward. But the rapid move toward the
compartmentalization of tasks divided types of work and grades of pay. Here,
the tensions between the Project-­as-­human-­rights-­initiative and the Project-­
as-­place-­of-­employment ran deep for those who had signed on out of a sense
of moral commitment and who resented being excluded from the decision-­
making process. Some attributed the increasing verticality to the Project’s
leadership, partly composed of ex-­insurgents, reverting to military forms of
organization. As Victoriano put it, “Information had become so centralized
in the coordinación, that those of us who were doing the work and knew more
about it were kept out. Everything had become so secretive, and my personal
opinion was that these were the operating methods of the guerrilla, this com-
partmentalization!”74 Because the Project was a human rights project, workers
expected it to be democratic; because it was a workplace operating under con-
ditions of duress, the coordinators leaned on older organizational models as a
way of keeping incendiary information closely guarded. The conflict between
the two models was never fully resolved, and in difficult moments, it soured
some compañeros on the whole initiative. “The archives have come to be seen
as a business,” complained Jacinto, “and the people who work there are seen
as the workers in a business, workers for an employer who requires a product.
. . . But I am a thinking person, and I fought for my ideas, and I keep fighting
for my ideas, and I would like for that to be respected.”75
There were also uncomfortable realities to be gleaned from the documents
themselves. The sheer volume of information about state social control—
about informants, surveillance, unmarked cars, plainclothes officers, urban
raids and sweeps, international advisers, shipments of weapons and commu-
nications technology, trips made by pn agents to U.S. training centers, and
the like—brought home yet again bitter memories of a divided insurgency,
militarily outmatched, unprepared for the wholesale slaughter the state was
willing to unleash upon the civilian population.76 This is not to say that the
organized Left, armed and otherwise, did not have its areas and moments
of strength during the war—quite the opposite—and the immense scale of
the archives risked overdetermining both the pn’s historical power and the
“doomed” nature of the revolutionary movements. Nonetheless, when I inter-
viewed Victoriano with his wife, Dolores, they spoke movingly of how dispir-
iting it was to understand, only now, what exactly they had been up against:

172  —  CHAPTER SIX

 victoriano: I am from the egp, I was basically born with it, I gave my
whole life to it, and when I discover in the archives information about
the spying they did on the revolutionary organizations, I realize—
dolores:—That we were only in diapers!
victoriano: And so that’s how I came to truly understand the dimen-
sions of the war, the repressive character, the information they had, the
training they received from the Israelis and all this. And at the time we
thought, look at these police, they’re so stupid, we shouldn’t be afraid of
them, we’re más chingón than they are.77
Despite these and other challenges, however, the archives remained one of
just a few spaces where ex-­militants felt they could keep advancing what they
saw as lifelong goals, such that, despite the labor tensions and psychological
stresses and bitter realizations, they would persevere. “This belongs to us and
we bear responsibility to make sure that this work is brought to fruition,”
reflected Rosa, sounding world-­weary at the thought of the task ahead, and at
the thought of the task left behind. “Look, if you give up in the face of some-
thing difficult, you have lost. So we have to keep fighting. That’s how it is.”78

UNEXPECTED DIALOGUES

These workers may have entered the Project with their conciencias fully
formed, but this did not mean that their contact with the documents was a
static experience. Rather, their reencounters with the past—whether trau-
matic, vindicatory, or both—had unexpected results.
We have seen how memory workers’ labor at the archives brought new
information about their histories, galvanized those who sought ways to
enact their hopes for Guatemala in the context of a neoliberal peace, and
opened possibilities for justice. It also, importantly, occasioned interpersonal
reconciliation between ex-­militants and agents of the National Civil Police
(pnc)—a productive collaboration that would have been unimaginable before
the archives. The pnc maintained a team of more than ten police agents at
the archives full-­time, and they shared close quarters with the Project team.
Working with the police was not an easy transition for many Project staffers.
When I asked María Elena what kinds of contact she had had with the po-
lice before the archives, she laughed heartily. “Ha! Running away! Escaping!
Being in protests where they were shooting at us!”79 Raúl, leaving the usac
campus with fellow union leaders late one 1983 night after a long meeting,
was ambushed by pn agents who opened fire when they reached the univer-
sity gates, killing Raúl’s companion and wounding Raúl in the arm. Many

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 173

 A National Civil Police agent scrutinizes a public display of the war’s dead and
FIG. 6.4 
disappeared. Photograph by James Rodríguez, mimundo.org. Used by permission of
the photographer.

former militants had little love for the police, and the prospect of working on
a pnc base alongside pnc agents tested the limits of their tolerance. There
was institutional tension as well, between the Interior Ministry, the pnc, and
the human rights ombudsman’s office. As Fuentes put it, “There’s a historical
reality there—the pdh and the police haven’t exactly walked hand in hand
through this country’s history!”80
Having pdh employees occupying a police base and examining documents
that, despite the judicial order granting them user privileges, remained pnc
property was naturally a strained process. Police agents assigned to the ar-
chives shadowed Project workers closely in the early days. Ana Corado, the of-
ficer in charge of the archives, said that this was “to help them out, to tell them
what needed to be done with the documents,” but workers saw it otherwise.81
One staffer with an especially sensitive role reported being followed home by
plainclothes officers on multiple occasions; when he complained, the inci-
dents ceased.82 Most pnc surveillance took place at the worktable level under
the guise of “protecting” the records. “When I started,” Dolores recalled, “we
were put in a room with a police officer who would keep watch over us. They
would note down every time we went to the bathroom, they would note down
everything we did, what we talked about. I saw the notebook once, and it had
notations on all of these things.”83 “When we started,” said Rosa, “the police

174  —  CHAPTER SIX

were running around as though they were ‘taking care’ of the documents,
but really they were making sure we weren’t touching anything, looking at
anything they didn’t want us to see.”84 Being vigilado (surveilled)—all over
again—led workers to modify their behaviors and guard their words. “There
were often police agents with us, spying to see what we were up to, seeing
what papers we were looking at,” Jacinto remembered. “When they weren’t
there, we would talk, we would chat about politics or whatever, and as soon
as they came back in, boom! The doors closed and we would only speak of
trivial things.”85
But the pnc agents were nobody’s fools, and they responded poorly when
treated with suspicion by people whom they, in turn, mistrusted as inter­
lopers. Ana Corado and her agents had invested considerable effort in manag-
ing the heaps of abandoned records before the pdh had arrived, in defiance of
their superiors’ orders, attempting to bring some modicum of order and orga-
nization to the dumped papers. As a result, Corado was protective of the docu­
ments under her charge and was unconvinced that the pdh’s intervention
in the archives was to the benefit of the records. Because any request to see
a new group of records had to be cleared with Corado, bad relations quickly
translated into bad access. Inquiries about sensitive bodies of records—those
of the Second Corps, the Joint Operations Center, or the Department of Tech-
nical Investigations—regularly put the two sides at loggerheads.
Project staffers soon realized that to get their work done, they needed to
cultivate better relations with their counterparts, despite their negative past
experiences. In the process, they became more sensitive to how “these papers,
these archives, belong to the police, and we were working in a space that also
belonged to them,” as Rosario put it.86 An atmosphere of tentative mutual
respect slowly began to emerge, based on a shared valuing of the archives
and fostered by the Project’s directors in order to speed the pace of progress.
Change came in the small details: before the Project had funds to install water
cisterns or a microwave on-­site, pnc agents shared theirs with Project staffers.
In turn, it pleased and impressed the archives agents that the pdh was willing
to provide supplies, introduce computers, and generally improve the archives’
conditions, even if the two sides had different goals in mind.
It was the slow accretion of small gestures like this, in response to the dif-
ficult working conditions all the parties shared, that led to an unpre­cedented
relationship being built between a hodgepodge group of leftist activists and
state security agents. The necessity of forced coexistence, in police space, pro-
voked two new forms of understanding among Project staff: as one worker
put it, “First, you start to understand the logic of it all; second, you start to

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 175

put yourself in their shoes, to see them as human beings.”87 When Project
workers learned that it was due to Corado’s efforts, not in spite of them, that
the archives existed at all, the animosity dissipated further still. Workers
found something in common with the agents: they all believed that the ar-
chives were, in Corado’s words, “a treasure.”88 “We respect them for precisely
this reason: because they really wanted to preserve these documents,” said
Gregorio.89 It stunned many at the Project to learn that the plastic cord bind-
ing document bundles together had been purchased by the pnc agents at their
own expense, and that the scissors and staplers in daily use had been brought
from the agents’ own homes.
Walking in police agents’ shoes and spaces, and coming to appreciate their
dedication to the archives, pushed many who began as ideologically opposed
to the pnc toward an amplified understanding of their counterparts’ lives. As
Victoriano recalled of an early workshop held with Project workers and pnc
archives staff:
That was when I came to understand for the first time that the police were
also victims of the system. With the solidarity that the police provided—
Doña Ana [Corado] and the rest of them—we came to see their commit-
ment to their institution from a more human perspective, seeing their
children, hearing about their lives in very working-­class barrios, knowing
that their children can’t tell anyone that their mothers are police officers
because of the gangs, knowing about their loans. . . . They would give us
water, which was scarce, and we would share space with them, and that
was how things started to change for the first time, how the relationship
advanced. And that’s how you open up ideologically.90
Nearly everyone I spoke with stressed the idea that the police were also
victims of the war, and if this did not mitigate the pn’s abuses, it partly served
to explain them. (All were careful to specify that this applied only to regular
agents, and not to the death squads or the generals who actually controlled
the police.) “Knowing the conditions in which the agents had to live, you
can see that the police themselves had to be dehumanized in order that they
could perform certain objectives or act in certain manners against victims,”
reflected Raúl.91 Project workers saw firsthand that pnc barracks, some of
which abutted the archives, were “in the most unbelievable state of filth
and abandonment”—filled with rats, cockroaches, broken sanitary facilities,
and “intolerable odors,” amounting to “miserable, subhuman conditions.”92
Mattresses were filthy and filled with fleas or else nonexistent; agents often
worked twenty-­four-­hour or forty-­eight-­hour shifts only to be forced to wait in

176  —  CHAPTER SIX

line for a bed on which to rest. Most low-­level agents came from the interior,
shipped to the capital to work and send money home to their families; they
were, in Christopher Browning’s words, “ordinary men.”93 Their pitiful salaries
did not cover rent, so they slept and lived at work. “In these conditions, people
are not formed; they are dehumanized,” Raúl said. “A dehumanized person is
much more likely to commit crimes or other violations.”94 It was a difficult
mental and emotional leap to make, but ex-­militants came to see the police
as human. María Elena found herself starting to think about the individuals
who had, in the past, made up the police’s rank and file, realizing that they
had joined the police out of economic necessity, much as contemporary entry-­
level pnc agents—including those consigned to the basurero–were forced to
do as well. “This was one of the hardest parts for me, coexisting with them,
thinking that one of them could have been a torturer, one of them could have
killed a compañero, and then to start discovering and building in these daily
interactions a respectful human relationship. . . . It makes you see yourself
differently, and see the relationships differently, and see that we were all vic-
tims here.”95 She was not alone in asserting that her vision of the police “from
before” had changed.96 Victoriano put it curtly: “I no longer think that we
should line them all up against the wall and shoot them.”97
That progressives and ex-­revolutionaries could work alongside a group of
police officers in the pursuit of a common goal—in this case, the preservation
of archives—was almost stranger than fiction. It bespoke the extent to which
social reconstruction, rather than being generated by governmental accords
or reparations programs or the building of monuments, is necessarily a slow,
patient, on-­the-­ground process requiring at least a partial sharing of goals and
some degree of mutual compromise and trust. The reckoning achieved on
one police base in Zone 6 of Guatemala City, wherein two formerly opposed
groups met in the middle to construct a new kind of collaboration around
the National Police archives, demonstrated the critical difference between
social “reconciliation” and social reconstruction. Reconstruction represented
the building of something new and distinct, of a “transformational element,”
rather than a return to a poisoned status quo after some official ritual of for-
giveness and contrition.98
The fact that these former militants could make their fragile peace with a
group of rank-­and-­file police officers did not mean that the age-­old hostilities
dividing the country had melted away. Not all state security forces were cre-
ated equal; not all hands were equally bloodied. When I asked workers if they
could imagine a similar rapprochement with army soldiers who had served
during the war, some laughed and others frowned while giving the same

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 177

response—no, of course not, absolutely not, never. But it bears pointing out
that ten years earlier, they likely would have said the same of the police.

HUMAN NETWORKS AND THE NEXT GENERATION

The social and spatial world created on the police base derived its richness
and energy from the dynamic, shifting relationships between past and present
that the work engendered at every turn. The historical animosity between
the human rights sector and the police was, in this space, redefined; for Proj-
ect workers, their own psychological barriers between past and present were
challenged by their immersion in the records of their former lives. It was the
human resonance of these archives, the unfinished lives they depicted and
the restoration of subjectivity and agency they were seen to promise, that
gave the archives such texture and depth. The records are invaluable resources
for scholarly analysis on a range of themes, to be sure. But to understand the
process by which they were given new life, we must recognize that it was the
people revolving around them—the militants turned memory workers, the
police agents, and the thousands of dead who spoke through the yellowed
photo­graphs and crumbling pages—who represented the archives’ heart.
Their relationships both stretched forward and reached back in time, defining
the archival work being done even as they reconstituted bonds of solidarity
and visions for the future.
Many of the workers who speak in this chapter already knew each other be-
fore starting at the Project. Some were spouses, some had been compañeros in
the egp or far or pgt, some were old university friends, and others were sim-
ply acquaintances “from before” who reconnected upon arriving. Establishing
these bonds anew represented, for some, a reinscription of past identities, a
reconnection with their former lives. Alberto lost his brother, a revolutionary
combatant, during the 1980s; in chatting with a coworker who had fought
alongside his brother, they were able to connect based on their memories of
their shared companion. “For some of the people who have rescued relation-
ships of solidarity, of much caring, it has meant that we reidentify ourselves,”
Alberto said. “For example, I was talking with a compañero from the Project;
it turned out that he had known my brother, they worked together, and we’ve
proceeded to build a very beautiful friendship, based in this past detail. ‘Oh,
your brother was so-­and-­so, I worked with him, I remember him very well, he
taught me a lot, et cetera.’ Now we’re friends, real friends.”99
These types of experiences highlighted how the processes of social recon-
struction at the archives were collaborative and quotidian, based in reading
documents but also in sharing and interpreting those readings. “Reliving

178  —  CHAPTER SIX

some of the things I lived and then chatting about it with a compañero is a
pretty beautiful experience,” Esteban told me. “To remember precisely these
moments is part of the reconstruction of memory, and even better if you’re
able to do it with people who also lived it with you, or when you remem-
ber it with someone who lived it too, but who you didn’t know at the time.
There’s a whole mountain of experiences there to talk about, to share, to chat
about—and it becomes part of your daily life.”100 Interpreting the dates and
names in the documents required sharing knowledge within work teams,
whereby workers jogged each other’s memories, older workers told war sto-
ries to younger ones, and questions were both asked and answered. “People
come,” Jacinto said, “they hear you talking about something, and they ask,
‘hey, did you know so-­and-­so?’ And you say yes, and they say, ‘well, he was
with me in this demonstration,’ and it gives us a little bit of an opportunity to
de-­compartmentalize ourselves and to say bueno, you were there too, that’s
great, we’re compañeros.”101
Personal ties between workers extended not just horizontally among older
ex-­militants but also vertically between generations, again for reasons linked
to the history of the Left. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, when state
repression made political life in Guatemala City nearly impossible, many ac-
tivists went into exile in Mexico City, where the insurgent leaderships were
partly based—so many that a significant exile community developed there.102
Exiles set up mutual assistance groups, communal houses, day cares, and job-­
seeking networks in their new city, aiming to ease the transition for political
refugees not only from Guatemala but also from the other Central American
nations riven by Cold War conflict.103 Others spent their exile years in Nica-
ragua and Cuba, where they established similar networks. Both María Elena
and Esperanza, during their time in Mexico in the 1980s, worked in these
communal day cares caring for the children of compañeros. It was a delight for
both women to find, upon beginning at the archives, that some of the babies
whose diapers they had changed in exile were now grown up and working
by their side among the Project’s flood of young hires. Of the roughly forty
children for whom María Elena cared in one Mexico City safe house, no fewer
than three ended up at the archives. “In one way or another, seeing them
working here makes you feel like you left interesting seeds, seeds which grew
into a sense of social commitment,” she said. “Even though [exile] was such a
hard experience and there were so many negative aspects which could have
scarred them, I think that it also provoked for them some overarching ques-
tions, which brought them here.”104
In some cases, the intergenerational ties ran even deeper. Rosa, whose revo­

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 179

lutionary commitments forced her to send her children outside the country
for the duration of the war, found that having her two sons work with her at
the Project helped them to finally understand why they had grown up abroad
without the regular presence of their mother. It allowed them to move past
feeling resentful and abandoned, wondering if Rosa had left them because she
truly was just a “bad mother,” as family members on their father’s side would
tell them. “Now that they have read the documents,” she told me, “now that
they know how the war played out, they say to me, ‘Mamá, how terrible. How
did this happen? How did you endure all this? And how did we survive?’ Only
now are they really starting to absorb this knowledge, but only because they’re
in this reality of the archives—if they weren’t there, they would have continued
thinking as they did before.” Rosa’s sons’ ability to hold, in their own hands,
evidence of the state’s ferocity allowed them to reconstruct a relationship with
a mother they had scarcely known as children. “I cried so much at not be-
ing able to be there all the time with my sons. I didn’t want to be apart from
them; it was a decision. But this seed that I planted, one way or another, has
grown,” she said, echoing the language of germination often used to describe
the younger workers. “And now they are also adding their own contribution.”105
The optimism these women felt about the promise of new generations was
not theirs alone; many of the ex-­militants with whom I spoke expressed great
hope for Guatemala’s youth, cheered by the experience of working alongside
nearly a hundred young students who were committed to the Project and its
goals. The violence of la época meant that many of those who were politically
active on the Left had been forced to suspend their studies; in today’s genera-
tion, they saw youth with better training and knowledge than they had been
able to obtain for themselves. “Some of these young people are more academ-
ically qualified than compañeros who have entire lifetimes of experience in
the struggle,” said María Elena, suggesting that collaborations between better-­
educated youth and older veterans yielded a hybrid skill set that itself was an
interesting result of the recovery process.106 Others feared that the next gener-
ation had lost sight of progressive values, though they believed that the youth
exposed to the archives were likely to become “stronger” in their ideals, to “act
more intelligently,” and to emerge with a heightened social consciousness. “I
often chat with them about what we did, and the possibility that they, too,
can find ways to express themselves and what they live,” said Esteban. “We
have the responsibility to tell them what we did, but also to tell them what we
really think about it, in order to sustain it.”107 Sharing knowledge was, in this
interpretation, another way older activists could reivindicar their struggle—by
passing it on to others who might take up its mantle.

180  —  CHAPTER SIX

 Hope for the next generation masked a darker truth for some older work-
ers: a belief in their own obsolescence and contamination by war, trauma,
and infighting over ideological differences. “I think that the generation of
older folks [viejitos] just needs to die off,” said Jacinto. “We need to die, and we
need a new generation of young people who fight for different ideas. Because
the older ones of us, we’re not going to save the Left. Our own resentments
limit us.”108 “Today there are different actors,” Raúl explained, “the youth,
those who need to learn—perhaps very painfully—the same things that we
learned, and who need to avoid committing the same errors that we commit-
ted.”109 Young people, Esteban suggested, were not as “poisoned” as their fore-
bears: “We older people already have a set of elements that have determined
our actions—because we came from this organization or that organization,
that’s how we think. And we don’t change, because often we don’t want to
change.”110 The pride many felt in having joined the organized Left existed
alongside a tremendous sadness and bitterness at the sacrifices those deci-
sions had demanded. “We’re resentful, yes,” said one member of the Project’s
advisory board, a well-­known activist. “I carry around a lot of resentment. I
lost a lot. I lost part of my own life, the part of my life shared with my friends,
my compañeros, with my own husband, who was assassinated. So yes, I am
resentful. But resentment is not a crime. Genocide is.”111
Continuing to labor for justice, by working at the archives and sharing
their experiences, was how many of these veterans tried to exorcise, or at least
wrestle with, the demons of the war. As Jacinto told me about the murder of
his brother, a pgt activist, during the 1980s, he broke down in tears, and we
stopped our conversation while he recovered his composure. When he did,
he said:
That’s what motivates you, it motivates you to keep fighting—not for my-
self alone, but for many people. We hope that what we’re doing serves a
purpose for many people, so that this can continue to be clarified, even if
the perpetrators are dead or no longer here. Many are already dead, but
others continue to live. Maybe the perpetrators in my [brother’s] case are
no longer living, but there are others who are, and we work for the oppor-
tunity for them to face punishment. It isn’t vengeance, it isn’t vengeance at
all—it’s justice, and it’s so that the state can offer reparations to the families
of the victims. If they don’t, then it’s as though the human life has no value.
And the life of a human being who fights for their ideas is invaluable.112
In the run-­up to the 2007 presidential elections, when it seemed possible that
General Otto Pérez Molina could win the presidency, whispers circulated that

REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES   — 181

if he triumphed, it would put the archives project in grave danger. (Pérez Mo-
lina did not win the presidency until 2011, and the Project has, at the time of
this writing, survived his administration.) But the idea that an army general—
one trained at the School of the Americas, who had commanded troops in the
blood-­soaked Ixil Triangle under Ríos Montt, had headed the secret intelli-
gence service of the elite Presidential Staff, and was implicated in the intel-
lectual authorship of Bishop Gerardi’s murder—could take away yet another
regalo de vida from these survivors was unconscionable. This new chance at
postwar justice, at proof and vindication, would not be surrendered easily,
not after so many other defeats. “If they want to close down the archives, then
they’ll have to drag us out of there themselves,” Rosa vowed, smiling. “And
they will have to drag us out of there dead.”113

182  —  CHAPTER SIX

 sev en ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)

I am an optimist, and so I believe in the young people. We lived it,

but they can interpret it in new ways.
—Victoriano, Project worker

L
atin American writers share a long tradition of addressing the hemi-
sphere’s youth, affectionately passing along the sage advice or bitter
truths of generations gone by. Otto René Castillo, Guatemala’s best-­
loved revolutionary poet, was no exception. Castillo, a pgt activist forced
into exile by the coup against Arbenz, returned in 1966 and joined the far.
Apprehended by the military during combat, he was tortured for four days and
burned alive during the late-­1960s Zacapa counterinsurgency campaign.1 Ever
since, the martyr’s poems have resonated with progressives, with none strik-
ing a deeper chord than “Vámonos patria a caminar,” the work that presages
Castillo’s own death. Addressed to his patria, it invokes Castillo’s aspirations
for the generations that would succeed his own. I will remain blind so that you
may see, he wrote; I will remain voiceless so that you may sing. I have to die so
that you may live, so your flaming face appears in every flower born of my bones.
Ay, homeland, the colonels who piss on your walls, we must pull them up by the
roots, hang them from the tree of bitter dew, violent with the anger of our people.2
Castillo, still young himself, hoped his death would not be in vain. His poem
hailed the youths who would follow in his footsteps, calling on them to walk
with workers and campesinos to fight tyranny in the land of eternal spring. He
would, he assured them, be at their side in spirit.
One of the most distinctive aspects of the Project was that the majority of
its workers were under the age of thirty. By August 2007, the team had grown
to more than 200 strong, though it would later settle at a stable size of about
150; with equal representation from men and women, some 65 percent of
its members were youths.3 These were individuals who came of age in the
context of the war but never participated in it as insurgents, trade unionists,
community organizers, or student activists as had many of their older counter-
parts.4 Many had only spotty recollections of the war. But studies of political
violence’s long-­term effects indicate that those who grow up in a wartime
milieu are nevertheless affected by it in myriad ways, carrying the war with
them both consciously and unconsciously.5 In general, Guatemalans between
the ages of twenty and thirty have found themselves a generation in transition:
not quite one of the long conflict’s several cohorts, yet neither entirely part
of a postwar one, and hence lacking an obvious way to define themselves.
Many of them, encouraged by the discourse of page-­turning reconciliation
and abetted by a deficient educational system, not to mention distracted by
the necessities of economic survival, rejected engagement with the past. As
one Project worker in his midtwenties put it, “Most young people today are in
their houses watching television, eating McDonald’s.”6 Given the perception
of widespread apathy regarding the war and its legacies, then, it is remarkable
that such a sizable group of youths would endure the conditions at the Proj-
ect to toil reading dusty documents, under the twin psychological burdens of
mass death and a binding confidentiality agreement. What impelled the Proj-
ect’s next generation to connect with this history? Was this its way of heeding
Castillo’s call to pull up the colonels by their roots?
This chapter explores how youth experiences factored into the rescue of
the archives. As this work argues more broadly, the conditions of a country’s
archives suggest greater truths about its history, social fabric, and politics.
The nature of youth participation in the Project, with the Project itself micro­
cosmic of a larger conversation about the war’s legacies, reveals much about
how coming generations will interpret, internalize, debate, embrace, and
reject varied aspects of their country’s twentieth-­century history. Holocaust
scholar Eva Hoffman posits that the recent “phase of fascination with collec-
tive or group memory” regarding traumatic historical events in both academic
and popular spheres emerged from what she calls the “ ‘post’ generation” or
“the generation ‘after’ ”—a group in which she includes herself, for whom
the Second World War and the Holocaust were crucially formative events,
but events which its members did not themselves experience.7 The extent
to which the Holocaust, academic literature’s touchstone for analyses of the
relationship between memory and history, may fruitfully be compared to the
Guatemalan context is limited.8 But Hoffman’s point that defining the roles
of memory and history in contemporary politics will necessarily fall to this
“post” generation—in Guatemala’s case, to several “post” generations—rings
true. She cautions against the reification of “memory itself as something of

184  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

value . . . a kind of late post-­modern moral good,” but stresses the importance
of the “post” generation’s engagement with “terrible histories which are close
to us, but are not ours.”9
Young workers at the Project came from diverse backgrounds in terms of their
experiences of the war. Many had no direct, immediate-­family connection—
no desaparecidos in the family, no parents who participated on either side.
Others did; they grew up partially in exile, were raised in communal safe
houses while their parents fought, or lost close relatives to political repres-
sion, and they identified strongly with those connections. In terms of the
general panorama of Guatemalans, however, the under-­thirty workers were
hardly diverse; nearly all were part of the urban middle class. Most had a
university education, usually from the usac, the national public university
long associated with leftist politics, and proudly defined themselves as sancar-
listas.10 Many intended to continue in human rights, expansively defined, for
the rest of their lives. They would be the progressive lawyers, journalists, and
academics of their country’s not-­too-­distant future—the opinion makers, the
intellectuals, the definers of an evolving conversation about rights, social jus-
tice, and memory. They were the very people who would have been targeted
for assassination had they been alive thirty years earlier.
Work at the archives, whether an initiation into such themes or the con-
tinuation of a path already trodden, provided a space for these children of the
conflict to negotiate their complex subjectivities as part of a minority inter-
ested in historical memory, to understand the workings of their society, and
to build, based on firsthand contact with state security documents, visions
for change. Their experiences at the Project matter; they also, in important
ways, surprise. This chapter presents the stories and dreams of a group of
young amateur historians and archivists; it discusses the relationships and
tensions between different generations of activists, comparing their concep-
tions of memory, history, and justice; it analyzes labor relations at the archives
as a means of exploring these young workers’ struggles for self-­definition and
respect; and it considers their debates over progressive or activist politics in
terms of the larger challenges of reconstituting a functional Left in the post-­
peace era. Francis Blouin and William Rosenberg write that “what goes on in
an archive reflects what individuals, institutions, states, and societies imagine
themselves to have been, as well as what they imagine themeselves becom-
ing.”11 If Otto René Castillo had to remain blind in order that his patria might
have eyes, what might it mean that these young Guatemalans chose to put
those eyes to work reading documents?

ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)   — 185

PULLING CHILDHOODS FROM THE ARCHIVES

Like the older workers in the Project’s early days, selected because they were
considered politically trustworthy, many of the small number of under-­thirty
workers at the Project’s inception joined the effort as no strangers to the hu-
man rights sector. A few had worked in other divisions of the pdh, several
in its Unified Register of Forced Disappearances, the attempt to build a mas-
ter registry of the disappeared.12 A few others, through ngos like the Mutual
Support Group (gam) or Security in Democracy (sedem), had even worked
on the 2003 effort to digitize the archives of the defunct Presidential Staff
(emp), discussed in chapter 2.13 Others, however, had no experience at all
with memory work. They simply had the connections affording them access
to a coveted commodity: a well-­paying job. Each young worker’s experiences
were distinct; each revealed a different facet of a generation in transition, one
deeply touched by a war it never had the choice to embrace or reject.
Héctor, a round-­faced and cheerful Project worker in his midtwenties,
was born in Nicaragua to egp cadres; his mother’s first partner, the father of
Héctor’s brother, had disappeared in combat some years before. Héctor’s first
eleven years were spent in exile, oscillating between Nicaragua and Cuba,
during which he changed homes dozens of times. He spent some of this time
in colmenas, communal houses for Guatemalan exiles in Nicaragua where
groups of revolutionaries’ children were cared for together, though his memo-
ries of this were hazy.14 Educated by his parents about why their lives had taken
such twists and turns, Héctor never resented them for the instability of his
childhood; “Our parents never left us behind, no matter what they were doing
for the Organization,” he said, “and I value that a lot.” But his return to Gua-
temala proved difficult. In Cuba, he remembered, “We lacked for nothing—
we could play, we had food, we had education, we had health care, we could go
outside whenever we wanted, with our friends, and not be afraid!” Integrating
into a volatile pre–Peace Accords Guatemala was hard for Héctor and his sib-
lings. They longed to return to Cuba and quickly had to modify their Cuban-­
inflected Spanish to fit in at school (and avoid suspicious looks from other
parents). Moreover, when he and his parents returned, they were met with
criticism and rejection from their extended family—cousins, grand­parents,
aunts, and uncles—who disapproved of his parents’ insurgent participation,
a common source of family fragmentation during the war and after. Yet de-
spite the dislocations of his childhood, Héctor felt that the economic and ra-
cial injustice in his country was intolerable, and believed that it justified the
sacrifices made in his name. “I think that if I’d been alive during the armed

186  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

conflict, I would have incorporated myself [into the insurgency] too,” he said.
“Working at the Project is like following in my parents’ footsteps.”15
Camilo, a usac sociology student of the same age as Héctor, had a similar
childhood. His parents, student activists and pgt members, lived clandes-
tinely for nearly twenty years, constantly moving and switching false iden-
tities, before leaving for a six-­year exile in the early 1980s. Because the war
remained ongoing when the family returned, they maintained strict security
conditions; outside the house, they trained themselves not to be noticed. But,
Camilo said, “inside the house, there was a lot of trust, and my parents would
tell us stories—my mother would often tell us stories about university, about
people who had disappeared, about victories they had won, happy stories and
sad stories.” His mother, especially, took care to explain everything—why she
saw the struggle as necessary, why they had to live abroad, and why they de-
cided to return from Mexico, where Camilo was cared for in an exile-­run day
care by a group of women, including several who would later work with him
at the Project. Camilo was an activist in what he called the contemporary
youth movement, a tight-­knit group advocating not only for postwar justice
but also against a neoliberal economic orthodoxy that saw Guatemala signing
on to free-­trade agreements and ceding indigenous land to foreign resource
extraction interests. He defined this movement as a collective project of “all
these young people who had returned from exile and were searching for an
identity,” youths who sought to make sense of their childhoods by engaging
with social justice. His mother, Camilo said, was proud of his activism: “My
political involvement is a function of hers; it’s like a continuation of what my
parents started. We’re a family that has a certain path, and I am following the
path of my family.”16
For Rafael, the family connection was most explicit of all. He was born
in Nicaragua to parents who were relatively high up in the egp; like Héc-
tor, his childhood had unfolded in Nicaragua and Cuba, and the move away
from those idealized revolutionary lands in 1995 was tough on him too. “I
didn’t want to leave Cuba,” he said. “Everyone looks out for their own interests
here in Guatemala. The wealthy in Guatemala have never cared about the
rest. Cuba’s not like that. We had education, health care, a house—we didn’t
have luxuries, but we had everything we needed, which is the most important
thing, right?” He was beaten by the teacher in his first Guatemalan school for
doubting the existence of God, and he struggled to fit in. His parents were
absent for much of his childhood, and he resented them—particularly his
mother—for years.17 But when Rafael and his mother, Rosa, found themselves
in 2006 working side by side at the Project, he came to see for himself, in the

ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)   — 187

documents, why she had left him behind to fight. A later convert to memory
work, Rafael chose not to wear the political T-­shirts, long ponytails, or goatees
of many other young male activists, avoiding their revolutionary machismo,
and he found his lifelong imbrication in a small community of leftists sti-
fling at times. “At a certain point, I really wanted to separate myself from this
group,” he commented. “Because it was always the same thing—the people
from work were the same people at the bar, the same people from childhood.”
After some time at the Project, however, he came to appreciate his networks,
which provided him “comfort, and a sense of security.” Rafael felt he could let
his guard down among youths who had similar experiences, and he rebuilt
his relationship with his mother. Over the course of the work at the Project,
he made peace with the instability of his upbringing; he came to see, in the
documents as much as in his daily life, why his early years had been spent
the way they had. “If someone came to me tomorrow and said ‘look, we’re
starting an armed group to fight against the government,’ I would join up,” he
said. “I wouldn’t think twice. . . . I think that even though many errors were
com­mitted, I fully defend the actions of my parents. I would participate in a
similar struggle at any moment.”18
Young workers from militant families, then, saw the Project as a way of con-
tinuing the struggle—much as the older veterans of popular movements saw it
as a way to continue their previous political engagement and engage their con-
ciencia. Youths like Héctor, Camilo, and Rafael were raised with the revolution
and schooled in its essential principles; some, while in exile, even underwent
structured programs of formación política (political training), particularly those
who had lived in Cuba.19 Rafael described his Cuban formación as follows:
We had spaces specifically set apart in which we could talk about politics,
depending on our age. They kept us informed, they told us what our par-
ents were fighting for. They would take us to the house where all of the
Organización’s bulletins were mimeographed, so we could see what they
said. They explained to us the situation of our country, and they explained
to us that we might not win this struggle. They also trained us in security
conditions, what we should and should not talk about. . . . But I understood
the reasons for the struggle. I knew that my parents were fighting in a
revolution, and I likened that to the revolution in Cuba—fighting against
the United States, even though technically that wasn’t how our revolution
worked. I knew it was a struggle for the masses. I knew that they were
fighting for the common interests of society—the only thing was that I had
never seen the society!20

188  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

Young adults with these sorts of pasts joined the Project with their political
identities well established; they were, in North American parlance, red-­diaper
babies, positioning themselves as inheritors of their parents’ revolution even
though conditions had changed.
Other young people were drawn to the Project not by family continuity
but by family loss. Davíd, a law student in his late twenties, could only specu­
late about his father’s involvement in the war. He knew his uncle had been
a member of an insurgent faction, though he did not know which one, and
surmised that because his uncle and father had lived together at the end of
their lives, perhaps his father had joined too. What he did know was that his
father had been extrajudicially executed, his body found tortured with teeth
missing, hands and feet tied, and a tiro de gracia in the back of the head. His
uncle disappeared around the same time, when Davíd was just six months
old. “All of this fills me with a strong need to know the truth, to find out what
happened,” Davíd told me. “And any one of those files at the archives might be
the file of a disappeared person. Any one of those files could be the file of my
father.” Each file, he said, “is the story of a life, maybe of a truncated life, one
which remains forgotten in the past,” and he hoped to resurrect their stories.
He even believed that the Project should have exclusively hired individuals
with a disappeared or murdered family member, because he thought direct
victims would toil much harder than nonvictims to mine the archives for de-
tails of state violence. He likened this to training police dogs, like those that
Project workers saw daily as they passed the pnc’s canine division to enter the
archives warehouse: if the dogs were familiar with the smell of grenades, then
they would learn to search buildings for grenades. “If you don’t have a need
to look for something, then you aren’t going to look for it; you’re just going
to spend your days here flipping through the papers,” Davíd said. “But if you
really feel that need to look for someone—for your father—then it’s going to
run through your mind whenever you read the documents, ‘I need to find my
father, I’m going to find him, I’m going to find him.’ ” (When Davíd broached
this staffing idea with the Project’s coordinators, they disagreed, telling him
that such an approach would turn the workplace into a “funeral.”)21
Simón, another law student, also lost a parent to the war. His father, an egp
insurgent, disappeared in combat; his mother fled the country with Simón
and his siblings, spending three years in exile in Costa Rica. In early 2006,
Simón was invited to join the Project by its assistant director, whose brother—
also a desaparecido—had been the very person to recruit Simón’s father into
the egp decades earlier. But while Simón shared Davíd’s desire to learn what
had happened to his father—“of course there’s a personal motivation”—he was

ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)   — 189

more interested in contextualizing his father’s case, in fitting it into a larger
historical picture and putting the archives to diverse uses. “Sure, there’s you,
and there’s your case, but it’s just one among many other people looking for
their disappeared,” he said. “I work for them too.” Ultimately, Simón felt, the
archives’ greatest impact would not be in solving individual cases or bringing
war criminals to trial, but, rather, in effecting broader changes in the rela-
tionships between archives, memory, and society. “These documents will help
people understand the importance that archives have to our understanding of
the history of our country,” he said. Simón still identified as a progressive but
had abandoned the strict Marxism of his parents (“I’m no radical”), alienated
by the Left’s errors and its failure to regroup as an effective political force in
the wake of the Peace Accords. Instead, his main political engagement, aside
from his labor at the Project, was to draft a proposal for a national archives
law, submitted as his law school thesis, which aimed both to protect the police
archives as a special body of records with its own legal norms and to guarantee
“the whole population’s access to the documents.”22
Héctor, Camilo, Rafael, Davíd, and Simón all started at the Project with
well-­developed ideological positions, by virtue of their childhoods, their par-
ents’ influence, and their previous work—at ngos like the Guillermo Tor­
riello Foundation, sedem, and gam; in the effort to rescue the archives of the
defunct Presidential Staff; in political parties like the Guatemalan National
Revolutionary Unity (urng) and Gathering for Guatemala (Encuentro por
Guatemala); or at the pdh. With their childhoods so strongly conditioned
by dislocation, they were preternaturally adaptive, motivated, political, and
committed to the idea that their parents’ struggles—and by extension their
own experiences of instability, exile, and loss—had not been in vain. Work-
ing in the archives was, they felt, an appropriate way for them to honor that
commitment. However, other young workers had far less obvious motivations.
Many lacked activist pasts, did not have family connections to war partici-
pants or victims—that they knew of—and signed on for other reasons: the
work seemed interesting enough, it was relevant to their academic interests,
or it was simply a decent-­paying job.
Amílcar, a journalism student, came from a large Kaqchikel campesino
family who lived on a coffee plantation in western Guatemala. He was sent
to Guatemala City as a teenager to make money, where he held a variety of
marginal jobs that he found distasteful, including as a private security guard
and a maquila worker. A twist of fate—his family’s involvement in a French
documentary about indigenous traditions, and the filmmaker’s subsequent
interest in supporting the family—allowed Amílcar to quit the maquila and

190  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

attend university. Through conversations with a friend, he began to be inter-
ested in politics; the friend’s mother connected them to Meoño, who offered
Amílcar and his friend positions at the archives. “We thought, ‘Why not?’
And we never, never, never imagined that we were getting ourselves involved
in something so large, so important,” he remembered. Amílcar did enter the
Project with a sense of partisanship; he remembered how, as a child, he and
his family had had to lie down on the floor as passing bullets from guerrilla-­
army skirmishes punched through the walls of their modest home. He also
remembered how soldiers would come to the farm and kick down the plants
his father had sown, force his mother to feed them, and once pointed a gun
at his little brother. “In that moment, I said, ‘I hate the army. And I hate the
police too,’ ” he recalled. But Amílcar’s sense of himself as a political actor
only blossomed fully at the archives, particularly when older workers shared
their stories—“their living knowledge”—about the war. “We have to speak
to people who lived these realities so that we can come to understand them.
It’s better to live and ask questions rather than moving through life dead, as a
corpse,” he reflected. Amílcar now hoped to spend his life asking questions of
himself and others, working “to build a more just, fair country” as a journalist
and filmmaker focused on issues of socioeconomic inequality.23
Sebastián, too, found himself asking questions about his past after begin-
ning at the Project in early 2006. A happy-­go-­lucky jock, Sebastián had no
background in politics. When he was assigned to read parts of the ceh report
in a university class, he “just flipped through it” and “didn’t really think it was
that important.” He was looking for work when a family friend told him about
openings at the archives. Upon being shown the ropes, Sebastián thought,
with trepidation, “This is very heavy work, very sensitive.” But the salary was
good, and so he stayed on, saying, “Bueno, this seems fine, this seems like
any other job—you’re given a task and you try to do the best you can.” Later,
as he gained exposure to the documents and to his fellow workers, he began
to see things differently. Sebastián was clearly still uncomfortable discussing
the war; he used vague phrases to describe insurgent participants (ellos estu-
vieron en muchos rollos) or the war itself (en esos tiempos, tu sabes, los ochentas).
Only late in our interview did he reveal the greatest gift given him by the
archives: knowledge of his father’s past. “My mother had told me that he had
been involved en esos grupos, and that was why he had to leave us,” Sebastián
recalled, though he never knew which group his father had joined, and due
to the positive presence of a stepfather he never keenly felt the absence of a
father figure. But, he said, “I had always felt an uncertainty. I had always won-
dered what had happened con todo este rollo de aquí.” So he started to pepper

ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)   — 191

older colleagues at the Project with questions about their experiences. A year
and a half in, after he had earned sufficient trust, Sebastián’s questions netted
results: it turned out that no fewer than four of his Project counterparts knew
his father from their days in the egp. “So now I know what group he was in!
It makes me want to learn even more,” he exulted. “And now that’s why I like
the work at the Project so much, that’s why I put so much effort into my work.”
For the first time, Sebastián was able to attach his individual experience to
his country’s historical context; by learning more about the egp and the war,
he felt he now had the ability to learn more about himself. Sebastián found
himself returning to his once-­discarded copy of the ceh report and reading it
assiduously. He decided that he wanted to put his law studies to the service of
antipoverty initiatives. “Now that I’ve come here to do this work,” he said, “it’s
opened my eyes further about how something must be done.”24
Others had even more tenuous connections to the war; they grew up in
its midst but had nothing in their histories that could have predicted their
involvement at the Project. Isabel, another usac student in her midtwenties,
had never worked a full-­time job before starting at the archives via a personal
recommendation. She came from a family of middle-­class businesspeople;
her friends were, by her description, “normal” people who worked in banks or
operated small businesses, and after she started at the archives these “normal”
people teased her, saying, “Vos, you’ve become a Communist!” Her interest in
the archives was intellectual; she studied sociology, and she was interested in
what she perceived as a lacuna in the sociological literature, an absence of hu-
man rights analyses in sociological approaches. “The connection is that Gua-
temalan history is a history that shows a consistent denial of human rights,
and that determines social interactions,” she said. “This is a fundamentally
sociological theme.” She was keen to explore human rights analyses “not only
to arrive at prosecutions, or to reveal the truth for its own sake, but rather to
involve distinct social sciences in analyzing human rights in Guatemalan his-
tory.” She aspired to remain detached from her work in the documents, trying
to look at the archives as an “object of study” with a dispassionate eye. In the
future, she hoped to work as a political analyst; “I don’t want to be a human
rights promoter. I want to promote them, but I don’t want to be someone
working in the pdh who just reports on human rights violations. I want to
work in analysis, in political and social analysis of the country.” Isabel wanted
to be a public intellectual—to use her experiences at the archives as a means
of expanding her knowledge of Guatemalan history and one day arriving in a
position of influence.25
Marisol was, like Isabel, a sociology student with no link to the conflict.

192  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

She heard about the Project from a friend who had volunteered there since
its inception; “entering that space and meeting all the compañeros, I fell in
love with the Project,” she remembered. Though no one in her family had
participated in the war, she still entered with certain preconceptions. “In my
house, I was taught that the police are thieves, that you have to be careful
around them, that they can kill you,” she said. Tensions between Marisol and
the pnc agents at the archives threatened to derail her work at various points,
with the agents taking offense at her standoffish attitude. Nonetheless, Mari-
sol rose to a leadership position at the Project, becoming a team head. Her
motivations were varied: at first, what interested her was “the idea of being
able to say to someone, someone who never found out the resting place of a
loved one’s body, where that body is.” Another motivator was the possibility
of understanding the conflict from the perspective of its perpetrators, rather
than from that of its victims. But after several years in the archives, her goals
became “more professional than personal,” she said. “It ceases to be a question
of, ‘I want to know. I want to point fingers. I want to know who did it, who
they were, why they did it, and who told them to do it.’ ” She conceded that
the compulsion to point fingers was “always latent, that’s always present in the
archives,” but now she had other priorities. She had come to value how the ar-
chives contained information that could be analyzed by professional research-
ers from a variety of perspectives—“anthropologically, sociologically, histori-
cally, psychosocially, with a gender focus”—and positioned herself within that
field, choosing to write her undergraduate thesis using documents from the
archives, but about a historical period predating the war. “The most important
thing for me is that the Project is put to the future use of the social sciences,”
Marisol said.26
For Amílcar, Sebastián, Isabel, and Marisol, then, their work at the Project
was transformative or instrumental rather than affirming. Instead of finding in
the archives confirmation for their existing ideas, they found that the archives
exposed them to new knowledge and approaches, providing them with new
perspectives on political engagement and the responsibility of truth-­telling.
The work also altered their senses of themselves; in a not-­so-­subtle act of neo-
liberal subject formation, it gave them a path forward as young professionals—
a way to put their academic studies to use, to advance their career aspirations,
or to link the recovery of historical memory to their own experiences.
In his trilogy of works on memory in Pinochet’s Chile, Steve Stern distin-
guishes between “emblematic memory” and “loose memory”: socially influ-
ential frameworks of meaning versus raw, private personal knowledge that
remains unanchored until individuals can connect these loose memories to

ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)   — 193

a compelling broader experience. He writes that “memory is the meaning
we attach to experience, not simply the recall of the events and emotions of
experience.”27 And for these young workers, the archives indeed gave them
a “memory framework”—a way to plug their half-­remembered, ambient, or
closely guarded childhood experiences into a deeper world of interpretive
meaning and, more important, a praxis. Davíd was able to channel his grief for
a father he never knew into a quest for justice. Sebastián was able to situate his
uncomfortable questions about what happened “in those years” in the histori-
cal context of an intensely ideological struggle with concrete groups and goals
and grievances. Isabel and Marisol were able to bring their research interests
in social conflict to bear upon an initiative that offered them the chance to
lead, analyze, and reflect on their society’s problematics. And, just as for the
older generations at the Project, young workers’ process of engaging with this
memory framework was an arduous one, though for different reasons.

THE LABORS OF YOUTH AND IDENTITY

One obvious tension for young workers was their charged coexistence with
pnc agents. As discussed in chapter 6, older workers initially found it difficult
to work on police territory because years of experience had taught them to see
security forces as the enemy. It had been police agents who had dispersed their
demonstrations, raided their homes, and fired into crowds of strikers with
whom they had walked. And yet, the older workers were able to build peace
with the pnc agents at the archives, coming to realize through conversation,
sharing space, and the documents that the police had been, in a sense, victims
too. But this thaw in relations did not occur to the same extent with younger
workers, some of whom had to be disciplined for wearing T-­shirts bearing anti-
police slogans. Their hostility was occasionally based on lived experience—for
example, when Davíd was once pulled over on the road by pnc agents and
answered their question about his employment with “I work in human rights,”
one agent told the other, “Put something on his record.”28 And Camilo’s activ-
ist group had seen its offices raided by the pnc on multiple occasions.29 But
there were historical dimensions to their animosity as well. If police had, in
the past, harmed their parents or their parents’ friends, how should they posi-
tion themselves toward police agents today, most of whom were not on active
duty during the war? Hoffman writes of the “post-­generation” experience that,
sometimes, “wrestling with shadows can be more frightening, or more con-
fusing, than struggling with solid realities.”30 Youths at the Project struggled
to interact not only with the real pnc agents at the archives but also with the
ghosts of pn agents past, whose deeds they read about in the documents.31

194  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

 Tensions between youths and the pnc agents were also related to growing
pains in the Project’s labor relations, and specifically to the massive expansion
of the team in January 2007, composed mostly of university students. This
produced the feeling of an “invasion” for the pnc agents, who often inter­
preted the presence of so many new people in their space “as an attack on
them,” and distrusted younger workers accordingly.32 Relations worsened
when the agents overheard young workers periodically making derogatory
comments about the police—“that police are thieves, that they’re corrupt,
that sort of thing,” said Ana Corado.33 Marisol was even accused by pnc agents
of tampering with documents, though the allegations were quickly dropped;
“the officials argued that they couldn’t work with me because I didn’t respect
them,” she recalled. Marisol never bothered to make social niceties with the
pnc agents as did the older workers, to whom the documents promised real
answers about their family and friends. “I’m not going to ask them how their
kids are doing,” she said scornfully.34
The amplification of the Project, though, had farther-­reaching ramifica-
tions for labor at the archives—ramifications that would strain social rela-
tions to the breaking point, generate intergenerational conflict, and change
the nature of workers’ engagement with the archives’ recovery. As discussed
in part I, the work at the Project gradually transformed from an artisanal,
collaborative effort into a rationalized, assembly-­line system characterized by
the division of labor into discrete functions: document cleaning, scanning,
description, analysis; investigating cases, writing reports, maintaining infra-
structure, and keeping inventory. Organizing a group of (at its peak) more
than two hundred workers required new management techniques, many of
which did not sit well with a group of activists who, as Simón put it, “are
not people accustomed to staying silent about what they think, or to keeping
their thoughts to themselves.”35 As Amílcar said, “Before, there were only rules
made when they were necessary, there was a lot more tolerance and patience.
Now, everything is becoming a rule, and if you don’t like the rules, too bad.
We’re falling into the same structure as the state, the government—employ-
ees, administrators, bosses. Bureaucracy.”36 Not only a previous era’s leader-
ship modes but also its state forms reproduced themselves at the archives, and
the strong-­willed twentysomethings did not approve.
In early 2007, the Project inaugurated its human resources department.
Workers who formerly could just ask Meoño or Fuentes for the go-­ahead to
miss work for, say, a doctor’s appointment now had to go through a permis-
sions process with a human resources coordinator. While individual table
teams had always had a designated head (responsable de mesa) who served as

ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)   — 195

liaison to the leadership, relations between responsables and their teams had
previously been horizontal and open. Now, as the Project’s affairs were made
more vertical, the responsables came to be seen as bosses, decision makers
privy to information from higher-­ups that they were not to share. Table teams
became separated and compartmentalized, and less exchange of ideas took
place across groups. Those whose labor was channeled into the more rote
tasks—scanning, cleaning, or other jobs that did not involve the analysis of
documents—felt devalued, no matter how often Meoño stressed in meetings
that the Project was like an elaborate machine, with no task more important
than another, that would grind to a halt without any individual component.37
Work relations grew strained, and some blamed the influx of young workers,
who were criticized for being less politically invested in recovering the ar-
chives and diluting the family-­like atmosphere that workers had so valued at
the initiative’s outset.38 “Some people aren’t there to recover historical mem-
ory,” Camilo complained. “They just want to build up professional experience
for their careers.”39
Discontent about the changes found a focal point, one change that par-
ticularly rankled: the introduction of a timbre, or bell, rung to indicate the
beginning of the workday, the limits of the morning coffee break and lunch
hour, and the end of the day. Workers who did not strictly obey the bell were
disciplined. “It’s an insult! You’d expect this kind of treatment in a bank,” said
Héctor.40 Workers who joined the Project out of conciencia were offended to
have their labor regulated as though they were working in a “regular” place
of business. The bell became a stand-­in for larger complaints about the grow-
ing tension between the Project-­as-­human-­rights-­initiative and the Project-­
as-­workplace, and workers were not afraid to speak up when they perceived
bad faith. When the bell was installed, recalled Amílcar, “I said, ‘how terrible,’
because when I worked at the maquila, they would always ring a bell when
it was time to start, time to eat, time to leave.”41 Comparing the Project to a
maquila became a common gripe, with younger workers in particular resisting
the new technologies of labor regulation. Rafael chafed at the idea that the
ex-­militants running the Project were behaving like managers: “It contradicts
the very principles of the revolutionaries themselves.”42
The coordinators, for their part, were sanguine about their new role as
workplace bosses. “Look, I know that the bell is unpleasant,” said Fuentes,
the assistant director. “But if the bell didn’t ring, people would come back to
work fifteen or twenty minutes late from lunch. So, compañeros, excuse me,
but there’s a schedule here.”43 In fact, the workers’ opinionated nature was
consciously factored in by Project leaders as an extra challenge to manage.

196  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

Transforming a ragtag collection of free thinkers into a functioning group of
employees was not a task the coordinators relished, but it was one they at-
tempted to face head-­on. “You’re dealing with people who are, almost by defi-
nition, contestatory—people who protest, people who demand their rights,
who complain, who propose, who think, who are creative,” said Meoño.44
Coordinators valued these qualities but felt they also had to limit them. Not
every decision could be made by consensus as the team became larger, the
work more specialized, and the politics of the archives more complex. While
the Project’s early direction had been sketched out via group brainstorming, it
now would instead, coordinators and international consultants argued, need
to depend upon centralized strategic planning. “This is work that needs to
have a clearly defined strategy, that needs to be well planned-­out, work in
which we each must play a specific role and in which that role must be ful-
filled independently of whether our heads might be filled with a thousand
ideas or a thousand suggestions,” Meoño explained.45
While workers resented this, the coordinators absorbed their invective pa-
tiently. They saw their adoption of managerial notions like productivity and
discipline not as betrayals of their principles but rather as those principles’
purest enactment: only by enforcing dedication to the work would the doc-
uments be preserved for posterity. By making sure no working moment was
wasted, the Project’s leadership could ensure the rescue of the papers, their
use in court, and the ultimate goal: their digitization, thus guaranteeing their
survival and use after the pdh’s fragile tenure expired. Lacking viable avenues
for older modes of political struggle, coordinators focused on preserving the
documents, hoping to leave a legacy for future generations that could not be
crushed or erased. Each lost moment on the job was one fewer document
scanned. And scanning was “the only aspect of this that is irreversible,” said
Meoño, “the aspect where no matter what happens, those documents will
never be lost.” He continued, unapologetically:
And to arrive at that point, we need to achieve of a whole series of goals. So
concepts like productivity are also necessary here. Concepts like efficiency,
like effectiveness. So discipline, productivity, efficiency, effectiveness—
these are ideas that, many times, clash with the more liberal, open, oppo-
sitional thinking at the Project. I would prefer, a thousand times over, to
be forced to confront this dynamic—regardless of who says “this son of
a bitch, he’s become an exploiter,” or “this asshole is like a factory owner
now.” I know that there are people who say this, who call me “Maquila
Meoño.” I prefer to confront this every day than to hire a group of obedient,

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 uncomplaining people. Why? Because that, too, comes with limitations
in thinking. I think that, at the end of the day, these contradictions and
conflicts are healthy—it’s something we can salvage. . . . Because the other
option would be to replace our thoughtful, argumentative people with obe-
dient, submissive people who don’t think.46
Team members had already accustomed themselves to hearing the guerrillero
speak like an archivist; now, too, they heard him speak like management. It
was uncomfortable, and it did not feel particularly revolutionary. Coordina-
tors had to play varied roles in order to shepherd the Project along: at differ-
ent points, circumstances demanded that they be colleagues, bosses, friends,
archivists, historians, therapists, fund-­raisers, political operators, managers,
troubleshooters, diplomats, and activists. They could not please everyone, but
the Project’s leaders attempted to calm the waters where possible, motivated
by being able to leave behind something concrete that could never be de-
stroyed. The contribution they attempted would be not only a repository of
documents preserved for posterity but also a group of engaged young leaders
who would, they hoped, spend their lives fighting for social justice in one way
or another.

LEADERSHIP AND THE NEXT GENERATION

One way that coordinators fused the priorities Meoño described—to get the
work done while also promoting creative thinking among their young work-
force—was to create spaces in which motivated younger employees could
assume midlevel leadership positions. In November 2006, a group of under-­
thirty workers were promoted to table team leader positions, and some were
invited to collaborate in the drafting of what would eventually become the
initiative’s first public report, released in March 2009. Young leaders were
defensive, quick to point out that their new positions were no acts of char-
ity or social engineering; instead, as Isabel put it, they were won “por puño
y espada” and kept based on results.47 But the coordinators did consciously
nurture selected young workers with an eye toward their future potential; as
one said, each young person occupying a leadership position was “a promise
for the future.”48 “For me, it has been a beautiful experience to work alongside
so many young people and to feel like an important seed has been planted,”
said María Elena, formerly of the egp. “I don’t want to say that these are
the only young people in Guatemala with these capacities—surely there are
many more. But here we have more than one hundred youths, both men and
women—and many of them are women in positions of responsibility, who are

198  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

doing their jobs extremely well.”49 As she pointed out, many of the students
at the archives had more education than older workers like herself who had,
instead, lifetimes’ worth of nonacademic experience. Allowing them to take
charge of aspects of the work could produce an “amalgam,” in her words, of
technical expertise and living history.
No amount of academic training, however, could prepare a college student
to lead a team that included people decades his or her senior who had lived
la violencia firsthand. “It’s hard; it’s very hard,” reflected Isabel. “I’ve been in
charge of people who know more than I do.” And she knew that these wise
subordinates were not always thrilled to have her calling the shots. “It’s a func-
tion of age; older people will say, ‘Who does this girl think she is, bossing me
around? I know more than she does, I lived this history, I was a victim.’ ”50
When Simón was made a team leader, he felt “bad vibes” from some other
team members, who not only had been at the archives for longer but also
felt that their life experiences made them more qualified to lead.51 It was not
uncommon to hear gossip about the young leaders being “upstarts,” “self-­
important,” or “disrespectful” of their elders. But though the tension between
training and life experience occasionally flared up, in most cases older work-
ers were gratified to see the next generation at work. “For the country, really,
it’s very satisfying to be able to count on young leaders who have tools and
capabilities that are far more . . . developed, let’s say, than ours were,” María
Elena said.52 While the positions were tough, they did allow youths like Isabel,
Marisol, and Simón—all, now, invested in connecting archives, history, and
politics—to develop leadership skills that would serve them, and society, well.
“Personally, it’s helped me to develop some mediating abilities—to be direct-
ing tasks, but also to be managing personalities that are very distinct, and are
very complicated in most cases,” said Simón.53 “Those of us who are young,”
argued Isabel, proved themselves “because we’ve done the work well; because
we’ve had a positive leadership role; because we’ve asserted ourselves and our
opinions; because we’ve not only listened to what we’re told, but we’ve made
our own proposals.”54
The developing leadership of the “ ‘post’ generation” was, however, contin­
gent—its very essence as postconflict was deeply relational, impossible to un-
derstand without consideration of what came before. At the Project, this rela-
tionship between generations took concrete form and was critical to building
youth leadership. Intergenerational sharing—of war stories, experience, polit-
ical opinions, wisdom, past mistakes—was cited by all the young workers with
whom I spoke as fundamental to their understandings of their place in society
and their dreams moving forward. Sebastián’s case, in which he learned of his

ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)   — 199

father’s identity after conversations with his older counterparts, was the most
obviously transformative. But the oral transmission of history took various
forms. Intergenerational collaboration was key to the interpretation of the
documents; if a young worker came across a photograph of an early-­1980s
demonstration, for example, she would ask the older members of her team
whether they remembered the march, if they had participated, and what the
political climate was like at the time. Older workers’ experience was critical
to younger ones’ ability to situate and analyze the documents.
Working alongside their elders had impressionistic effects, too. Marisol
found that “the most interesting life experience” she had had at the Project
was, simply, coexisting with so many historical actors. “People have shared
their stories with me, stories of survival—and that’s a motivation for me, to
think that when I am the same age as some of these people, that I will still
be fighting for what I believe in, that I will still be fighting against injustice.”
She pointed out that the inequality to which the insurgency had responded
with violence persisted; “there are just different ways to fight that now,” she
said. “So if that’s still their fight, and if the archives can help accomplish that,
then that’s very encouraging, especially for young people like me who can’t
imagine living through what they lived through.”55 Working with respected
ex-­militants allowed Marisol to imagine for herself a life of similar dedication.
She and the other young women also took heart in the fact that the ma­
jority of Project leaders were female. “That motivates you a lot, to know that it
isn’t just the same old historical figure in charge of you—an old, white man—
but that they’re women, women who have fought, and that’s why they have
the positions they have,” said Isabel.56 Isabel worked closely with Esperanza,
a pgt ex-­militant whose process of radicalization in the mid-­1970s led her to
split with a longtime partner who disapproved of her political activity. “His
idea was that we should just keep studying, that we should prepare ourselves
academically, and that when I got my diploma we would get married, be-
cause women are meant to be in the home, and the diplomas are meant to be
hung on the wall,” Esperanza remembered. “I said bueno, this is not for me!”57
Stories like Esperanza’s, told together, presented a living portrait of struggle
and social change refracted through class, race, gender, and politics. Younger
workers’ exposure to individuals they identified as fighters let them position
themselves and their aspirations along a homegrown historical continuum of
oppositional thinking.
Camilo, for his part, idolized the Left’s martyrs, some of whom had been
close friends of his parents: labor lawyer Mario López Larrave, student leader
Robin García, and aeu president Oliverio Castañeda de León, who led the

200  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

1978 protests against Lucas García before being gunned down by security
forces. When Camilo came across a report in the archives that recounted
Castañeda’s killing in dry, bureaucratic language, he laid down his head and
wept. “It touched me very deeply [to find that document],” he remembered.
“For me, and for other people in the youth movement, Oliverio is like—fuck,
this guy was twenty-­three years old and he had the government on its knees,
and that’s why they killed him. For me, he’s like an icon.” When Camilo had
started out in activism years before, he found himself “really looking for an
example, someone to look up to, someone’s struggle to model my own after.”
Surrounded by older veterans whose actions he could assess with increasing
maturity, though, he became able to balance respect for his heroes with an
ability to draw inspiration from within. “After a while, you start to realize that
it’s inside you. I don’t need these points of reference; truthfully, it depends on
me, and on an incredible number of young people,” he reflected. “You can’t
only depend on Che Guevara or Subcomandante Marcos; I can do things on
my own merits.” Camilo believed that the archives could empower others, too:
“If organizations of young people can have access to these materials in order
to understand how the interpersonal relations and social relations of today
are based in their history, or if they’re able to understand the historical roots
of the crises in youth organizations and how that is based in past repression
against the revolutionary movement, I think that will be a tool they’ll be able
to use to focus their struggle.”58
However, young workers, for all their inspiration and eagerness, were
keenly aware of their minority status. If the human rights sector was a small
cross section of the population, then its youth contingent was smaller still.59
Its members tended to stick together. “Most of my friends are involved in hu-
man rights in some way or another,” said Héctor. “Everyone has their circles;
it’s natural that you have friends who see things more or less the way you do.
That’s your world! It’s your life. You can’t sit down with some airheaded girl
in Zone 10 and talk about shoes and cellphones and that kind of bullshit.”60
The Project’s youths tended to define themselves as distinct from what they
described as “most” middle-­class young people—they saw themselves, rightly
or wrongly, as more enlightened, more engaged, less selfish, less materialis-
tic. “When I talk to young people who are roughly my age, they have a totally
different vision—very individualistic, seeking economic advancement, and
always having this same idea about making more money, no matter what’s
happening to the other people around them,” said Amílcar.61 Project youths’
exposure to the archives strengthened their sense of difference vis-­à-­vis their
peers and furthered their resolve to continue political work, but they worried

ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)   — 201

that the rest of society would meet their efforts with indifference. As Amílcar
continued:
What I see in these papers shows me much courage, much bravery on the
part of the people who fought. And today, you don’t see this bravery or
courage—instead, people are living in a peaceful, conformist world, think-
ing of themselves and their own lives rather than of the lives of others. . . .
And so this work in the archives gives me more strength with which to
express myself, because how is it that people don’t complain or fight for
themselves now, when these people in the documents sacrificed their
whole lives? It seems to me that those of us who are growing and learning
about the history of our country, touching those papers—we are building
consciousness about what happened, and thinking about trying to build
something. That’s the impact the archives have had on me.62
This was why older workers so valued the opportunity to share their ex-
periences with their “post-­generation” counterparts. “It isn’t as though we
pass them a torch and we tell them, ‘Okay, it’s your turn!’ ” said María Elena.
“But I do see that, even with the great deficiencies and limitations in political
development that this country’s new generations face, we do find ourselves
here with young people who have a lot to give, and who are committed to
giving.”63 In many cases, however, ex-­militants spoke of the coming genera-
tions of progressives cautiously—with optimism but also with realism, a heavy
sense that the war’s stifling effects on militancy and creativity would not dis-
sipate so quickly. Young Guatemalans wishing to make a difference had the
odds stacked against them; “we know perfectly well that the damage done
isn’t going to repair itself today, or tomorrow; that its effects will maybe last
through the third, fourth, or even fifth generations,” Esperanza reflected.64
It was true: the ripple effects of state repression had contracted or poisoned
the spaces available for young people to explore, express, and work toward
their visions for a more just Guatemala. Attempts at building progressive
movements within the political party system had thus far failed; the urng
party was reduced to two seats in the 2007 elections, and the experiments of
the Gathering for Guatemala and Winaq parties garnered even sparser sup-
port.65 The aeu, a focal point of youth organizing during the 1970s and 1980s,
fell victim to infighting by the late 1990s and was even rumored to have been
infiltrated by organized crime.66 Organized labor never recovered its 1970s-­era
strength. The influence of the Maya movement had waned somewhat from its
high point in the aftermath of the Peace Accords. And differences of opinion
regarding ideology and strategy, along with held-­over resentments from the

202  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

conflict, plagued efforts to reconstitute a functional Left in peacetime. “It
was the army’s masterwork,” Camilo said. “The strategy wasn’t just to win the
war; it was to ultimately end the Left,” using infiltration and betrayal as stra-
tegic tools to irreparably shatter activists’ lifelong ties of trust.67 The ultimate
goal, therefore—for veterans and younger workers—was to be able to imagine
these young leaders at the forefront of new, innovative movements for social
and economic justice. Intergenerational relationship-­building proved a way,
for those on both ends of the exchange, to imagine the future of progressive
politics. How could previous struggles be continued in a new era? How could
modern youths fight for change without repeating the errors of the past? As
Raúl put it, “We need to have an alternative for our current age.”68 Critically
thinking young people being who they were, however, progressives across the
generations did not necessarily agree on the nature of the path forward.

PROGRESSIVE POLITICS IN NEOLIBERAL GUATEMALA

It was auspicious that nobody at the Project could agree on whether or not
the initiative to rescue the archives was inherently political or leftist. Was
working at the archives actually part of a vision for change? Was the Project,
as some claimed, a continuation of past struggles when armed conflict was no
longer a thinkable option, or was it just another reminder of ideological de-
feat? Precisely what, in sharing experiences between generations, were both
sets of individuals seeking to build? “This is a job,” said Isabel. “It isn’t an act
of political militancy. . . . But in a country as politically polarized as ours, it
is a left-­wing project.”69 Most workers I asked tended to argue that although
the Project included many left-­wing individuals, its goals were nonpartisan.
If the purpose was to uncover recent history and to ensure that human rights
abusers faced punishment, then its priorities were only leftist or progressive
to the extent that leftists and progressives had suffered abuses disproportion-
ately. “The investigation is an investigation of human rights violations that
were committed by the National Police, and that’s not left-­wing, that’s just
reality,” said Marisol.70
The pdh was by no means a radical institution. Moreover, because the om-
budsman Morales came, over his two terms in office, to be viewed as a corrupt
political operator with ties to the political Right, neither did the Project con-
sistently find friends on the traditional Left. “Unfortunately, the ‘official’ Left
in Guatemala has not understood this project,” said Meoño, charging that the
factions emerging from the urng were too preoccupied with their potential
legal liability for the 3 percent of human rights violations (according to the
ceh) committed by the guerrillas to unequivocally support justice-­seeking

ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)   — 203

initiatives.71 Others saw different reasons for the Project’s uneven relationship
with progressive sectors: “There are people on the Left who say this project
is bullshit,” said Rafael. “You have to think about who these people are, and
why. Maybe because psychologically, they don’t want to relive that history.
Maybe because they have other interests. Most of the people I know, who crit-
icize the Project, it’s because they don’t want to remember this past, because
they don’t want to experience that loss again, and so they don’t want to fight
for justice.”72 Again, then, the Project was shaped by what had come before.
Its young workers, endowed with educations, relevant work experience, and
older mentors, were better situated than most to promote change, but they
were saddled with old expectations and conflicting opinions about the path
ahead. Many veterans suspected that their own ideological baggage had al-
ready dangerously constricted the space available to subsequent generations.
“Let the young have their own conflicts,” said Jacinto. “I think that’s import-
ant, so that they learn to move past them. Our ways of thinking don’t hold true
anymore in a globalized world. The only thing [youths] need to figure out is
how to deal with it. But we can’t tell the young people to launch an agrarian
reform.”73 But here, too, the defeats of the past wore heavy on members of
older generations, constricting their political imaginaries. Why not tell young
people to launch an agrarian reform, a goal toward which campesino groups
like cuc and conic (the National Indigenous and Campesino Coordinating
Council) continued to work?
Older veterans could not even agree on whether or not today’s youths were
the inheritors of past struggles; some were cynical about postconflict youths’
ability to serve as new incarnations of their own radical selves. “In terms of
continuity with these young people, I don’t think there’s really anything that
ties us together, because the university youths of that era were clearer about
what they wanted and how they wanted it,” said Rosario, a former organizer
with Guatemala City’s municipal workers’ union. “Today, I feel like there’s
just a little trace left behind that today’s young people want to pick up—but
they haven’t had any experience, any experience of struggle, like that which
the university students went through back then.”74 A few older workers saw
their youthful counterparts as appropriating a revolutionary discourse that
did not correspond to their lived experience. “I think that what’s happening
is that many young people on the left arrived late to the process,” observed
Humberto. “So they lived it, in a way. But they are romantically thinking that
another moment will arrive when they too will be able to take up arms. It’s ro-
manticism, nothing more.”75 While some younger staffers at the archives, like
Rafael, expressed their willingness to participate in a future armed struggle,

204  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

those who had actually lived through war saw no benefit in the idea. “Arming
ourselves and starting another war isn’t going to solve anything,” said one.
“We’ll just be arming the dead, arming bitterness.”76
One of Guatemala’s highest-­profile youth activist groups, Sons and Daugh-
ters for Identity and Justice and Against Forgetting and Silence (hijos), was
a flash point for the debate over revolutionary inheritance.77 This group used
bold, attention-­getting tactics: staging annual counterprotests on Army Day,
during military parades, that involved throwing red paint on the cadets to
symbolize spilled blood; using graffiti campaigns; demonstrating at gener-
als’ homes; and, one year, marching into army barracks to confront officers
they denounced as war criminals. Members of hijos had worked at the ar-
chives over the years, but for those who had weathered the war, such provoc-
ative actions seemed flippant, even dangerous. “For people today to stop the
Politécnica students and throw red paint on them, I view that badly. I see it
as a lack of respect. And at any moment, the military could make us pay for
it,” said Humberto. “You think that in those years, if a group of young people
had tossed red paint on a bunch of soldiers, that the army would have let
them go free, that they would have let them live? Not a chance.”78 And while
some believed in the importance of passing the torch to the next generation,
others feared for younger activists’ safety, worrying that their appropriation
of revolutionary discourse would invite deadly retribution. Dolores, formerly
of the egp, never told her daughters about her involvement, “because I’m
scared that they’ll get involved in something. When my daughter joined the
aeu, I sat down with her and told her not to. Because you don’t want history
to repeat itself.”79 This was more than skepticism or a sense that postwar pol-
itics was only a watered-­down version of battles past; it reflected a fear that
counter­insurgent tactics could be reinstituted at a moment’s notice, wiping
out another generation of young idealists.
In the end, young workers’ political decisions were theirs alone; whether
their elders consecrated them as the new generation of rebels would not neces­
sarily affect how they chose to move forward in their lives. They had been
amply exposed to the history of the war and the counsel of their elders, and
they would decide what to adopt and what to leave behind. What visions
did they have, then, for their society’s transformation? While some claimed
that they would join another revolution, none seriously proposed initiating
one. Instead, most of those with whom I spoke hoped, if ambivalently, to work
toward social justice as professionals—journalists, educators, researchers, or
lawyers. “I can’t tell other people how to think, but I can act in such a way that
those other people can have better opportunities in their lives,” said Amílcar,

ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)   — 205

FIG. 7.1  Every 30 June, traditionally Army Day, activists hold a counterdemonstration
demanding justice for the war crimes of state security forces. They call their campaign
the “memory offensive.” Photograph by James Rodríguez, mimundo.org. Used by
permission of the photographer.

the day laborer turned aspiring filmmaker. “I still have some problems with
this, because I’m still not convinced that the state and the government provide
us with the space to change things in this way,” he said. “I’m not sure. Some-
times I do feel that if I work with the government, all that’s going to happen
is the consolidation of the system we’re currently living.”80
Whether raised with Marx in the home or exposed to it later, these young
activists struggled with the contradictions of capitalism. How could historical
memory be rescued in an economic climate where its value seemed to di­
minish daily? “Youths are also the seed of capitalism,” argued Camilo, who was
cynical about his peers’ capacity to break free. He argued that young people
were products of “the system” to an even greater extent than were the older
generations who modeled its hierarchies and social relations. A young student
living at home while working at the Project, incurring few costs while making
a decent salary, could spend his or her earnings on a life of relative leisure,
all while accruing the social capital of having worked on an internationally
recognized human rights initiative. “I think it’s good that young people are
working at the Project, but it means that the process is going to be truncated,
because they are products of the system. A young person who lives at home
and spends their money on clothes and CDs acts against historical memory

206  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

because they’re reproducing the system” instead of devoting themselves to
shattering it, Camilo said.81 A young Guatemalan could self-­define as a revo-
lutionary, but how could she live a revolutionary life?
Project youths also had mixed feelings about the archives’ dependence
on foreign assistance. While they appreciated other countries’ support, they
resented the “paternalism” and “agenda” of that aid, as well as foreign con-
sultants’ directives about how the work should be conducted.82 “There is an
attitude of conquest, the idea that they want to liberate these countries af-
flicted by state terror . . . because they bear some guilt or responsibility for our
suffering,” said Isabel.83 On top of that, young workers wondered what they
actually could build in the context of Guatemala’s semifeudal economy and its
place in the world capitalist system. Archival rescue would neither break up
the countryside’s massive agriplantations, nor force foreign mining companies
to shutter their operations ravaging indigenous community lands (rural anti­
mining activists were doing this work on the ground, at great personal risk
and often with the help of other ex-­guerrillas), nor stem the narco violence
produced by the global North’s unslakable thirst for drugs. As such, young
activists were “frustrated by Guatemalan political conditions” and doubted
whether their efforts would take root.84 Everyday citizens did not have the lux-
ury of immersion in memory and archives, many felt; instead, “they just want
to be safe in the streets, they don’t want to be murdered for their cellphones.”85
But in a world of difficult questions and intractable problems, the archives
did provide these young Guatemalans a means, however imperfect, of work-
ing toward something they saw as broadly positive: a deeper social engage-
ment with the past. For all the tensions between the Project-­as-­human rights
initiative and the Project-­as-­workplace, the limitations posed by inequality
and a fragmented Left, and the scars of the recent past, the consensus among
young workers was that their efforts mattered, that history counted, and that
there was a tangible value to researching the war. And they were clear-­eyed
about it; these amateur historians and archivists did not, for the most part,
reify “history” and “memory” as fetishes with value unto themselves. Instead,
they saw the labor of engaging with history as a goal-­oriented task with con-
crete outcomes. In the legal sphere, “if we get a single successful case out of all
this work, it will all have been worth it,” said Rafael.86 In terms of recovering
historical knowledge, Marisol commented, “You can go to any public list of
victims and read it, you can read two hundred, five hundred, two thousand
names of victims, as many as you want. But you can’t open a book and find
the names of two hundred perpetrators. So if you’re helping to build that list
of perpetrators—for me, it isn’t exactly comforting, that wouldn’t be the right

ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)   — 207

word, but it is an accomplishment.”87 In matters archival, Simón attested, their
work “can contribute to a change in the way that our society values archives,”
thus opening doors for the rescue of other bodies of documents replete with
forgotten histories.88 And in looking to the future, these young adults who
spent their days poring over records of repression and resistance knew that
their country could have no way forward unless it acquired the ability to look
back. “I think the work is a contribution to transformation in this country. . . .
Not only do we want to put people in jail, but we want to make sure this
history is not repeated,” said Camilo. “The fact of judging the criminals isn’t
going to change anything—it only guarantees that these events won’t happen
again.”89 Whether true or not, it was a powerful aspiration.

¿VÁMONOS PATRIA A CAMINAR?

Guatemala’s statistical indicators of economic inequality, crime, and social

dislocation usually made optimism a scarce commodity.90 More than that,
however, the legacies of political repression had had a powerful dampening
effect on how Guatemalans expressed hope, emotion, excitement, or aspi-
rations, from national politics all the way down to the individual and family
levels.91 As Meoño put it, “We Guatemalans are introverted, tight-­lipped, and
withdrawn compared to Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, Hondurans, or Mexicans.
It’s our way of being: reserved, introverted, but above all . . . mistrustful. We
repress ourselves; we say to ourselves, ‘It’s better to be this way, it will keep
us out of trouble.’ ”92 Many remarked to me that long-­term planning was an
almost unheard-­of modality at various levels of society—organizationally as
much as personally—because the dark past served as an object lesson in the
wisdom of living for the moment. Getting one’s hopes up for tomorrow was a
risky proposition. “These archives show us, with documentary evidence, in-
formation that can help to explain why we are the way we are,” said Meoño.93
But this was not all the pn archives had to show, because for all the dis-
agreements and rancor that reared their heads over the course of formulating,
precisely, a long-­term plan for the rescue of the documents, everyone agreed
on one point: the archives, and the history they told, were critical for the
future. As such, workers and those in the Project’s greater orbit spoke of the
archives with an enthusiasm rarely applied elsewhere. “What I think is that
you always have to look for the positive,” said Marisol. “We’ve gotten to where
we are now, after two years, in spite of many blows. At first we thought the
Project would only last for six months. It’s always been unstable. So we think,
we’ve been here for two years! And it might be three years!”94 And the Project
did last for three years, and then four, and beyond, even amid institutional up-

208  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

heaval. The personnel roster took a beating in December 2007, when the pdh
refused to renew the contracts of some thirty employees as part of a power
struggle between the Project’s internal leadership and the ombudsman’s office.
But even this strike at the heart of workers’ solidarity was weathered, because
of the promise that the archives—and, principally, its staff and the capacity
they had built—were seen to embody. “Even if the group of people left here is
only forty, fifty, or sixty people,” Marisol argued, “those people are going to do
something great for this country.”95 This was exactly the gamble that coordi-
nators were taking with their young staffers.
The work at the archives—the embodied experience of dealing with paper
cadavers—was not easy, even for members of the “post-­generation.” It had the
same impact on them as it did on their elders, as Amílcar attested:
Reading for five, six hours straight is difficult—reading in the archives, I
mean. You get breaks. Two straight hours are okay, with a break—but the
next two hours? And the problem is that it never changes. You’re reading
the same things—reports of kidnappings, tortures, things like that—and
you’re reading it constantly. It produces a psychological fatigue—not a
physical fatigue, but a psychological fatigue, which is much worse. And
you’re wearing a lab coat, a mask, a hood—it’s depressing, it’s so hot. Some-
times you just want to take it off, you feel like you’re drowning in that mask.
But it’s tiring mainly because of the content. Sometimes you dream that
you’re being attacked by the police, or that there are thieves chasing after
you, and these dreams are caused by the documents one reads. . . . A person
who started work in January 2006 is not going to be able to work the same
way as a person who starts later, because they will have an accumulation of
this problem. I have this problem, it’s like a disturbance—a buildup of ca-
davers, tortures, and all that, and the anger and frustration that produces,
and then you get up the next day and you have to do it all over again. And
after a while you come to accept it as a routine, which is also a problem. . . .
Sometimes I dream that someone arrives and touches me, and then I am
paralyzed and can’t breathe. Or else someone shoots me in the head, or in
the chest, and then I can’t move. And these images come directly from the
descriptions of crimes I read about in the archives. It is a painful feeling.96
But young workers were sustained through this labor by what they had
in common: a sense of themselves as a generation in transition. They felt
a responsibility—a sense that they needed to do memory work in order to
bridge the gap between the “living history” of their mentors and the lives of
those today growing up in a climate of historical amnesia. “Nothing is going

ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)   — 209

to change overnight,” said Sebastián. “We need a lot of time, we need to raise
the consciousnesses of those who come after us.”97 As Fuentes, the Project’s
assistant director, put it:
The decisions of other types will be theirs, but if they have this knowledge
and these experiences from the archives, that positive and negative bag-
gage, it can serve them well. Because this country deserves better luck. It
can’t be possible that Guatemala is fatally condemned to live as the victim
of fourteen families who have their army, their police, their gringo and
narcotrafficking friends, and who can keep the rest of the country living in
subhuman conditions.98
Their time at the archives would galvanize these twentysomethings in a
variety of ways. For young workers who saw themselves as following in their
parents’ footsteps, working at the archives helped them weave the loose mem-
ories of their childhoods into a socially meaningful, historically contextual-
ized framework. “It makes a real impression to see in the documents that this
was all true, that the stories I’d been hearing for my whole life weren’t just
stories,” said Héctor.99 For others less directly affected, the archives offered
new ways of conceiving of social science research, human rights advocacy,
and activism. They were interested in bringing war criminals to justice, and
in writing the history of the armed conflict, to be sure. But they were also
interested in writing other stories: sociological studies of crime and crimi­
nals; analyses of gender and institutions; histories of the state and of the links
between bureaucracy and social control; studies of different regions and lo-
calities; examinations of the evolution of mentalities and social imaginaries
across space and time; and, with a host of additional research avenues made
available by the police archives, innumerable stories more.
What they wanted was to make history, in every sense of the word. They
wanted to unearth history; to write history; to participate in an archival re-
covery initiative of indisputable historical importance; to connect the old Left
to new ideas; and to evoke in their fellow citizens an awareness of history’s
value and of why recent history could not be repeated. This was how they
would heed Otto René Castillo’s call to pull up the colonels by their roots.
Young Project workers saw the archives as having transformative potential,
and were eager to do the necessary work. If they were to succeed at the task,
however, they would need to train their eyes not only on the National Police
archives but beyond, to other repositories of forgotten records elsewhere in
Guatemala. And major hurdles remained in their path.

210  —  CHAPTER SEVEN

 PART IV PASTS PRESENT AND THE
FUTURE IMPERFECT
 ei ght CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT
CAN BE SAID, AND DONE

Two men are on the beach catching crabs. One of them has a bucket
with a very secure lid so the crabs won’t get out, but the other one’s
bucket is open. “Aren’t you worried your crabs will escape?” asks the
first man. The other replies, calmly, “Oh no, these are Guatemalan
crabs. Whenever one tries to climb up and out, the other ones just
pull it back down again.”
—Guatemalan joke

T
o extend its reach and influence, the Project for the Recovery of the
National Police Historical Archives would need to transcend its be-
ginnings. While the emergency judicial order secured in 2005 allowed
the work to take place, it was an impossibly threadbare legal framework for an
initiative aspiring to permanently protect the pn’s rich archival production.
The fact remained, too, that the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office (pdh),
still the archives’ institutional host, was hardly in the business of adminis-
tering state records—and for good reason. Millions of the documents had
been digitized, but many tens of millions more awaited preservation, and the
clock was ticking. And the largesse of the international community, which
had allowed the Project to evolve from a pipe dream, had sustained the effort
for some time. But would it always continue to do so? In many respects, and
despite the herculean labor to make it otherwise, several years into the Proj-
ect’s existence the warehoused documents were as vulnerable as they had ever
been. The Project’s flanks remained exposed, and its members knew it.
Despite this tenuous state of affairs on the ground, however, the Project
became a phenomenon on the international stage. From its inception, the
idea of rescuing the archives generated tremendous enthusiasm from inter-
national ngos and friendly foreign governments, and by 2007 the Project
had expanded to proportions that were mammoth by local standards. At its
height, it employed more than two hundred staffers, while the national ar-
chives, the agca, limped along with fewer than twenty-­five people managing
its five hundred years’ worth of documentary patrimony. The Project’s annual
operating budget grew to 12 million quetzales, or about US$1.5 million; the
agca’s budget was 500,000 quetzales, not counting staff salaries.1 A darling
of the human rights world, the Project built relationships with such far-­flung
archival recovery and memory efforts as the Iraq Memory Foundation, the
Documentation Center of Cambodia, Archivists without Borders, Chile’s Vi-
cariate of Solidarity, Paraguay’s Archives and Documentation Center for the
Defense of Human Rights, and Argentina’s Provincial Commission for Mem-
ory. The archives were featured in several documentary films and even in a
novel, Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s El material humano.2
Importantly, however, Project leaders were not content to simply reap the
rewards of international interest for their initiative’s exclusive benefit. Once
the Project had built its own momentum, it sought ways of sharing its state-­of-­
the-­art equipment and expertise, self-­consciously attempting to provoke a sea
change in how state institutions, private organizations, and the educational
system conceived of archival preservation and access. For example, the Project
lent its scanners for the digitizing of some 400,000 pages of adoption records
from the Secretariat of Social Welfare (Secretaría de Bienestar Social [sbs]),
dating from 1978 through 1986; the sbs archives documented cases of children
abducted from left-­wing parents by the military during the war and placed on
the international adoption market.3 Taken for forcibly disappeared, some of
these children would, it was hoped, eventually be reunited with their families,
as Salvadoran and Argentine children had. Other collaborations abounded:
the Project accepted the Ministry of Culture’s invitation to participate in draft-
ing a proposal to develop a stronger legal foundation for documentary preser-
vation.4 Different municipalities, such as the city of Flores, solicited help from
the Project to organize their own records, as did state dependencies like the
Youth and Adolescent Appeals Court (Sala de Apelaciones de Niñez y Adoles-
cencia) and the Property and Real Estate Registry (Registro de la Propiedad
y Inmueble). The Bomberos Voluntarios, Guatemala City’s firefighters, also
sought assistance in grappling with their records. Here, the two efforts were
naturally consonant—the Bomberos usually arrived first at crime scenes, to
collect the bodies, and as such their records had the potential to shed new
light on urban killings during the war. Along similar lines, the Project struck
up research-­sharing partnerships with the Forensic Anthropology Foundation
of Guatemala (fafg) and the National Reparations Program (pnr) in order
to, respectively, help identify bodies excavated from urban mass graves and

214  —  CHAPTER EIGHT

bolster victims’ claims for reparations.5 And the Project not only pitched in
on like-­minded initiatives and accepted others’ requests for help, but crea­
tively generated ways of making its own interventions into national archival
culture. Its archivists worked with the University of San Carlos to develop a
diploma program combining instruction in archival science and human rights
research, to better stock the country with young professionals prepared to
handle records of similar importance; its National Advisory Board worked to
draft a new national archives law to replace the obsolete Decree-­Law 17-­68.6
“The Project is converting itself into an archival reference point, and people
are starting to ask us to help them out,” said Fuentes. “We are contributing
in that direction, and let’s hope that this translates someday into an archival
politics at the state level.”7
Indeed, the Project came to spark, or to intersect with, a whole constel-
lation of post-­2005 initiatives surrounding citizens’ access to state records,
including efforts to push for the declassification of military records from the
war. Two years after the appearance of the pn archives, then interior minister
Adela de Torrebiarte assigned two staffers to begin the task of cleaning and or-
ganizing seventy thousand abandoned ministry files, dating from 1600 to 1983
and including penitentiary records, land distribution titles, and censuses from
the days of the Central American Republic.8 Another campaign, which began
even before the signing of the Peace Accords, was won three years after the
discovery of the police archives: Congress approved the Free Access to Public
Information Law in September 2008.9 It entered into force in April 2009,
and though its implementation was bedeviled by official intransigence and a
lack of preparation on the part of individual state dependencies, its passage
nevertheless represented a major step forward in the state’s archival practice.10
Interestingly, the push for the law was led not by human rights activists,
though they were involved, but by journalists and lawyers seeking greater
transparency in the management of state funds and the conduct of electoral
politics.11 This was not to say that the law did not reflect other concerns; it
stipulated that “in no case can information regarding investigations of human
rights violations, or crimes against humanity, be classified as confidential or
restricted-­access.”12 However, this relative divorce between the efforts of orga-
nizations like gam and sedem to secure access to records about war crimes,
and the media and anticorruption ngos’ audit-­oriented focus on government
accountability, spoke to a certain fragmentation of priorities among factions
of civil society.13 (And neither side, until the Project learned its lesson the hard
way, showed any interest in involving archivists.) But while the protagonists
may have been different, the opposition was the same: Efraín Ríos Montt’s frg

CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE SAID   — 215

party, which had long controlled Congress, and the military, which appealed
again to the protection of secreto de estado. As Silvio René Gramajo Valdés
writes, “We must not forget that the armed forces have powerful reasons for
opposing the [access to information] initiative.”14
Other post-­2005 archival access initiatives were more expressly political.
Much discussion in these years centered around four specific documents:
Plan Ixil, Plan Sofía, Plan Victoria, and Plan Firmeza, all early-­1980s military
action plans for counterinsurgency operations in the province of El Quiché.
The Association for Justice and Reconciliation (ajr), along with the Center for
Human Rights Legal Action (caldh), had long fought for the official release of
these plans, though unofficial versions of several of them already circulated.15
But the effort to declassify these documents faced a familiar set of obstacles:
an endless succession of amparos, or injunctions, filed by Ríos Montt’s lawyers
insisting that the plans’ surrender would violate Article 30 of the constitution
and its secreto de estado provision. Each time one of Ríos Montt’s injunctions
was thrown out of court, his lawyers would file another to delay the case.
When, finally, the ajr and caldh won their appeal in Guatemala’s highest
court, army authorities argued that two of the four plans had been destroyed,
and thus could not be turned over as per the court’s order. Defense minister
Abraham Valenzuela reported that the documents, like some of the Guate­
malans whose lives were documented in them, had simply “disappeared.”16
Supporters of the counterinsurgency plans’ release had reason to be frus-
trated: President Colom had made an unprecedented promise a year earlier,
prompted by the success of the Project, and activists wanted results, even if
they knew better than to expect them. In 2008, on 25 February—the National
Day of Dignity for the Victims of the Armed Conflict—Colom made the jaw-­
dropping announcement that he was ordering the opening of all the military’s
archives. “We want truth and justice,” Colom indicated, acknowledging that
“reconciliation” would probably prove impossible. “We will make all of the
military’s archives public, so that the truth can be known.”17 Colom’s inspira-
tion was clear: from day one, he indicated that the ideal approach for manag-
ing the army records would be to pass them into pdh custody, in order that
pdh staffers—veterans of the Project—could commence a recovery initiative
along the same lines as that of the police archives. It was a stunning reversal
of the status quo.18
It seemed, at first, that Colom’s promise might be kept. Within days, Co-
lom asked the Project to assemble teams of its workers for deployment to the
relevant military bases to begin work on the files as soon as the logistics were
sorted out with army high command. Colom even visited the Project to de-

216  —  CHAPTER EIGHT

clare his support for the plan, touring the police archives to learn about their
inner workings; Meoño called the president’s initiative “the most important
historical opportunity to arise since the signing of the Peace Accords.”19 At
the Project, workers wept and embraced upon hearing the news. “It’s like Ma-
condo,” one staffer told me, referring to the fictional town in Gabriel García
Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that was transformed overnight from
a sleepy backwater into a thriving modern metropolis. “It’s like the whole
world has changed in just a few days.”20
In the aftermath of Colom’s announcement, anticipation ran high, but so
too did cynicism and doubt. As journalist Juan Luis Font wrote, “President
Colom’s declaration has value as another gesture, like all those we have seen
from the authorities since the signing of the Peace Accords. But it is only that:
a gesture.” If Colom was truly serious about clarifying what had become of
Guatemala’s disappeared, Font suggested, opening the archives was a neces-
sary but insufficient component of what needed to be a much larger process
involving civil society consultations, efforts to secure witnesses and testimo-
nies, the initiation of legal proceedings by the government, and forensic in-
spections of the relevant military and police installations—not to mention an
investigation of human rights violations committed by members of insurgent
groups.21 This would beg significant judicial reform—a challenge since, in the
words of former vice president Eduardo Stein, “asking the justice system to
reform itself is like tying up a dog with a string of sausages.”22 Font’s implica-
tion was that Colom, hoping to identify himself with the “pink wave” of leftist
governments sweeping the Americas, was mouthing platitudes while lacking
the muscle to truly effect change.
The bittersweet Macondo analogy was borne out, as the substantive change
promised by Colom did not come to pass. First, military officials refused to
accede to his request, again citing Article 30 as justification. “Even as Presi-
dent and commander-­in-­chief of the army, he is not above the law,” asserted
defense minister Marco Tulio García.23 Ex-­president Mejía Víctores’s lawyer,
Fernando Linares, called Colom’s pronouncement “unconstitutional” and
suggested that the president was ignorant of the constitution’s stipulations.
Others attempted different evasive maneuvers. General Otto Pérez Molina,
who would succeed Colom as president, argued that declassification was a
red herring: “In our archives, they aren’t going to find that any operation to
kill innocent people was designed or ordered during the armed conflict. That’s
not going to be found in any archives. That’s not going to appear.”24 In June
2011, the army opened to the public a collection of some twelve thousand
documents spanning the more than four decades between 1954 and 1996—an

CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE SAID   — 217

implausible paucity of records purporting to cover some forty years of wartime
army operations. Researchers soon reported that these were little more than
bureaucratic flotsam and jetsam, nothing of investigative importance.25
Though expectations were deflated in this instance, the fact that a civil-
ian president had dared to even attempt forcing open the army’s records was
still significant.26 It would not have transpired absent the paradigm-­shattering
precedent established by the rescue of the National Police archives. Foucault
reminds us that archives determine “the law of what can be said,” and the
Project, through its self-­conscious efforts to change the country’s archival cul-
ture, did bring about a change in the law of what could be said in Guatemala.
It transformed the idea of civilian access to secret military records—and the
shift in the power balance between society, the state, and the army that such
access would entail—into something speakable and thinkable, if not quite
doable (yet). However, the Macondo episode and other aspects of the archive
wars also testified to postwar Guatemala’s challenges, all the more heart­
breaking for the intensity of the hopes raised and dashed along the way.

MACONDO: THE LIMITATIONS OF THE POSTWAR STATE

The teams of Project workers readied for deployment to military bases were
dissolved after it became clear that the army would not give in without a fight.
But it was also true that Colom’s commitment to archival opening was not only
hot air. Colom was a nephew of the social democratic politician Manuel Co-
lom Argueta, gunned down by the Lucas regime in 1979, and his engagement
was personal as well as political. While president, Colom formally accepted
responsibility on behalf of the government for the murder of his uncle, for the
killings of student leaders and trade unionists, and for the state’s repression of
the labor movement. And within the Presidential Peace Secretariat (sepaz),
Colom ordered the creation of a new program: the Peace Archives Directorate,
which would work toward the declassification and opening of archives per-
taining to the civil war. Its goals united principle and praxis: first, “to recover
the historical memory of what occurred between 1954 and 1996, in order to
avoid repeating this tragedy,” and second, “to locate, process, preserve, and
analyze the documentary heritage of the Guatemalan Army, the Secretariat
of Social Welfare, the Presidential Guard, and of other related state depen-
dencies, in order to contribute to the clarification of the events of the armed
conflict and to reconciliation within Guatemalan society.”27 In May 2009,
the Peace Archives effort released its first report, The Authenticity of the Mil-
itary Logbook in Light of the Historical Documents of the National Police, which
analyzed records from the National Police archives on fifty-­four individuals

218  —  CHAPTER EIGHT

FIG. 8.1  President Otto Pérez Molina during his time as a military commander in the
Ixil Triangle. Pérez Molina’s tenure in the Ixil coincided with the bloodiest years of the
scorched-­earth campaign in the country’s western highlands, and in the Ixil Triangle
in particular. © Jean-­Marie Simon/2012.

named in the “Death Squad Dossier”; other reports followed, and its docu­
ments and staff expertise were brought to bear on a number of human rights
prosecutions. Many of the Peace Archives staffers were former employees of
the Project, building upon their experience with the pn records to attempt a
different path toward archival access. So, Colom’s commitment was perhaps
as real as could be expected given the political context, though in the long run
it would not much matter: Otto Pérez Molina dissolved the Peace Archives
Directorate within six months of assuming the presidency.
This context—citizen disenfranchisement, a woefully lacking educational
system, widespread illiteracy, and a long history of hermetic, antidemocratic
rule—meant that the archival battleground was not necessarily of much inter-
est or relevance to most Guatemalans. Rescuing warehouses full of moldering
Spanish-­language papers would not feed or house the country’s rural Maya
majority, many of them living in abject poverty and desperately underserved
by government. Neither would they translate directly into reparations pay-
ments, land redistribution, or bilingual schools. The fact of archives being
publicly accessible in Guatemala City mattered little to those who infrequently
visited the capital, could not read, or feared retribution if they were to come
forward seeking information about a killed or disappeared family member.

CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE SAID   — 219

The national conversation around access to information and archival poli-
tics was overwhelmingly an urban and elite conversation. To what extent did
the archive wars resonate, then, with the population? Transparency, access,
declassification—whose priorities were these?
Nearly all the efforts at securing access to state documents had been under­
written by the international community, whether by foreign governments,
transnational ngos, or research and advocacy organizations.28 North Ameri-
can groups like the National Security Archive, the Washington Office on Latin
America, and Human Rights First assisted activists’ attempts to wrestle with
the emp archives, the police archives, the struggle to force the opening of the
military archives, and the denial of military and police records to the ceh.
European governments channeled funds directly to projects like the police
archives and made indirect contributions to others by way of their support for
human rights organizations like gam, sedem, and the pdh. One of the most
significant attempts to protect archives was the country’s chapter of unesco’s
Memory of the World project, which published instructional manuals on ar-
chival preservation, worked toward the creation of a national inventory of
documentary holdings, and lobbied government for more stringent protection
of the resources housed in the country’s libraries, archives, and private collec-
tions.29 As Michael Moerth, of Switzerland’s Program for the Promotion of
Peace, put it, “The international community [in Guatemala] is very clear that
if a country doesn’t learn from its past, it won’t have a future. We’ve always
been very clear on that. . . . A country without records is a country without
history. It has no memory.”30
International donors’ funding of these projects meant that they were, to
some extent, inflected with donors’ priorities. As discussed earlier in this
book, before the pn archives were found, the donors supporting Guatemala’s
transition were uninterested in matters of archival preservation qua archi-
val preservation. Their objectives were justice reform, election monitoring,
socio­economic development, promoting the rights of women and indigenous
peoples, combating state corruption, and other objectives tied to liberalizing
conceptions of postbellum jurisprudence, institution ­building, and the ever-­
contested idea of “reconciliation.” Donors accommodated their inclination
to collaborate with the Project under the rubrics of their existing programs
on transitional justice; all those I spoke with agreed that their governments
would never have supported an archival preservation initiative absent a hu-
man rights investigation component.31 This was not necessarily negative; if
cooperating countries had promoted different goals, then the Project might
never have been adequately funded or defended, and the pn archives would

220  —  CHAPTER EIGHT

have gone down in Guatemalan history as yet another lost opportunity.32 As
one Project worker told me, “International assistance is a necessary evil. The
ideal would be for us to have our own state archival politics, our own state
resources to care for archives. But that is the desire, not the reality.”33
But foreign involvement in the archive wars resonated with more complex
aspects of the country’s politics. First, the surge of international interest in
Guatemalan archival practice surrounding the Project could not help but echo
a previous surge of international interest in Guatemalan archival practice:
when usaid and its Office of Public Safety trained the pn in archival methods
during the early years of the Cold War. While the two efforts’ ends were very
different, the means—professionalization, “modernization,” the application of
international archival standards and norms, and the streamlining and ratio-
nalization of record-­keeping labor—were the same. It was not the only way in
which recovering the past in Guatemala at times occasioned uncomfortable
acts of mimesis. Second, it was no isolated fact that international support and
money served as the glue helping to hold the Project together in the face of
threats to its survival. Rather, the deep involvement of international funders
in the Project reflected the greater reality of foreign engagement with postwar
“progress.” In providing such support for Guatemala’s liberal advances—by
funding its ngos, encouraging its development goals, and pressuring the state
to honor its Peace Accord commitments—what, precisely, was international
assistance truly fostering? Was it building Guatemalan sovereignty and inde-
pendence? Or was it helping to stitch together the flimsy outward appearance
of a functional free-­trade partner while the domestic sphere remained hos-
tage to the continued dominance of the military, foreign investors, and the
drug trade?
Neither was the progressive wing of civil society that international donors
hoped to nurture without its own deep divisions and conflicts. While the ar-
chive wars had inspired collaborations over the course of the twenty years
preceding the National Police records’ appearance, those years had also been
marked by the same infighting, resentments, and mistrust that characterized
the postwar Left more broadly, all the more charged for the sums of foreign
dollars at stake in the peace process.34 Different victims’ rights ngos regu-
larly worked separately to investigate the same cases of forced disappearance;
other ngos split asunder over procedural conflicts or interpersonal problems,
not least because many of their leaders shared long and difficult histories.
The weaknesses of a progressive sector that had suffered some five decades of
fierce repression and infiltration would be reflected again in debates over the
Project, which came to a head over the question of public access to the police

CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE SAID   — 221

records. Soon after the Project’s institutionalization, it faced criticism from
the very organizations whose volunteers had sparked the recovery initiative
in the first place. Nongovernmental organizations like gam and sedem felt
as of 2007 that the Project had become too secretive, unwilling to share the
fruits of its investigation with the organizations that had helped to build it.35
Concerned parties were divided on how to attribute blame—to the Project’s
leaders, or to Sergio Morales and the pdh—but they all felt shut out by the one
initiative that potentially promised answers to their decades-­old questions,
and worried that the police archives would meet the same neglected fate at
the pdh’s hands as the emp images.36 “There will come a time when our orga-
nizations are going to demand some kind of access, some kind of information,
some kind of opening,” a gam staffer told me.37 And that time did come: on the
twenty-­fourth anniversary of her first husband’s disappearance, gam founder
and congresswoman Nineth Montenegro forced the issue by publicly demand-
ing that the pdh open the police archives. She had inside knowledge that the
pn records contained information about her lost spouse, trade unionist Edgar
Fernando García, and she wanted it released.38 Although it took longer and
required more pressure than Montenegro might have hoped, documents from
the pn archives about her husband’s disappearance were released in 2009
and led to the successful prosecutions of multiple police officers involved in
the crime. The Project’s subsequent transfer out of pdh control did much to
restore social organizations’ goodwill, but for several years the relationships
between the Project and its supposed allies were strained at best.
The tension surrounding the lag on public access to the pn records spoke
to a legitimate concern about timing. No event better exemplified this than
the death of General Germán Chupina in February 2008.39 As discussed in
chapter 5, Chupina served as director-­general of the National Police from 1978
through 1982, overseeing one of the bloodiest periods in urban Guatemalan
history. For those interested in using the pn archives as evidence against war
criminals, Chupina’s would have been not only one of the best-­documented
cases but also one of the most vindicatory emotional victories. But time ran
short; the octogenarian general died peacefully of respiratory failure, a free
man, in his own bed at his posh home in Boca del Monte. For activists, it was
a crushing blow—to have finally gained access to hard state evidence, but for
the generals to elude their grasp regardless. “Chupina is one of the bloodiest
characters of this history,” said one Project leader. “And for him to die in his
bed, bathed in impunity. . . . For me, it hurts.”40 Indeed, of the eight military
and police officials originally named in the Spanish genocide case—former
heads of state Ríos Montt, Mejía Víctores, and Romeo Lucas García; former

222  —  CHAPTER EIGHT

defense minister Aníbal Guevara; former interior minister Donaldo Álvarez
Ruíz; former army chief of staff Benedicto Lucas García; Chupina; and former
Commando Six chief Pedro García Arredondo—two were dead (Chupina and
Romeo Lucas), one was hospitalized with health problems (Guevara), and
one had fled into exile (Álvarez), leaving, as of 2008, just four elderly men
living out their days.41 It added an extra dimension of urgency to an already
tense work pace at the Project. Perpetrators were dying before they could be
charged and convicted; witnesses were dying, too, before they could testify.
With these constraints in mind, the Project’s staffers worked day in and day
out, going years without taking vacations, mindful that their labors repre-
sented one of the last chances to see courtroom justice done. What they never
suspected was that the greatest threat to the Project’s survival would come
from within.42

GUATEMALAN CRABS: AN ETHNOGRAPHIC SNAPSHOT

On first glance, the evening of 24 March 2009 seemed like it would prove a
momentous historical event: the pdh threw a massive gala to commemorate
the release of the Project’s much-­awaited investigative report, El derecho a
saber (The Right to Know), and to announce the granting of public access to
some ten million digitized documents from the archives.43 Presided over by
human rights ombudsman Sergio Morales, the flashy soirée was attended by
the country’s diplomatic and aid corps, the Project staff, representatives from
nearly every human rights ngo, the Project’s national and international ad-
visory boards, Vice President Rafael Espada, and the presidents of Congress
and the Supreme Court, and it was covered by every major media outlet in the
country. The evening was designed to have the same sort of gravitas as had the
public presentation of the ceh’s report in 1999.44 And it did turn out to be a
momentous gathering—but not for its intended reasons.
Sergio Morales became a controversial figure on the Left during his 2007
efforts to secure his congressional reappointment as ombudsman. When
originally named to the post in 2002, Morales was the favored candidate
among left-­leaning ngos. (Installing a progressive ombudsman was import-
ant to human rights activists because, although it is popularly referred to as
the Procuraduría de los Derechos Humanos, the pdh’s full name is the Insti-
tución del Procurador de los Derechos Humanos, or ipdh. It is the office of the
ombudsman; all revolves around the appointee, and the organization enjoys
little long-­term continuity independent of the official at its head.) During his
first term, Morales seemed a solid pick: the pdh investigated record numbers
of human rights complaints, supported the creation of the un-­backed Inter-

CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE SAID   — 223

national Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (cicig), and worked
closely with social organizations.45 But Morales’s first term was due to con-
clude in mid-­2007, placing the future of the Project in jeopardy. Were a new
ombudsman to be less interested in rescuing the archives, or to espouse a dif-
ferent politics, the Project would risk being ignored, muzzled, or closed down.
This was not the only stressor for Project workers surrounding Morales’s
exit. Wanting to leave behind a legacy, Morales tasked the Project in early
2007 with the expedited production of a major report on its findings, the
release of which would coincide with his leaving office. Workers, particularly
the case investigation and analysis teams, found themselves under the gun
to produce the report, which was, like the remhi report, to be organized in
four volumes—another clue about how Morales sought to position himself in
the historical record. (“Since Sergio was on his way out, he wanted to leave a
monument,” one donor told me.) Morales began speaking of his desire to build
a “memory museum” at the archives, inspired by his visits to Villa Grimaldi
and to Hiroshima. He envisioned “a forest of peace” with “trees for medi-
tation, a water fountain, and rosebushes so that people could use the space
as a distraction, but that they could also refresh their memories about what
happened.”46 It seemed unlikely that so much could be done in the first half
of 2007—the writing and release of a historic report, the construction of a
memory museum, and the handing over of the Project to a new ombudsman.
Sure enough, these objectives were delayed, owing to a decisive change in
the playing field: Morales ran for reappointment to an unprecedented sec-
ond term as ombudsman, and won. While on its face this seemed a boon to
the Project, ostensibly assuring its institutional continuity for another five
years, it instead provoked deep divisions. This time around, Morales was no
longer the favored candidate of the human rights community; skeptical of
his ambitions, many organizations supported a more progressive contender
instead. And a troubling rumor surfaced surrounding the circumstances of
his reappointment: that Morales had used the archives as a bargaining chip
to secure support for his candidacy from an frg-­controlled Congress.47 The
prospect was alarming: in addition to being an international-­donor cash mag-
net, the Project also held information implicating high-­level figures in human
rights abuses. “As we understand it,” sedem’s Iduvina Hernández told me,
“the ombudsman bargained that he would only provide public access to the
documents up to a certain point, and that certain types of information would
be protected or restricted. . . .What worries us is that the information [from
the archives] in the ombudsman’s hands is being used as a weapon for political
negotiation. In service of the interests of the ombudsman as an individual.”48

224  —  CHAPTER EIGHT

Gossip had it that Morales was grooming himself for a run at the presidency
and planned to use the pn archives as a political commodity.49
Nothing could be proved, and some of the rumors seemed less like fact
and more like the perennial accusations of duplicity and engaño that, as Di-
ane Nelson points out, haunt postconflict Guatemala.50 But with Morales’s
re­appointment, conditions at the Project deteriorated markedly. The publica-
tion of the report, over which researchers had been feverishly laboring, was
postponed indefinitely, to the consternation of donors and the workers who
had spent months desperately trying to complete it. In December 2007, the
pdh ordered the firings of more than thirty Project employees, chosen seem-
ingly at random, in an overnight decision remembered by those left behind
as el golpe (the blow, or the coup).51 At the same time, the pdh appointed an
administrative coordinator to be the Project’s titular head—a way to strip au-
tonomy, and power over funds and information, from Meoño and his team.52
Donors began to wonder if the pdh was playing fast and loose with the funds
earmarked for the Project. Most distasteful was the suspicion that the Project
had been forced to hire frg loyalists into its team of workers, which raised
the threat not only of fraud but of surveillance and infiltration—dynamics that
harkened back to the very war years the Project was investigating.
This turmoil eroded Project workers’ morale. From late 2007 through mid-­
2008, the archives were a rat’s nest of gossip, fear, and cynicism, with every-
one waiting for the next ax to fall and many angry at the lack of transparency
behind the changes to their workplace. As one worker, among the Project’s
first hires but who was fired in el golpe, told me, “I was frustrated, because
after three years, they haven’t published the report. They told us we had to
do all this work on the report and it never came out; it was a lie. They don’t
want anyone to talk. They snuck people from the frg into the groups. . . .
And then Gustavo [Meoño] came to tell me I was fired, and nobody will take
responsibility for it.”53 His wife, who survived el golpe, spoke sadly of how a
new hire at the archives showed up bearing a photograph of her disappeared
spouse, saying that she wanted to learn her husband’s fate. “And today, what
are you going to tell that woman?” she asked. “That the ombudsman wanted
to secure his reelection and so the archives got screwed because of it? No. It
can’t be that way.”54
Though the circumstances were dispiriting, workers attempted to maintain
some optimism. Moods were lifted by the fact by early 2009, Project employ-
ees enjoyed the security of six-­month contracts—in the past, they had worked
under two-­month contracts, or without contracts at all—and by the fact that
they had just returned from a twenty-­day vacation, the first substantial break

CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE SAID   — 225

in the Project’s nearly four years of existence.55 Additionally, the idea of build-
ing a memory museum, bandied about since the Project’s earliest days, con­
tinued to inspire. “From the outset, the idea of a museum was talked about,”
said Dolores, a case investigator. “It came up in December 2005, when we
were working on a progress report. In that moment, [another coworker] said,
‘We just need to bring a little tree and give it water,’ and right then I visualized
it, I visualized the whole thing.” She continued, bursting into tears. “In Eu-
rope, they have those huge monuments to the fallen; I imagine it as a symbol
of peace, one hundred percent. . . . A monument would create the space that
our fallen ones deserve.”56 But the idea of a memory museum did not escape
the corrosive effects of power struggles at pdh headquarters. Amid the gossip
regarding Morales’s political compromises, other workers worried that the
monument initiative would prove an empty gesture—a totem disguising a lack
of commitment to access and justice. “If there is a museum without justice,”
one argued, “then it will be nothing more than kitsch.”57
Though the ombudsman’s ambitions ran high, so did the expectations of
domestic and international Project allies. The pdh could not stall indefinitely
on granting public access to the scanned documents or releasing the report.
Pressure mounted from all sides—from human rights groups, victims’ fami-
lies, donors, and Project advisers—counterbalancing the message the pdh was
likely receiving from conservative sectors to silence the Project’s findings. As a
result, and suddenly it seemed at the time, the pdh announced that during the
week of 23 March 2009, it would make a number of advances. First, Morales
would inaugurate a rosalera, or rose garden, in honor of the women disap-
peared during the armed conflict. The next day, he would release El derecho a
saber, the report that had been some three years in the making. The following
day, public access to the scanned documents—some eight million images at
that point—would be granted, its access norms regulated by the newly gen-
erated Regulation for the Reference Service on Human Rights Violations
(serevidh).58 A public documentation center, just adjacent to the rosalera,
would open on 25 March, while the finishing touches were being put on a
“memory museum” next door. And though the paint was still fresh on the walls,
the documentation center successfully received its first petitioner that very day.
The rose garden and museum were underwhelming and poorly executed.
But the week’s hallmark event was to be the release of El derecho a saber on
24 March. The atmosphere at the Project had been tense for the weeks leading
up to the release. In early March, the Public Ministry had made the first arrests
based on information from the archives, of two of the rank-­and-­file agents ac-
cused in the forced disappearance of Fernando García. But immediately after

226  —  CHAPTER EIGHT

the arrests, the head of the pdh’s Special Investigations Unit was ambushed
and badly beaten, and Project staffers began to notice unfamiliar cars parked
outside the archives, whose occupants photographed them as they left work.59
On the morning of 24 March, this localized uneasiness spread throughout the
city. Capital dwellers were accustomed to everyday violence, but that day was
different. Early in the morning, armed attacks on buses at high-­volume transit
arteries—along the Periférico highway in Zone 2, on Castellana Avenue in
Zone 9—left five dead, seven wounded, and traffic paralyzed for hours. After
the morning’s deaths, bus drivers blockaded the Periférico and Petapa Avenue,
near the usac, to protest the state’s failure to protect them from gangland-­
style assassinations.60 This jammed traffic further, impelling businesses to
close early so that employees could get home before nightfall, giving the city
center the feel of a ghost town by midafternoon. Rumors circulated via radio
that the government had declared a state of siege, abetted by the fact that “an
unusually high military presence” began patrols after dusk.61 President Colom
gave a defensive radio address that evening refuting the state-­of-­siege gossip
and arguing that the violence represented an effort by organized crime to de-
stabilize his government.62 There was no hard evidence linking any of this to
the release of the pdh’s report, but as Project advisory board member Antonio
González Quintana later wrote, “None of us who attended the release cere-
mony could avoid thinking that all this bore some relation to the presentation
of the report and the opening of the archives to the public.”63
The mood at the gala, then, was anything but relaxed, with clusters of
guests huddled and whispering about the day’s events.64 Nonetheless, nearly
a thousand attendees, after passing through metal detectors, assembled in
the hotel’s chandeliered ballroom for the presentation of El derecho a saber.
The hushed conversations taking place included speculations as to just how
watered-­down the report would be: the Project’s investigative team had had
to submit its final version to the pdh for “editing,” and several expressed
fears that, because of Morales’s rumored political compromises, perpetrators’
names would be excised. Nonetheless, the event showed promise early on.
Project director Gustavo Meoño cut a surreal figure in his brown 1970s-­style
suit: a former guerrilla commander lecturing a banquet hall full of dignitaries
about the marvels of archival science. Meoño praised the work of the Project
staff, accused the state of concealing information about war-­era abuses, and
argued that Guatemalans were “a fearful and fragmented people” afflicted by
the country’s failure to right the war’s wrongs. He called the goal of giving vic-
tims’ families access to the archives the Project’s “moral heart.” But, standing
at the lectern, he looked both weary and wary.

CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE SAID   — 227

 The rest of the event had a schizophrenic character, uneven and charged
with intensity. Control of the lectern alternated between government func-
tionaries making vague remarks about the importance of “knowing the truth,”
and children of prominent Guatemalans disappeared or killed during the war
speaking forcefully to the need for justice. First to speak was the daughter of
the poet Luis de Lión, a pgt activist who was disappeared in 1984.65 She told
the crowd of the emotional torture inflicted upon her family, and thousands of
families more, by the unending crime of forced disappearance. Her gripping
testimony was followed, however, by a dry description of the report by a pdh
official who pointedly failed to mention specific perpetrators or cases in his
exposition. It then became clear to Project staff that their report’s conclusions
had been bowdlerized, and whispers of dissatisfaction began to bubble forth
from the audience. This splitting, between victims’ penetrating accusations
and state representatives’ reiterations of the value of historical knowledge for
its own sake, caused the room’s collective frustration to mount with each sub-
sequent speaker. Next at the podium was Julio Solórzano Foppa, the son of
feminist intellectual Alaíde Foppa, who was disappeared by the Lucas García
government in 1980. Where de Lión’s daughter’s words had been elegiac,
those of Foppa’s son were angry. “Who were those responsible,” he thundered,
“and how will they be brought to justice?” He turned to the head table, where
Vice President Espada and the other dignitaries sat, and, addressing Espada
directly, demanded that the government tell victims exactly when they would
be given access to the still-­closed military archives. In a country with such
a hierarchical political culture, this bold statement to a sitting official was
shocking, and it was met with wild applause by the activists at the back of the
ballroom. Solórzano was followed by another pdh functionary who provided
information about the documents’ access norms. Next to speak was Mayra
Alvarado, the daughter of pgt leader Bernardo Alvarado Monzón—killed by
security forces alongside other pgt activists in 1972—and her testimony shook
the event’s foundations. She never knew her father, who was detained seven-
teen days after her birth, and in tears, she read aloud a tender letter he had
written to her immediately after she was born. Still crying but now defiant,
the younger Alvarado proclaimed that she both affirmed her father’s right to
rebellion and defended his struggle for all Guatemalans to be able to think
differently about their country. By this point, dozens of audience members
were in tears themselves; they gave Alvarado a standing ovation.
The evening’s charged tone had now become electric. Sergio Morales got
up to present the report to Espada. Upon receiving the report and taking the
podium, Espada found his prepared statement interrupted by the cries of a

228  —  CHAPTER EIGHT

well-­known activist in the front row, who screamed a demand that Congress
approve the proposed Law 35-­90 ratifying the International Convention on
Forced Disappearance. She cried that if Espada’s government failed to do
so, it would be complicit in the crimes of its predecessors. Again, it was a
breach of protocol that set the room abuzz. When Espada continued with his
remarks, which focused on the abstract importance of “truth” without men-
tioning criminal justice, the room’s center could no longer hold. “¡queremos
justicia!” yelled an audience member. When Roberto Alejos, the president
of Congress, rose to take the microphone from Espada, he was drowned out
by hundreds of audience members chanting “¿Qué queremos?” followed by
“¡justicia!” The president of the judiciary and the attorney general faced
similar reactions, contrasting sharply with the sense of jubilation that rippled
through the hall when those giving testimony spoke.
Even before the speeches concluded, attendees began flooding out to the
foyer in search of an answer to the great hanging question of the evening:
What, exactly, did El derecho a saber actually say? Print copies were available
only to elite guests, mainly the foreigners, while others received a compact
disc copy to read later. Nonetheless, the print copies made it around the room,
and even a cursory flip through the volume confirmed suspicions: while the
report contained interesting information about the archives themselves and
the police’s history, its investigations of specific human rights violations and
harder-­hitting conclusions had been stripped. Milling about and discussing
the report, young Project workers joked around, mocking Morales and the
pdh. But older workers were somber, feeling that the report’s “editing” repre-
sented yet another defeat. “We’ve been crushed and beaten down a thousand
times,” one told me. “And a thousand times we stand up and keep on fighting.”
At her side her husband, a Project case investigator, simply shook his head
in disbelief.
The next morning at the archives, anger and disappointment crackled
through the air. Few had slept. Meoño, nearly in tears, told me that the report
had been “censored” and “mutilated,” its heart removed. Although many had
seen this coming, it was still painful; they had hoped, against the odds, for
better. After nearly four years of exhausting labor, the limitations of their post-
war, post-­peace state still reigned: corruption, shady power brokering, and a
lack of political will to attempt redress for state crimes against humanity. “It’s
as though they’re making fun of us” and “They’re mocking us” were comments
I heard from many rank and filers at the archives that day, who felt engañado
yet again. Many wondered about the future; perhaps, some speculated, the
takeaway message was that the Project would not be permitted to keep go-

CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE SAID   — 229

ing at all. The members of the international advisory board (cci), for their
part—some of whom had had access to the unedited, complete report, and
knew exactly how much of it had been excised—met that day to craft a public
response sharply critical of the pdh.
They would never release it, however, because of the next day’s news: Mo-
rales’s wife, the lawyer and politician Gladys Monterroso, had been kidnapped.
At seven in the morning, as Morales reported upon her release twelve hours
later, she was eating breakfast in a restaurant when she received a phone call
instructing her to step outside. When she did, three armed men wearing hoods
forced her into an suv for an ordeal that she thought would be “the last day of
[her] life.”66 As a sobbing Morales told reporters the next day, during Monter-
roso’s captivity she was burned with cigarettes, threatened at gunpoint, raped,
beaten, and drugged before being dumped at the side of a road in Zone 18,
where she was rescued. “This barbarity must end,” Morales wept at his press
conference. “We must continue on with our work,” he affirmed, theorizing
that the attack was an act of retribution for the release of El derecho a saber—
much as Bishop Juan Gerardi had been assassinated following the release of
Guatemala: Nunca Más! in 1998.67 Given the news, the cci opted to shelve its
critique. Civil society groups called for Monterroso’s case to be investigated
by the un-­overseen cicig. Soon after, the pdh detained one Oscar Gutiérrez
Valle as a suspect in Monterroso’s case.
The commission began to look into the case in collaboration with the Pub-
lic Ministry (mp), but within three months it withdrew from its investigation
of Gutiérrez Valle, and cicig director Carlos Castresana began advocating
for the detainee’s release, arguing, “There is no greater injustice than an in-
nocent person being sent to prison.” Cynical rumors had abounded in the
days following Monterroso’s kidnapping that the incident had been an auto­
secuestro, or self-­kidnapping—a publicity move with some precedent in Gua-
temalan political history. Yet there was no doubt that Monterroso had been
savagely assaulted; photographs of her arms, scored with cigarette burns, and
her blackened eyes were published widely. So what had taken place? In Au-
gust 2009, journalist Claudia Méndez Arriaza published a withering exposé
of the circumstances behind Gutiérrez Valle’s arrest, suggesting that the pdh
had trumped up the charges and conducted a slipshod investigation of the
case.68 Around the same time, word spread that the mp had obtained video
footage contradicting Monterroso’s testimony, by way of the security cameras
at a bank adjacent to the restaurant from which Morales said Monterroso was
kidnapped.69 As well, blood tests performed by the mp indicated that Gutiér-
rez Valle “very probably could not have been the author of the sexual viola-

230  —  CHAPTER EIGHT

tion of Ms. Monterroso.”70 All that the alleged video could suggest was that
Monterroso had not been abducted from outside the Zone 9 restaurant, and
the blood tests only demonstrated that Gutiérrez Valle was not the primary
assailant. This did not prove that she had not been attacked later. However, it
was enough to raise doubts.
The competing versions of the Monterroso story—and, by extension, of
Morales’s credibility—came to a head in June 2009, three months after the
report’s release. On 20 June, Morales announced that the pdh could no lon-
ger afford to pay its staff at the archives and so it would be forced to shut the
Project down, effective 30 June. This came as a surprise to the donors, whose
financial support for the Project had been unwavering during the preceding
four years and who had no intention of abandoning it.71 It also came as a shock
to Project workers, who were informed of the decision by internal memo. Do-
nors, along with the Project’s workers and leaders, interpreted the move for
what it was: a move to shut the initiative down once and for all, as predicted in
the aftermath of the 24 March gala, and the culmination of the slow internal
move, dating back to Morales’s 2007 reappointment, to silence the archives’
revelations. While Morales feigned displeasure at the situation, his message
was clear: the Project had lost the backing of the pdh.72
This now being clear not only to insiders but also to the general public,
Meoño and his colleagues decided to reveal what they had known for years
but which, hoping to protect the archives, they had not previously disclosed:
that the pdh was diverting Project-­earmarked funds elsewhere; that the pdh
was burning through some 10 percent of the Project’s payroll budget to fund
individuals in “ghost positions” who were not actually working at the archives;
and that the pdh had stripped the Project’s control over human resources in
order to make nepotistic hires. Meoño made two additional, weightier accusa-
tions. First, he attested that Morales had “mutilated and censored” El derecho
a saber, removing any discussion of the army’s role in the counterinsurgency
or naming of names from the police’s chain of command. Second, and more
damning, Meoño argued that Morales had protected the intellectual authors
of Edgar Fernando García’s forced disappearance. Though the archives had
revealed both the names of the crime’s low-­ranking material authors and of
the Fourth Corps chief (Jorge Alberto Gómez) who ordered it, the pdh only
moved to prosecute the rank-­and-­file agents who had carried out Gómez’s
orders, not naming their superior officer in the suit. Meoño told reporters
that while the Project had presented the pdh with more than two hundred
documents on the Fernando García case, including full documentation of
the chain of command behind it, Morales had ignored the higher-­ups in the

CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE SAID   — 231

Fourth Corps and the layer of military authority above them. Ultimately, Gó-
mez’s name was first disclosed not by Meoño or human rights activists but by
the lawyer representing the detained agents, who questioned why his clients
were being punished for a kidnapping ordered by their boss.73
After Meoño’s revelations, ngos and research organizations came together
to demand that the Colom administration step in and assume responsibility
for the archives. In a joint statement, more than forty groups asked that Co-
lom oversee the archives’ transfer to the Archivo General de Centroamérica,
guarantee unobstructed access to them, publish the unedited original version
of El derecho a saber, ensure that Project staffers’ jobs were protected, and
create a National Commission on Historical Memory to coordinate access to
various bodies of documentation pertaining to the armed conflict.74 Colom
acceded, announcing that custody of the archives would be transferred to the
Ministry of Culture and Sports, the parent ministry of the agca, a move some
had argued for since the outset. All of the staff would keep their jobs, and the
donors would continue funding the archives in their new home. According
to Colom, this shift would form the foundation for the building of a new na-
tional archives system, one that would one day include the military’s historical
records as well.75 Human rights organizations were thrilled, both at the short-­
term transfer of the pn records and at the long-­term shift it portended for state
archival practice.76 It was, finally, the opportunity at institution building that
had been impossible to pursue in 2005 when the records were first located.
The state had mustered the political will (if not the cash) to take on its archival
responsibilities. And while this was partially due to Colom’s intervention, the
truth was that the Project would not have lasted until Colom took power had
its workers and allies not worked tirelessly for four long years to protect it.
The Project had not only successfully changed the law of what could be said
in Guatemala—it had changed the law of what could be done.
On 1 July, formal custody of Guatemala’s National Police Historical Ar-
chives was transferred to the agca. “A new phase of the Project has begun,”
read a communiqué from Meoño, “characterized by the institutionalization of
the archives.”77 Next, the Project would work on securing the archives’ legal
foundations by promoting the passage of a new national archives law, further
developing the records’ access norms, and continuing to process and scan
millions more documents. A new chapter had begun, one remaining in its
infancy at the time of this writing; it remains to be seen how the Project will
handle the obstacles sure to present themselves in the future. Come what
might, however, the Project had achieved its major victory, having created and
saved an unprecedented initiative that, a scant few years before, would never

232  —  CHAPTER EIGHT

have even been imaginable. The transition was marked by a change in the ef-
fort’s name: from the Project for the Recovery of the National Police Historical
Archive (prahpn) to, simply, the National Police Historical Archive (ahpn).
The archives had thus concluded their period of becoming—their malleable,
shape-­shifting phase, their years of improvisation and missteps and raw strug-
gles with the production of knowledge—and had undergone an ontological
shift into a new, more stable state, that of being.

THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE DONE

In one of his most frequently cited commentaries on the subject, Michel Fou-
cault writes, “The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that
governs the appearance of statements as unique events.”78 Foucault’s archive,
which he describes as “the general system of the formation and transformation
of statements,” polices the parameters of discourse. It is the elephant in every
room, the ur-­notion defining the very boundaries of enunciability, reminding
us that however enthusiastically we might seek to investigate the past, our
forays into the archive ultimately only underscore the past’s unattainability, its
distance from ourselves. The archive, Foucault tells us, “is the border of time
that surrounds our presence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in
its otherness; it is that which, outside ourselves, delimits us . . . its threshold
of existence is established by the discontinuity that separates us from what
we can no longer say.”79 The poetics of applying Foucault’s framework to the
real-­world context of the pn archives certainly tempt a writer’s imagination,
and elements of his analysis ring true. Surely the specters of the country’s
desaparecidos, who survive only in memories and in state documents, can be
said to “surround” and “overhang” the lives of surviving family members, re-
minding them daily that they will never be reunited. But one must not confuse
the rich life of a person with its thin archival record—its paper cadaver—nor
confuse state security forces’ purposeful political repression with the deper-
sonalized exercise of power Foucault describes. In the Guatemalan case, the
police archives have at different points in time bounded speech and action, it
is true—but only to the extent that their records were used by actual, living
police officers to locate suspicious individuals for interrogation or worse. Stu-
dent leader Oliverio Castañeda regularly gave speeches during his too-­short
life, and he must have known that the military state was keeping track of his
words; but Castañeda gave the speeches regardless, and in them, he dared the
army to come after him. Counterinsurgency archives did not constrain him
discursively; they did so corporeally and bloodily in their use by his assassins.
As historian Craig Robertson observes, “Archives do not neutrally store

CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE SAID   — 233

documents; rather, objects captured through archival practices are trans-
formed into knowledge.”80 This is true both of the surveillance data captured
through counterinsurgent archival practices and of the criminal evidence cap-
tured through memory-­oriented, recuperative archival practices. Such knowl-
edge, produced by way of the contact between police officer and document,
once informed actions including abduction, torture, and murder. Now, the
archives’ use by a mobilized group of activists—even in spite of the internal
divisions and dangers threatening their progress—redefined the law of what
could be said about the past in Guatemala, making possible new worlds of
expression and interpretation. And this was not all: the Project also changed
the law of what could be done about the past in Guatemala. Subsequent devel-
opments in the treatment of state records, including Colom’s 2008 attempt to
force the opening of military archives and the creation of the Peace Archives
initiative, owed their thinkability to the Project’s work on changing archival
culture—assigning new value to state documents, transfiguring them from
garbage into treasure by putting them at the service of new objectives.81 The
Project redefined archival preservation in Guatemala as a political act. In the
process, the initiative ceased to be a “project” at all, transcending its benighted
origins and turning the police’s archives into the people’s archives.
The actual conditions delimiting the Project’s field of possibility were
structural. For all its utility in the struggle against impunity, increased archi-
val access would not repair the broken justice system, repel the corrupting
influence of foreign aid dollars, redistribute land and wealth, or bring back
the dead. On the other hand, however, veterans of political struggle knew
that every glimmer of opportunity had to be seized upon and fought for. A
convergence of propitious factors—international interest, Colom’s desire to
legitimate himself as a social democrat, and the experience gained over the
course of the archive wars—presented survivors and activists with a chance,
however beset by challenges it was, to effect a small shift in the country’s
balance of power. Archival access did not equal socioeconomic change, but
it did complement it. “In one way or another, knowing what happened makes
an important difference, at least to be able to end these cycles of grief,” said
Esteban, a Project worker. “Even better, to learn that there was an intellectual
author to these acts and that there exists a log or register of where the dis-
appeared were buried. So, even the minimum provided by the archives can
at least form the base for changes—for an end to impunity, for the birth of a
certain respect for human rights.”82 The hope was that advances on the ar-
chival front would impact other spheres of social and political life. If archival
practice served as a metonym for governance, or as a microcosm of it, then

234  —  CHAPTER EIGHT

successful attempts to change a country’s archival practice would alter the way
it governed, and expand the nature of political possibility. Sonia Combe writes
that the “ ‘repressed’ archive” represents the “power . . . of the state over the
historian.”83 What activists learned during the archive wars was that fighting
archival repression, whether sponsored by past military regimes or by corrupt
politicians in the present day, was a way to assert the power of the amateur
historian—the witness—over the state. This was not everything. But it was
certainly something.

CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE SAID   — 235

 n in e CONCLUSION
THE POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITATIONS
OF ARCHIVAL THINKING

Archiving is not about history looking backward, but about stor-

ing and securing for the future. Archiving—all the activities from
creation and management to the use of records and archives—has
always been directed towards transmitting human activity and
experience through time and, secondly, through space. . . . It is the
quality of the archive as a time machine.
—Eric Ketelaar, “Archival Temples, Archival Prisons”

A
rchives, or the truths we imagine them to contain, fascinate us. They
speak to us of the most elemental human preoccupations: birth,
death, identity, history. They attract us, and we fetishize them, hop-
ing they will provide proof points—trustworthy signposts of fixity—to help
guide us through the “epistemic murk” of modern life.1 As archivists Terry
Cook and Joan M. Schwartz write, archives “are the basis for and the valida-
tion of the stories we tell ourselves, the story-­telling narratives that give co-
hesion and meaning to individuals, groups, and societies.”2 They are the stuff
of which our histories are made and remade, the places where voices once
silenced can be resurrected and where truth-­claims might be substantiated.
They are sites of hope and aspiration.
But at the same time, archives also intimidate us; we want access to them,
but we fear what we might learn in the process of looking. Archives are the
treasure houses, the cornerstones, of modernity’s most powerful institutions:
banks, states, police forces, corporations, employers. Their archives remind
us that we are small, and when we are denied access to them, it makes us
feel smaller still. Moreover, we are uncomfortable with archives because we
know that their flat, bureaucratic representations of our rich, full lives will
outlive us, and outlive the memory of us. We know all the things the archives
can never record, and we know that even being archived does not guarantee
that we will be remembered. No one likes to think that she can, and will, be
reduced to a file in the end, even if, as Milan Kundera writes, “police files are
our only claim to immortality.”3
In a postconflict or postcolonial setting, this archival thrall—the simulta-
neous push and pull, the twinned promise and peril of institutional archives—
takes on outsize proportions, mirroring the outsize proportions of those past
(and/or present) regimes’ carceral, punitive institutions. On the one hand, the
archives of bygone governments are great gifts to those tasked with rebuilding
shattered societies; they can be used to locate missing persons, lustrate state
dependencies, rewrite histories, and design programs of reparation and heal-
ing. As such, reformers and victims understandably clamor for the records,
demanding their accessibility and preservation. On the other hand, opening
the archives presents real risks, the most dramatic being the danger of find-
ing unwanted information. For example, East German dissident Vera Wollen-
berger was among the throngs of citizens who flocked to consult the records
of the Stasi after Germany’s reunification. In the archives, she learned to her
horror that her husband had been informing on her for years, feeding intimate
details about her political and personal life to his Stasi handler; it destroyed
their marriage, and her world as she had known it. “What I have had to go
through,” she wrote of what her file revealed, “I wouldn’t wish on anyone,
not even my worst enemy.”4 Yet while the appearance of unbidden truths is a
hazard of the process, worse still is information’s absence. What if, after thirty
years of waiting for a spouse or child to reappear, new state security archives
are opened to great expectations but contain no mention of that particular
desaparecido? What happens if, and when, the archives do not speak? Archives
can liberate, but they can also enclose, silence, or disappoint.
This book has outlined a dialectical analysis of archival recovery in con-
texts of political transition. Records once used in the service of state terror
are repurposed by surviving reformers as building blocks for the rule of law
and tools of social reckoning. Archivist Eric Ketelaar highlights this “essen-
tial connection between archives and human rights: the violation of these
rights has been documented in the archives and citizens who defend them-
selves appeal to the archives. . . . If the fact of oppression appears in records
originally inscribed for surveillance and tyranny, they can also be used for
reclaiming human rights and regaining freedom.”5 This is, of course, a well-­
established dynamic, familiar to activists and activist-­scholars who have made
use of Soviet, Nazi, Spanish Civil War, or other documentary collections for
the purposes of historical, moral, or legal repair. But far less understood are
the processes by which such a transformation—from terror archive to people’s

CONCLUSION  — 237
archive—is made to come about, and the shifting, volatile synthesis resulting
from that transformation. I hope to have addressed this lacuna by detailing
the interiorities of this process as it unfolded in Guatemala and by advancing
a series of interrelated, yet distinct arguments: that how a state deals with
its past bureaucratic production, and how citizens respond in turn, reveals
much about the present and perhaps the future contours of that society; that
the National Police and the urban theater of the war need to be written back
into Guatemalan history; that documentary production and preservation are
always functions of power relations; that human interactions with terror ar-
chives strongly impact individual and collective subjectivities in ways that
cannot always be foreseen or comfortably managed; that what matters most
about such archives is not their supposedly depersonalized, abstracted exer-
cise of panoptical control but rather their use-­value by real humans, whether
police officers or peacemakers, engaged in real political struggles; and that in
a country where legal justice is for the most part impossible, and where the
notion that national social solidarity (“reconciliation”) could ever be born out
of catharsis or peace treaties or reparations programs rings hollow, history and
historical narratives matter—intensely so.
Yet for all the ways in which this is a story about Guatemala, informed by
the country’s sobering specificities and determined by the contingencies of
its uniquely stygian history, it is not Guatemala’s story alone. No transition
out of authoritarian or military rule has failed to include significant debate
about how to deal with the surviving records of past regimes. In Latin Amer-
ica and beyond, the trend toward privileging, protecting, and opening state
records as vital elements of transitional justice has escalated significantly in
recent years, making these dynamics near universal—challenges confronted
from Russia to Rwanda by activists who have been transformed by necessity
into amateur historians and amateur archivists. (Importantly, these are not
only dynamics of the global South, or of settings conventionally labeled as
“postconflict.” Watchdog groups like Wikileaks or the National Security Ar-
chive in the United States can attest all too well to the challenges of forcing
governments that are, in the main, considered “democratic”—to say nothing
of private corporations—to relinquish records documenting abuses of power
both past and present.)
As archival rescue and preservation have come to be considered fundamen-
tal to dismantling authoritarian state apparatuses alongside more traditional
approaches like reparations payments or police reform, however, the nexus
between the worlds of archivists and human rights activists and lawyers has
grown, producing several new precedents in international human rights law.

238  —  CHAPTER NINE

The first is the writ of habeas data, discussed in this book and implemented
throughout the Americas over the course of the past two decades; habeas data
allows an individual to petition her government for any information it holds
about her, and obliges that government to furnish it.6 Another is the notion
that a state’s violence against its documents, whether via willful destruction
or negligence, is a form of violence against its citizens. This is particularly
relevant in a country like Guatemala, because of its high number of desa-
parecidos; if the state withholds or destroys documentation confirming that
someone considered to have disappeared is actually dead, it subjects that per-
son’s surviving family members to decades of torturous searching for someone
they believe might still be alive. The evolving legal concept has now been
enshrined by both the Organization of American States and the un as the
“right to truth,” with the un naming 24 March, the anniversary of Salvadoran
archbishop Oscar Romero’s 1980 assassination, the International Day for the
Right to the Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Violations and for the
Dignity of Victims.7
Perhaps the most important innovation on this front has been the land-
mark Gomes Lund v. Brazil (2010) ruling by the Inter-­American Court on
Human Rights (iachr). The case concerned a small guerrilla movement in
Brazil’s Araguaia River region, formed in 1972 to oppose the military dictator-
ship. The Brazilian army’s counteroffensive destroyed the movement and dis-
appeared more than seventy people, forcing their families into a long crusade
to learn the fates of their loved ones. Culminating a legal battle lasting more
than twenty years, the iachr ruled against Brazil and its long-­standing refusal
to turn over documentation pertaining to the resting places of the Communist
Party and guerrilla members. The court rejected Brazil’s amnesty law, held
the state liable for the deaths of the guerrillas, and mandated broad repara-
tory measures. It also ruled that the secreto de estado, or the national security
argument for preserving state secrets, could not be used to deny access to
documentation of crimes against humanity. And it included an extraordinary
provision obliging the Brazilian government, if it claimed that the relevant
archives detailing the murders of the guerrillas had been destroyed and could
therefore not be furnished to survivors, to investigate and prosecute those
responsible for their unlawful destruction.8 Archival thinking, it appears, has
taken hold.
This global phenomenon represents the archival dimension of what politi-
cal scientist Kathryn Sikkink terms the “justice cascade,” the domino or ripple
effect of individual societies’ juridical reckonings with authoritarian or bloody
pasts.9 As early adopters like Portugal, Greece, and Argentina moved first to

CONCLUSION  — 239
prosecute their respective ancien régime officials, Sikkink argues, they built a
growing body of international legal precedent making it increasingly difficult
for perpetrators elsewhere to evade accounting. The archive and the court-
room are closely linked, as this study has demonstrated; the “justice cascade,”
which has seen countries like Peru, Cambodia, Argentina, Colombia, the for-
mer Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone explore forms of redress ranging
from state apologies to community justice (most famously, Rwanda’s gacaca
courts) to international tribunals, has unfolded contemporaneously with what
one might call the “archival cascade.”10 However, Sikkink’s terminology, in
which justice “diffuses” across space and time, or moves in “streams” via its
own momentum, risks eliding the all-­too-­material struggles over politics and
power that yielded those trials or acts of official contrition, and the backlash
that often ensues. Moreover, what of the effects of strengthening a liberal
jurisprudence whereby positive verdicts in the cases of single individuals or
aggrieved parties are prioritized over any meaningful recognition or redress of
collective repression—say, by way of concrete educational reform, demanded
in Guatemala’s Peace Accords but only unevenly implemented, or institu-
tional reparations, or agrarian reform and other means of economic redistri-
bution? Transitional justice in Guatemala may be beginning to take root, but
it is because Guatemalans and their allies have fought on the ground for the
few victories they have won, often at great personal cost. The transfiguration
of the country’s terror archives has reflected larger asymmetries of power and
politics, and rather than occurring at the flip of a switch, the transition from
one archival logic to another has more closely resembled a hard-­fought war
by other means.

BACKLASH, OR “YES, IT’S POLITICAL, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD”

It took fifteen years after the signing of the Peace Accords for Guatemalans
to begin to see a shift: an uptick, from zero, in the number of prosecutions
for wartime human rights violations, and the increased institutionalization of
efforts to reckon with the past. The recovery of the pn archives was but one
element of a larger constellation of projects, including exhumations, court
cases, memorials, truth commissions, and social movement campaigns, all
seeking to implement both the spirit and the letter of the accords. These ini-
tiatives nourished one another and were extensively cross-­pollinated, mak-
ing it impossible for any organization or individual to claim sole credit for
progress made. That said, some of the most notable advances in the struggle
against impunity in the years following the police records’ rediscovery bore
the imprimatur of the Project’s contributions.

240  —  CHAPTER NINE

 For example, in 2010 and 2011, evidence collected and analyzed by the
Project secured the first-­ever convictions for a forced disappearance com­
mitted in the capital city by the police.11 The verdict came in the case of Edgar
Fernando García—the trade unionist, pgt activist, and young father who was
abducted by four rank-­and-­file agents of the National Police’s Fourth Corps
in 1984 and never heard from again. In October 2010, based almost entirely
on evidence from the police archives, two of those four agents were tried and
given the maximum sentence of forty years in prison.12 At the trial, García’s
daughter Alejandra, a young lawyer who helped prosecute the case, gave
power­ful testimony:
I do not seek revenge, neither would my dad have, but I do seek the truth, I
want to know where he was taken, I want to know why he wasn’t formally
charged, I want to know who gave the order, I want to know where he was
taken and who he was handed over to, I want to know what happened to
him. My heart cannot rest and be at peace without the truth; as harsh as it
may be, the truth always heals the soul. If my father is dead, he deserves to
be buried like the beloved man that he was and still is, his name deserves
dignity. He was not a sewer rat that can be killed with impunity; he was a
human being.13
As we should be able to surmise by now, there was no smoking-­gun document
in the archives that spoke directly of García’s abduction. Rather, investigators
happened upon an announcement in the police’s daily reports that the head of
the Fourth Corps, Jorge Alberto Gómez (whom the ombudsman Morales had
tried, in 2009, to protect), had awarded medals of distinction to four agents
for their work in carrying out an operation against “two subversives” on the
very date, at the very time, and in the precise location where witnesses saw
García and his companion, Danilo Chinchilla, forced into separate vehicles
and taken away.14 To make their case, Project researchers had to triangulate
this information with that yielded by dozens of other documents and testimo-
nies, in collaboration with a Public Ministry led, as of late 2010, by a dogged
crusader for transitional justice, attorney general Claudia Paz y Paz.
Shortly after the agents’ sentencing, the intellectual authors of García’s
disappearance—Gómez’s disappearance—Gómez and former police director-­
general Héctor Bol de la Cruz, who commanded Gómez—were also taken into
custody. In 2013, both were convicted. Another arrest based on the Project’s
work came in July 2011: that of Pedro García Arredondo, the reviled former
head of the police’s Detective Corps and its Commando Six death squad, for his
role in the 1981 disappearance of agronomist Edgar Saénz Calito and the 1980

CONCLUSION  — 241
 Former army chief of staff Héctor López Fuentes, behind bars at his 2011
FIG. 9.1 
arraignment for the crime of genocide. Photograph by James Rodríguez, mimundo.org.
Used by permission of the photographer.

Spanish embassy fire; in 2012, García Arredondo was sentenced to seventy

years in prison.15 More indictments are anticipated in other cases involving pn
officials, building on the momentum of these initial successes. As well, hun-
dreds of documents from the police archives are being used in a case before
the Inter-­American Court on Human Rights by family members of the victims
profiled in the Diario Mili­tar. Meanwhile, parallel efforts secured the 2011
arrests of the former army chief of staff Héctor López Fuentes, who served
under Romeo Lucas García, and ex-­dictator Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores,
who pled health problems to have the charges against him suspended. But it
was January 2013 that saw the most stunning advance: the opening of judi-
cial proceedings against ex-­dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, the first-­ever former
head of state to be prosecuted for genocide in his home country’s domestic
court system.
The indictments were an absolute watershed, something inconceivable
just a scant few years earlier. But such impertinence on the part of activists
did not pass unnoticed. As discussed earlier in this book, the Project, like
other human rights groups, confronted at various points an array of warnings
including verbal threats, at least five Molotov cocktail attacks at the archive
installations, the periodic harassment of archive workers, and political pres-
sure to not publish perpetrators’ names or high-­impact case files. But in late

242  —  CHAPTER NINE

2010 and 2011, on the heels of the aforementioned arrests and in the lead-­up
to presidential elections favoring powerful military candidate Otto Pérez Mo-
lina, the tenor of establishment disapproval rose. A July 2011 article in the
conservative Prensa Libre quoted retired general Mario Mérida disputing the
“juridical character,” or legal integrity, of the Peace Accords—a clear attempt
at intimidation, implying that security forces might no longer feel bound by
the agreement to demobilize. Right-­wing members of the press corps moved
to ratchet up the tension. Polemicist and el Periódico columnist Raúl Minondo
Ayau wrote:
If [activists] continue in this way, peace will never arrive. The armed con-
flict should stay where it belongs, in the past. The future is today. This
business of locking up ex-­officials who simply did their constitutional duty
is embarrassing. . . . These people who continue to make their living off
the war and off spilled blood have neither father nor mother! The capture
of ex-­officials is nothing more than a ticket for them to get euros from the
same governments who financed the armed conflict. . . . Pathetic.16
Shortly after, in a paid newspaper advertisement, the Association of Military
Veterans (avemilgua) all but declared war:
During 36 long years, the Guatemalan population was subjected to the
most cowardly and serious acts of armed aggression by delinquent orga-
nizations organized in four terrorist factions. . . . Given the persecutory
actions being carried out against military personnel who, in compliance
with their constitutional mandate and in obedience of their orders, pre-
vented Guatemala from being converted into a communist state . . .
[avemilgua], in light of the capture of Colonel Héctor Rafael Bol de la
Cruz and General Héctor Mario López Fuentes . . . expresses its strenuous
opposition and asks that the Rule of Law be respected. . . . Until today, we
have maintained our respect for the dominion of law, but we lament the
acceptance and interference of “extrajudicial” factors, who, hypocritically
shielded by the “search for justice,” misinterpret [military documents] at
their convenience. . . . This is why our patriotic spirit remains high and our
honor unassailable and why, for those very reasons, we warn that we are willing
to fight anew if the circumstances thusly demand it. . . . Peaceful coexistence
will be impossible if society continues to be confronted in this way.17
avemilgua’s communiqué, in addition to threatening renewed violence,
made two interventions. First, it conveyed official hostility toward war crimes
prosecutions, accusing their proponents of being “fools trapped in the ideolog-

CONCLUSION  — 243
ical past” who had “continued the conflict by other means” and “penetrated
the institutions of the State and the key structures of the justice system” in
order to run a witch hunt against police and military officers. (The wording
appropriated the terms with which progressives typically decried military or
narco infiltration of state institutions.) Second, it prominently reiterated the
army’s version of history, in which its cadres had loyally rescued the nation
from the dangers of subversion.18 Soon after, avemilgua and other conser-
vative groups—associations of military officers, widows, and wives, and mar-
ginal groups with names like the Movement for Equality in Justice—began
holding marches to, as they put it, “break the silence” surrounding what they
saw as the unjust persecution of the arrested generals. Marchers wore white
and carried banners bearing slogans such as “We Can Speak Freely Thanks to
Soldiers, Not Poets,” “We Have Freedom of Religion Thanks to Soldiers, Not
Priests,” and “We Have the Right to a Fair Trial Thanks to Soldiers, Not Law-
yers.” As one such protester complained to a journalist, “Justice is in the hands
of the radicalized left. And it is being used as a political tool, for vengeance.”19
Also in late 2011, military groups began a legal counterinsurgency with,
they proclaimed, the goal of deposing the crusading Attorney General Paz y
Paz. Ricardo Méndez Ruiz, a politician from Ríos Montt’s frg party, fired the
first salvo: a lawsuit against twenty-­six ex-­guerrilla leaders, including Gustavo
Meoño, director of the archival recovery project. “The lawsuit I presented is
simply the beginning of the military’s counteroffensive in this third stage of
the war that has already been started, the counteroffensive to the offensive
that the guerrilla launched with the arrests of the generals,” Méndez attested.
“What you are seeing now is our response, the response of the army.”20 Two of
those named in Méndez’s suit were immediate family members of the attor-
ney general. “This is in order to get rid of Claudia Paz y Paz; she decided to
start this witch-­hunt against the soldiers,” Méndez told the media. “This is not
something improvised; we are working closely on it with retired and active
intelligence officers. . . . Yes, it’s political, for the love of God, I’m going after
the Attorney General.”21 Soon, more lawsuits of a similar character were filed,
each including lists of alleged ex-­guerrillas. Some of those named were indeed
former militants—several lists included Meoño—but others still were journal-
ists, activists, and authors whose connection to the events in question were
dubious at best. Interestingly, one such list of suspects included each individu-
al’s supposed guerrilla pseudonym, a level of detail possible only with the help
of the high-­impact military archives for which leftist activists had long clam-
ored. The placards hoisted by conservative protesters at their marches, which
featured the faces of these accused individuals, made this point manifest by

244  —  CHAPTER NINE

including file numbers beneath each person’s image, offering confirmation of
the secret archives’ existence as a tease.
Méndez and the rest sought, through their lawsuits, to generate a sense of
equivalency between their cases and those against Bol de la Cruz, López Fuentes,
García Arredondo, and Ríos Montt. In launching legal attacks, the military old
guard hoped to delegitimize the lawsuits of their adversaries; in threatening
a “return to an armed struggle,” they hoped to scare civil society away from
the country’s courtrooms. “What has been seen thus far is only the tip of an
enormous iceberg,” Méndez warned.22 He and members of avemilgua went
on to found the so-­called Foundation against Terrorism, which published on-
line screeds and expensive glossy inserts in the country’s major dailies at-
tacking the Catholic Church and Guatemalan progressives, most memorably
in a long photo blacklist titled “The Faces of Infamy”; its logo featured the
scales of justice hanging from either side of a sword’s cross-­guard. Méndez’s
positions were echoed both by powerful institutions, such as the business as-
sociation cacif, and by powerful individuals like the president. In his initial
months in office, Pérez Molina vowed not to interfere with the attorney gen-
eral’s work, but on the day following Ríos Montt’s indictment, Pérez Molina
used the presi­dential bully pulpit to argue that “in Guatemala, there was no
genocide”—a claim that sought to exculpate not only Ríos Montt but himself
too, as he had commanded troops in the Ixil region, the focus of Ríos Montt’s
trial.23 It remains to be seen how this story will unfold over the course of Pérez
Molina’s term and beyond, but what is clear is that the struggle over criminal
justice—a war waged by other means—will be fought out over many years.
In one sense, this evolving conflict was a matter of specific cases and in-
dividual victims—provable facts, incontestable evidence, objective court rul-
ings, particular and knowable historical moments. But more broadly, this was
a battle over historical interpretation, waged in the fungible and subjective
territory of memory. The arrests of army and police officials so enraged the
conservative Right not because of the fine points of their cases or any personal
loyalties to the perpetrators in question—the military’s legal countercrusade
was an institutional, not personal, defense—but because they were incom­
patible with the Right’s conception of history. In this interpretation, the mili­
tary had saved the country from communism, with its soldiers having been
the true patriots of the Guatemalan Cold War. Hard-­liners’ ideological model
had been not the United States’ domestic anticommunism, or even its inter-
national policy of containment, but rather the epic destruction of the Spanish
Popular Front by Francisco Franco, after whose methods influential wartime
groups like Guatemala’s Movement for National Liberation (mln) expressly

CONCLUSION  — 245
modeled their own. It was no coincidence that the bitter back-­and-­forth over
Guatemalan historical memory so resembled Spain’s own tortured attempts
at reckoning with the Spanish Civil War. As one banner, hung outside the
courtroom by Ríos Montt’s supporters as the general’s genocide trial unfolded,
argued, the fact that “terrorists, extortionists, assassins, and criminals” (hu-
man rights activists) were now prosecuting “the defenders of your liberty”
(the military) represented nothing less than “the world turned upside-­down.”
Meanwhile, human rights activists had their own interpretation of history—
one supported, it bears mentioning, by a supermajority of scholarly analyses—
and goals that went beyond simply locating and tallying the dead. They sought,
through their legal and memorial efforts, the reivindicación of the war’s stu-
dents, trade unionists, community organizers, progressive priests and teach-
ers, and even its insurgents—to prove that these people were not terrorists or
felons but rather idealists radicalized by the absence of democratic political
spaces. As the ceh’s final report observed, the wartime criminalization of
victims had formed part of the military state’s overall strategy: “The State also
tried to stigmatize and blame the victims and the country’s social organiza-
tions, making them into criminals in the public eye and thus into ‘legitimate’
targets for repression. This was done by stripping them of their dignity as
individuals, using fire and sword to teach them the lesson that the exercise
of their rights as citizens could mean death.” The commissioners went on
to describe how “this systematic indoctrination,” not only against socialism
but against independent thought, youth culture, contrarianism, civil society,
and political agency, “has profoundly marked the collective consciousness of
Guatemalan society. Fear, silence, apathy and lack of political participation
are some of the most important effects of having criminalized the victims,
and present a serious obstacle to the active participation of all citizens in the
construction of democracy.”24
It was the position of many Project workers that the only way new ideas and
leaders would be able to emerge in the future—the only way such pervasive
“fear, silence, apathy, and lack of political participation” could be overcome—
was to reivindicar or redeem the dissenters, oppositional thinkers, and reb-
els of the past.25 This had occurred, for example, in South Africa, where no
present-­day public figure would dare hazard a defense of apartheid and where
antiapartheid activists are rightly hailed as national heroes.26 The critical dif-
ference between South Africa and Guatemala, of course, was that apartheid
rule was terminated and discredited, while in Guatemala those trying to force
open their society had lost, and badly, making their postconflict journey toward
historical redemption steeply uphill. In amassing documentary proof of the

246  —  CHAPTER NINE

terror state’s atrocities, ex-­militants at the Project hoped not only to see justice
done but also to “give value to people’s struggle,” to prove that their fight against
dictatorship and social exclusion had been commendable, not criminal.27
But could the National Police archives really shoulder such a weighty bur-
den of proof? The history of the war would and should never be written from
the police records alone, incomplete, imperfect and bureaucratically turgid as
they were.28 Nor would the disputes over that history be settled by a few vic-
tories in court cases, however powerful those victories might be for survivors.
(Cambodia’s genocide tribunal, for example, was ten years and many millions
of dollars in the making but secured just one criminal conviction; some ar-
gued that the resources would have been better spent elsewhere.) Moreover,
the whole notion of “recovering historical memory” ran the risk of conflating
history and memory, of collapsing history’s gray areas and complexities into
a narrative of morality and immorality, of simply reversing the military’s of-
ficial story without deconstructing its stark binaries.29 (For example, what of
the guerrillas’ own killings and internal purges?) To put Ríos Montt behind
bars for his war crimes—to “nail a dictator,” as one U.S. documentary film
cavalierly put it—would be a critical contribution to the country’s future, a
testament to the indefatigability of justice advocates, and a relief for many
families. But not even Ríos Montt’s conviction would salve the wounds of an
internal armed conflict that was waged, at the rank-­and-­file level, by forcibly
recruited soldiers, near-­destitute police agents, and guerrilla cadres who re-
sembled each other (in poverty, ethnicity, and educational attainment) far
more than they would have suspected at the time, something Project workers
and pnc agents discovered upon sharing space at the archives. Putting Ríos
Montt in jail would not change the fact that victims and victimizers still lived
cheek by jowl both in rural villages and in the city, and it would neither bring
those groups closer together nor solve the problem of how they, in certain
instances, blurred. Criminal justice mattered, but it would not address the
socioeconomic divides that gave rise to the war in the first place, or resolve
the incompatibility of different historical interpretations. This left hanging
the question of what could be done with the archives and how much of an
impact they could make.

“WHAT IS NO LONGER ARCHIVED IN THE SAME WAY

IS NO LONGER LIVED IN THE SAME WAY”

As we have seen, archival access became a central focus of the struggles ac-
companying Guatemala’s “transition to democracy.” Derrida reminds us that
“there is no political power without control of the archive,” and Guatemala’s

CONCLUSION  — 247
counterinsurgent state grasped this reality, with assistance from the United
States, as early as the 1950s.30 The state was thereafter strongly resistant to
any form of archival opening, and it abetted an official culture that held docu­
ments to be garbage, memory and victimhood to be sicknesses, and postwar
reconciliation to be a fait accompli.31 But as war survivors and victims’ fam-
ilies began to demand answers about the dead and disappeared, they came
to comprehend the power of archives—and to assert their right to consult
state records. The ensuing archival tug-­of-­war between civil society organi-
zations and the state would last more than twenty-­five years, comprising a
variety of individual conflicts that I have dubbed “archive wars.” Tracing the
archive wars through their thorny evolution, in which advocates of access
faced seemingly insurmountable barriers and sharp technical learning curves,
demonstrates the slow, difficult, and often excruciating nature of postconflict
political change. No governmental accord affirming citizens’ right to infor-
mation, in the context of a deeply authoritarian tradition of rule and a largely
disenfranchised population, could dismantle old structures or erase old hab-
its; instead, real transition required blood, sweat, and tears, as it always does,
and in the Guatemalan case, the herculean effort devoted to archival opening
was contributed by a small human rights community that had already made
more than its fair share of sacrifices for the sake of social democracy. Over
the course of the archive wars, citizens’ fight for archival access became a
key means of making claims upon the postwar state, especially once making
arguments overtly about capitalism and class became a death sentence. The
concept of “archives” became bound up in a whole host of demands—for jus-
tice, for truth, and for a new kind of relationship between state and society.32
In coming to frame their objectives in terms of archival access, these activ-
ists made a strategic decision—to focus on old papers commonly considered
trash, a seemingly innocuous crusade, as a way of forcing the military to re-
linquish some measure of power vis-­à-­vis the civilian government. They took
the abstract concepts of justice and power and made them concrete, physical,
material: papers, documents, files. In so doing, they established that to com-
mit violence against documents was also to commit violence against people,
and against their rights.
It was only with the work of the Project for the Recovery of the National
Police Historical Archive that the wars of position over archives became not
simply a way of articulating calls for redress and reparations but also a vision
for a new kind of postconflict politics. Not content to simply sift through
the ghosts of the past, the Project deliberately moved to change Guatemalan
archival culture at its core. By working toward the passage of a national ar-

248  —  CHAPTER NINE

 The Project collaborated with the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of
FIG. 9.2 
Guatemala in the first-­ever exhumations of mass graves from La Verbena, the main
cemetery in Guatemala City. Investigators hoped that by triangulating dna evidence
with the National Police archives’ extensive documentation on cadavers buried as
“XX” or “unidentified,” they would be able to establish the identities of deceased
individuals previously considered to be disappeared. Photograph by James Rodríguez,
mimundo.org. Used by permission of the photographer.

chives system law, building new diploma programs in archival science and
human rights at the national university, sharing its expertise with arms of gov-
ernment seeking to preserve their own records, and collaborating with other
ngos on standing legal cases and efforts to identify war dead, the Project was
arguing for archives to occupy a new and different role in national culture—
and, hence, pushing to establish a different and more equitable relationship
between the government and its citizens. By changing the way Guatemala
archived, the Project sought to change the way Guatemalans lived.33
In a strange and still hypothetical sense, the Project’s greatest accomplish-
ment would be, in the future, its own banalization—to arrive at a point at
which the archives’ most common use would be not for hot-­button prosecu-
tions but for quiet consultation by scholars, genealogists, and curious mem-
bers of the public. In short, the records would become normalized like any
other archival repository, once justice was done. Many of the histories written
from these archives would still look at the civil war because of its obvious his-
torical import, but many others would not. They would include examinations
of crime and punishment in the capital city, or social histories of urban life in,

CONCLUSION  — 249
say, the Ubíco or Barrios years. They would involve reading along and against
the archival grain to recover the voices of rural migrants driven to seek urban
employment, rank-­and-­file police agents, squatters, sex workers, civil society
activists, or municipal workers; they would analyze the categories of informa-
tion recorded by the pn in order to shed light on changing societal attitudes
regarding race and ethnicity (for example, the early twentieth-­century use of
sin calzado, “shoeless,” as a way to denote indigeneity). They would illumi-
nate the relationship between the police and other institutions, including the
military, over the longue durée. Such histories not only would focus on what
police agents did but also would seek to understand why they did it, and what
it meant. Their production will take time.
It was true that the declassification of military records, or the release of
information from the police archives, would not feed the country’s hungry
or educate the country’s children, absent any governmental will to integrate
the new knowledge afforded by the archives into its school curricula. Neither
could these victories expunge so-­called parallel powers from government or
stanch narcotrafficking violence. Ultimately, the Project’s archival triumphs
served, above all, to highlight how much work remained to be done, how shal-
low the country’s transition had been. More than fifteen years after the Peace
Accords, Guatemala had a weak procedural form of political democracy; it did
not enjoy anything approaching economic or social democracy. Existing in a
state of what I have called post-­peace, most Guatemalans struggled to eke out
a living in the midst of appalling violence, impunity, and state institutions that
were either totally ineffectual or deeply enmeshed in organized crime, calling
to mind Tacitus’s admonition that a bad peace is worse than war. And the
new avenues opened by the Project were not uncomplicated ones. Dependent
upon international funding and political capital, as were other transitional
justice initiatives in Guatemala, the Project labored to meet its donors’ and
allies’ expectations while always anxious that those donors’ attentions would
turn elsewhere.
Despite these pressures, the Project succeeded at placing archives at the
center of national conversation for the first time. This conversation was nec-
essarily urban and elite and largely ladino, mainly limited to literate Spanish
speakers who were, for the most part, both educated and already keyed into
the human rights sphere. However, the Project symbolized something larger
than itself: reconstitution and reconstruction, or else constitution and con-
struction. The efforts to gain ground on the archival battlefield ultimately tell
the story of a battered progressive sector attempting not only to breathe life
into past struggles but also to build something new in the face of great obsta-

250  —  CHAPTER NINE

cles; among their innovations was a freely accessible digital archive of nearly
twenty million National Police records, preserved and protected forever, along
with an unprecedented new set of human relationships spanning generations,
old battle lines, and the slippery space between war and not-­war.34 The ac-
tivists leading this charge had lost the revolution; they had lost family and
friends, their youth, their dreams. They knew that the police archives’ great-
est impact might come not from the actual content of the files but, rather,
from the unprecedented convergence and energy of the nearly two hundred
Guatemalans trained in archival methods and committed to history’s ongoing
political relevance, and from the new thinkability of similarly ambitious ini-
tiatives. “For the purpose of building a different mentality, for the people who
still think that this country can move toward a place of social solidarity and
deep change, the archive can bring us a lot,” said Gregorio, a Project worker
and pgt veteran. “The archives can be very beneficial—so that we don’t forget.
Let’s try to build a different society, without forgetting what came before. It’s
a possibility—because what other spaces do we have?”35
The instructive lesson of this tale, from the archives’ accidental discovery
through the Project’s split with the pdh and beyond, was not that the postwar
period saw Guatemala become the kind of society others might aspire to em-
ulate. It was, instead, a parable that spoke to the difficulties of carving out op-
positional political spaces in a country deeply divided along economic, social,
and ethnic fault lines. Because the agca was kept desperately underfunded
and understaffed, it enjoyed neither the political clout nor the financial means
to carry out its mandate to care for the police archives when they first came to
light. Instead, the task of recovering the pn documents was supported, like so
many other essentials, by foreign dollars, propelled transnationally by their
own logics of neoliberal state formation and polyarchy promotion. The na-
tional archives system’s deficiencies were mirrored in most other arms of the
state tasked with protecting citizens’ rights: agencies charged with provid-
ing food, health care, sustainable development, safety, or justice operated,
more often than not, in name only. And this was no accident. With taxation
rates the lowest in the hemisphere after Haiti—and with a small elite deeply
invested in maintaining a weak state from which it could derive the great-
est gain—Guatemalans were left with a government that could barely fulfill
its basic functions. No single archives project could change this reality. In a
corrupt narco-­state long structured by, of, and for a tiny oligarchy, even the
hardest-­won liberalizing efforts made but small dents in a larger system of
power and exclusion. The Project’s circumstances spoke all too eloquently to
the adaptability and strength of that larger system.

CONCLUSION  — 251
 As such, the Project revealed, over the course of its struggle to survive, both
the possibilities and the limitations of archival thinking. The ferocity of the
efforts to derail the Project and its sister initiatives spoke to the persistence of
a counterinsurgent mentality in the halls of power, and no amount of interna-
tional support, archival norms, or technocratic knowledge production could
break this dynamic overnight—just as no amount of auditing, reparations,
or symbolic apologies could heal a society so pervasively scarred. As in other
Latin American post–Dirty War contexts, the military was willing to permit
“truth,” up to a point, but for the most part intervened to forestall efforts
at formal legal justice.36 The low-­ranking agents who carried out the forced
disappearance of Edgar Fernando García could be sacrificed to mollify what
right-­wing columnist Raúl Minondo Ayau derisively called “la suciedad civil,”
but the president who presided over that disappearance would live out his
days peacefully in his home.37
Knowing all too intimately what they were up against, and that the histori­
cal wounds they were investigating could never be healed, the coordinators
and workers of the Project took a page from the ceh in their approach to the
pn archives. When Guatemala’s truth commission was convened in the mid-­
1990s, it was evident to the jurists leading it that the country had been too
damaged for any simple accounting of deeds done to produce reconciliation.
Aware of the implausibility of legal justice or achieving consensus on what
had happened during the war, the ceh attempted neither, opting instead for
a novel strategy among Latin American truth commissions: providing a deep
historical analysis, stretching back five hundred years, of the structural causes
of civil war violence.38 In a country without other avenues for redress, telling
and substantiating this history was critically important, and the ceh’s exegesis
of Guatemala’s unequal, racist socioeconomic structures galvanized survivors
and victims’ families. The Project, then, in many ways carried the spirit of
the ceh to a new level: by fighting for and demanding access to archives and
history writing, its activists believed, they were resisting ahistorical discourses
of “reconciliation” by carving out their own narratives, page by rescued page.
They sought to use history as a moral language.
In doing so, the Project’s amateur archivists and historians had a new tool
at their disposal, one the ceh had never enjoyed: terror archives, or evidence
reflecting perpetrators’ perspectives. The National Police records certainly
did not contain all the answers that survivors sought; neither could any ar-
chives. Nonetheless, the Project represented a formerly unimaginable victory,
in which the survivors of state repression now wielded some measure of their
repressors’ archival power. Archival thinking was historical thinking, and his-

252  —  CHAPTER NINE

torical thinking was Guatemalans’ best hope for creating new mentalities and
political spaces—especially because the type of victory the Project embodied
was the sort that would beget others, by having incrementally changed the
laws of what could be said and done. “Without the police archives, it would
have been unthinkable, the idea that we could have access to the military ar-
chives!” exulted one young Project compañero, and indeed, it was true.39 Many
histories of the armed conflict remain to be written, and many more obstacles
to their writing will present themselves. The personal and political losses suf-
fered over the course of activists’ attempts to take ownership of their histories,
whether by gun or by pen, were staggering. But as a Guatemalan colleague
once quipped, riffing off Ríos Montt’s scorched-­earth strategy of quitar el agua
al pez (taking the water from the fish), the true goal of the counterinsurgency
had been to quitar al pez la cabeza, to decapitate Guatemalans’ future capacity
for critical, oppositional thinking. And the Project’s labor and spirit proved
that the army had failed at this goal, calling to mind Hannah Arendt’s obser-
vation that while a state’s repression aims to consign memory to “holes of
oblivion,” its efforts to make its opponents “disappear in silent anonymity” are
necessarily doomed to failure.40 The road ahead would be arduous, but there
were still Guatemalans willing to walk it. “What we cannot expect, because
nowhere in the world and in no society has it ever taken place, is for social
victories to be handed out for free,” reflected Maria Elena, who was among
those who referred to her work at the archives as un regalo de vida (the gift
of a lifetime). “Social victories are the fruit of the people’s struggle, always.
Nothing is easy, and it all represents a lot of work, no?”41

ARIADNE’S THREAD

In recent years, humanities scholars have taken an “archival turn” best charac-
terized by, as Ann Stoler puts it, the “move from archive-­as-­source to archive-­
as-­subject.”42 Putting the archive itself under the magnifying glass, as I have
done in this book, refracts one line of inquiry into a series of rays, or beams,
that extend in different directions—forward and backward in time, through
stacked layers of analysis, looking not only at “what history is” but also at “how
history works,” examining how societies think through, record, substantiate,
engage with, and create the past.43 But while we have long known that writing
history is hardly the unique preserve of professional historians, we now see
that archival thinking, too, derives its vitality from outside the ivory tower.
Indeed, its keenest innovators have been the amateur historians and amateur
archivists for whom access to documentation can be, quite literally, a matter
of life and death.

CONCLUSION  — 253
 This is reflected most clearly at the police archives, which remain at the
base where human rights activists first encountered them in 2005. This book’s
early chapters chronicled the dire conditions of the archival depot upon its
rediscovery. But by 2011 the site was transformed, most powerfully by the
repurposing of the pitted, barbed wire–topped concrete perimeter walls into
canvases for dozens of brightly painted murals. The murals, designed and
rendered by representatives of human rights organizations, championed the
values of truth and memory and quoted progressives’ best-­loved poets, among
them Otto René Castillo and Humberto Ak’abal. But two murals in particular
spoke eloquently to how the Project has inextricably linked the subject of
archives to the concept of justice in Guatemala. The first, bearing the words
“From Silence to Hope,” depicted a sun rising over a verdant highland village,
with several shadowed graves set back from an otherwise bucolic pastoral
scene of a church, homestead, and field of crops and flowers. Above the scene
flew a dove composed, in lieu of feathers, of pages from the archives; from its
tail, additional pages fluttered down to blanket the graves. The second fea-
tured a Lady Justice figure, blindfolded and holding the traditional balance
scale in her left hand, wading through a sea of scattered documents framed
by archival storage boxes, from which a bright green shoot sprouted skyward.
In her right hand, in place of her customary sword, Justitia held a bundle, or
legajo, of police documents.
Archives and graves; archives as weapons and tools; archives as prisons and
temples; archives in opposition to silence; archives, peace, and justice. Ar-
chives were perhaps a curious and inadequate repository for such lofty hopes
and aspirations, but Guatemalan history, the archive wars, and the Project had
made it thus, in a country so unsparing and pained that the poet Castillo once
called it “God’s tomb.”44 As Howard Zinn writes, “To refuse to be instruments
of social control in an essentially undemocratic society, to begin to play some
small part in the creation of a real democracy: these are worthy jobs for histori-
ans, for archivists, for us all.”45 If the path out of Guatemala’s “eternal tyranny”
was labyrinthine, then historical knowledge and the archives might serve as
an Ariadne’s thread, guiding a way forward that would necessarily be marked
by trials and errors.46 In any event, the hard work would still fall, as it always
does, to the idealists: those who worked to recover the past not for its own
sake but as a way to imagine more felicitous—even beautiful—possibilities
for the future. This was more than sufficient motivation for Guatemalan activ-
ists to learn international archival standards, to dig through history for sign-
posts and lessons, to plumb the depths of rotting archives—and to endure

254  —  CHAPTER NINE

 A mural at the Project depicts a dove with feathers made of pages from the archives,
FIG. 9.3 
shedding documents down to the earth in order to blanket rural graves. Photograph by
James Rodríguez, mimundo.org. Used by permission of the photographer.

A mural at the Project depicts Lady Justice wading through a sea of archival
FIG. 9.4 
documents with a file folder in her hand in lieu of the traditional sword. Photograph by
James Rodríguez, mimundo.org. Used by permission of the photographer.
the profoundly unsettling, dangerous, ambivalent, and human experience of
reckoning with paper cadavers.
This is why history and archives matter. To exhume a paper cadaver or
rescue a document is to stave off oblivion, to look backward, to prevent stories
and lives and traumas from being forgotten, and to accord dignity to the dead,
disappeared, and displaced. But while to delve deeply into dark pasts is an act
of remembering, it is also a constructive act, one of imagination. The activists
seeking to save the Guatemalan historical record from itself did so, and con-
tinue to do so, with regret and sadness—but also with inspiration. They had
nightmares about the violence of the war and the postwar period, but they
had dreams, too. Raúl, the former trade unionist turned amateur archivist
at the Project, had quite literally dreamed of entering the fearsome National
Police archives decades before it ever came to pass. And he and other work-
ers at the Project, despite everything they had lived, still envisaged a better
Guatemala—one in which they might, at the very least, be the last and final
generation charged with exhuming the massive archives of the dead. “Justice
should mean that if someone commits an error they should be brought to jus-
tice, whether today or tomorrow,” Raúl reflected. “We have to keep insisting,
and bit by bit, perhaps, we will advance.”47

256  —  CHAPTER NINE

 NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1. Saramago, All the Names, 4–5.

INTRODUCTION
1. The National Police (pn) was disbanded under the Peace Accords and replaced
with the National Civil Police (pnc).
2. Interview, prahpn024, 5 December 2007.
3. The archives contain an estimated seventy-­five to eighty million pages. See
Procuraduría de los Derechos Humanos (pdh), “Informe Archivo Histórico de la Policía
Nacional—por el derecho a la verdad” (2 March 2006).
4. Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (ceh), Guatemala: Memoria del silencio.
5. “Discurso del Profesor Julio Alberto Martí,” in Ministerio de Gobernación, Boletín
del Archivo General de la Nación (1967).
6. As of this writing, the cases of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are paramount
in the public eye, but there have been others, and there will be many more.
7. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, 11.
8. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 150.
9. On the war, see Proyecto Interdiocesano de Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica
(remhi), Guatemala: Nunca Más!; Rosada Granados, Soldados en el poder; McAllister,
The Good Road; Simon, Eternal Spring, Eternal Tyranny; Falla, Masacres en la selva and
Quiché Rebelde; Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala; Flores, Los compañeros; Ramírez, La
guerra de los 36 años; Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project; Grandin, The Last Colo-
nial Massacre; Payeras, Los días de la selva; Manz, Refugees of a Hidden War; Bastos and
Camus, Sombras de una batalla; Moller and Menchú Tum, Our Culture Is Our Resistance;
Filóchofo, La otra historia; Gallardo Flores, La utopia de la rosa; Centro de Investigación y
Documentación Centroamericana (cidc), Violencia y contraviolencia; Sánchez del Valle,
ed., Por el delito de pensar; Sichar Moreno, Guatemala; García, El genocidio de Guatemala.
10. Tomuschat, “Clarification Commission in Guatemala,” 233–58. Investigators for
the ceh were allowed into the Center for Military Studies to hand-­transcribe four key
military action plans; no access was provided to pn documents.
11. Alberti, “Archives of Pain.”
12. Jelin, State Repression, 27.
13. For example, the 1968 poster “Red Wall” displayed the photographs of fifteen
accused guerrillas along with these words: “People of Guatemala! Here are your vende-
patria [sellout] enemies, Communists from the pgt and the far, who with their crimes
daily bring mourning to the hearths of the Homeland. Know them and denounce them
wherever they are found!” ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, vol. 1, appendix 18, 285.
14. In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin writes, “The tradition of
the oppressed teaches us that the ‘emergency situation’ in which we live is the rule. We
must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear
that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in
the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.” In Benjamin, Illuminations, 253–64.
15. See Centro Internacional de Investigaciones en Derechos Humanos (ciidh),
Situación de los derechos económicos, sociales, y culturales en Guatemala, 2006; Impunity
Watch, Recognising the Past; Programa de Seguridad Ciudadana y Prevención de la Vio-
lencia, Informe estadístico de la violencia en Guatemala.
16. International Crisis Group, “Learning to Walk without a Crutch.”
17. Nelson, A Finger in the Wound; Sánchez del Valle, ed., Por el delito de pensar;
Amnesty International, Persecution and Resistance; United Nations Office of the High
Commission for Human Rights, “Report of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
on the Situation of Human Rights in Guatemala,” 1–21; Coalición para la Comisión de
Investigación de Cuerpos Ilegales y Aparatos Clandestinos y de Seguridad, “El rostro del
terror”; Goldman, The Art of Political Murder; Oglesby, “Educating Citizens in Postwar
Guatemala.”
18. The United Nations’ International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala
(cicig) has taken up this question, but the intractability of corruption and “parallel
powers” has made its progress slower than hoped. Carlos Castresana, the cicig’s first
director, admitted the occasional temptation to throw in the towel. “For these kinds of
missions,” he told reporters, “you just have to come without a towel.” Coralia Orantes,
“Critica falta de atención a propuesta,” Prensa Libre (19 February 2010). Also see Peacock
and Beltrán, Poderes ocultos; United Nations Development Program, El costo económico.
19. McCleary, Dictating Democracy.
20. ciidh, Situación de los Derechos, 2006; State Department, Bureau of Democracy,
Human Rights, and Labor, 2008 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Guatemala.
21. In speaking of two distinct historical “moments” or periods, I do not mean to
draw an artificial boundary between them or suggest that the archives’ uses were static in
those moments. Rather, I use the continuity and change in the conditions of the archives
as an analytical entry point to studying continuity and change in the broader Guate-
malan context. As E. P. Thompson writes, “In investigating history we are not flicking
through a series of ‘stills,’ each of which shows us a moment of social time transfixed into
a single eternal pose: for each one of these ‘stills’ is not only a moment of being but also a
moment of becoming: and even within each seemingly-­static section there will be found
contradictions and liaisons, dominant and subordinate elements, declining or ascending
energies. Any historical moment is both a result of prior process and an index toward the
direction of its future flow.” Thompson, The Poverty of Theory, 64.
22. Trouillot calls these two meanings “historicity 1” and “historicity 2.” Trouillot,
Silencing the Past, 29.
23. See www.avemilgua.org.
24. Fujino, ed., Winds of Resistance.
25. These observations come from my visit to the festival in 2007.

258  —  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

 26. McCreery, Rural Guatemala 1760–1940; McCreery, “Wage Labor, Free Labor”;
Handy, Gift of the Devil; Casaús Arzú, Guatemala; Smith, ed., Guatemalan Indians and the
State; Grandin, The Blood of Guatemala; Lovell, A Beauty That Hurts; Martínez Peláez, La
patria del criollo; Arenas Bianchi, Hale, and Palma Murga, eds., Racismo en Guatemala?
27. On the 1944 Revolution and the Revolutionary Spring, see Galich, Del panico al
ataque; Flores, Fortuny; Handy, Revolution in the Countryside; Grandin, The Last Colonial
Massacre; Cardoza y Aragón, La revolución guatemalteca; García Laguardia, La revolución.
28. On the coup, see Cullather, Secret History; Gleijeses, Shattered Hope; Immerman,
The cia in Guatemala; Kinzer and Schlesinger, Bitter Fruit.
29. Sabino, Guatemala; ceh, “Orígenes del enfrentamiento armado, 1962–1970,” in
Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, vol. 1, 123–146; Rosada Granados, Soldados en el poder;
Ramírez, La guerra de los 36 años; Sandoval, Los días de la resistencia; Maldonado, “Marzo
y abril de 1962”; Toriello Garrido, Guatemala.
30. Many of the insurgency’s surviving leaders wrote memoirs about the war and the
ideological divides within the revolutionary movements. See Payeras, Los días de la selva
and Los fusiles de octubre; Morán (Ramírez de León), Saludos revolucionarios; Macías, La
guerrilla fue mi camino; Colom, Mujeres en la alborada.
31. urng, Línea política de los revolucionarios guatemaltecos.
32. Kobrak, Organizing and Repression; Aguilera Peralta and Romero Imery, Dialéc-
tica del terror; Levenson-­Estrada, Trade Unionists; Asociación de Investigación y Estudios
Sociales en Guatemala (asies), Más de cien años, vol. 2; Figueroa Ibarra, El recurso del
miedo; McClintock, The American Connection.
33. ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio; remhi, Guatemala: Nunca Más!; Figueroa
Ibarra, Los que siempre estarán en ninguna parte.
34. Hernández Pico, Terminar la guerra; Sáenz de Tejada, Revolucionarios; Armon et
al., Guatemala 1983–1997; Rosada ­Granados, El lado oculto; Aguilera Peralta, Las propues-
tas para la paz; Jonas, Of Centaurs and Doves; Stanley and Holiday, “Broad Participation,
Diffuse Responsibility”; Sieder et al., Who Governs; Schirmer, “The Guatemalan Politico-­
Military Project.”
35. On the solidarity movement, see Smith, Resisting Reagan; Erickson Nepstad, Con-
victions of the Soul; Gosse, “Active Engagement”; Perla, “Si Nicaragua Venció.”
36. Despite anthropologist David Stoll’s efforts to undermine the narrative that Rigo-
berta Menchú Tum recounted to Elisabeth Burgos-­Debray and published as Me llamo
Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, Menchú’s account remains the most influ-
ential account of the war. Her book was used as an advocacy tool to draw attention to
the Guatemalan state’s mass killings of Mayas; Menchú was awarded the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1992. See Arias, ed., The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy; Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú
and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans.
37. As Greg Grandin asks, “Does labeling the massacres genocide overshadow the
fact that the state was being challenged by a powerful, multiethnic coalition demanding
economic and political reform? Does the charge of genocide eclipse the destruction and
violence inflicted on ladinos (Guatemalans not considered indigenous), who until 1981
constituted the majority of the victims of state repression? Likewise, does it overstate
the racial dimensions of the insurgency while downplaying its class component? Does it
deny indigenous participation in the popular movement and reduce the repression to a

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION   — 259

simplified tale of ladino violence heaped on defenseless Indians?” Grandin, “Chronicles,”
399. For more on the “genocide” label’s complexities, see Garrard-­Burnett, Terror in the
Land of the Holy Spirit, 13–18.
38. For an incisive exegesis of these politics, see McAllister, “Good People.”
39. These scholars include (but are not limited to) McAllister, Konefal, Oglesby,
Garrard-­Burnett, Manz, Falla, Schirmer, Nelson, Grandin, and Vela Castañeda, as well
as the many Guatemalans at research organizations like avancso (Asociación para el
Avance de las Ciencias Sociales de Guatemala), iccpg (Instituto de Estudios Compara-
dos en Ciencias Penales de Guatemala) and flacso (Facultad Latinoamericana de Cien-
cias Sociales de Guatemala).
40. Notable exceptions are Kobrak, Organizing and Repression; Levenson-­Estrada,
Trade Unionists; and McClintock, The American Connection.
41. On the Pan-­Maya movement, its advances, and the “neoliberal multiculturalism”
that has been its unexpected result, see Hale, Más Que Un Indio; Warren, Indigenous
Movements; Fischer and Brown, eds., Maya Cultural Activism; Bastos and Camus, El mov-
imiento maya; Cojtí Cuxil, El movimiento maya.
42. See, for example, Payeras, El trueno en la ciudad.
43. Kobrak, Organizing and Repression, 68–69.
44. I borrow this formulation from Derrida, who writes in Archive Fever that “what is
no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.”
45. The phrase “archival thinking” finds use mainly by professional archivists as a
way of describing current trends in their field, such as in the journal Currents of Archival
Thinking. Here, however, I borrow and adapt the phrase to analytical ends. The phrase
also appears in Strobel’s 1999 article “Becoming a Historian,” as a way for Strobel to de-
scribe how crucial it is that activists keep records of their work. Archival thinking is not
developed conceptually in her piece; her point that activists must self-­archive is taken
up by Bickford in “The Archival Imperative.”
46. See, for example, Stoler, “Colonial Archives”; Trouillot, Silencing the Past;
Ketelaar, “Muniments and Monuments”; Ketelaar, “Tacit Narratives”; Bickford, “The
Archival Imperative”; Huskamp Peterson, “The Role of Archives in Strengthening De-
mocracy”; Fredriksson, “Postmodernistic Archival Science.”
47. See the essays in the special issues of Archival Science devoted to the theme “Ar-
chives, Records, and Power,” including Cook and Schwartz, “Archives, Records, and
Power”; Trace, “What Is Recorded Is Never Simply ‘What Happened’ ”; Hedstrom, “Ar-
chives, Memory, and Interfaces with the Past”; Ketelaar, “Archival Temples, Archival
Prisons”; and O’Toole, “Cortes’s Notary.”
48. Huskamp Peterson, “The Nasty Truth about Nationalism”; also see Lowenthal,
The Heritage Crusade; O’Toole, “Between Veneration and Loathing”; Cook, “What Is Past
Is Prologue”; Duchein, “The History of European Archives”; Lowenthal, The Past Is a
Foreign Country; Brown and Davis-­Brown, “The Making of Memory.”
49. See Nelson, Reckoning, 27; Strathern, Audit Cultures; Power, The Audit Society;
Hetherington, Guerrilla Auditors.
50. On the Guatemalan case, see chapter 4; also see Huggins, Political Policing; and
Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression.
51. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 33.

260  —  NOTES TO INTRODUCTION

 52. See Stoler, Along the Archival Grain; McCoy, Policing America’s Empire; Richards,
The Imperial Archive; and Burton, Dwelling in the Archive.
53. Derrida, Archive Fever, 4. Derrida’s work has proved a stimulating and contro-
versial departure point for archival thinkers. See Steedman, Dust, 77; Ferreira-­Buckley,
“Rescuing the Archives”; Shetty and Bellamy, “Postcolonialism’s Archive Fever”; Van Zyl,
“Psychoanalysis and the Archive”; Harris, “A Shaft of Darkness”; in a truth commission
context, Harris, “The Archive, Public History, and the Essential Truth”; and Manoff,
“Theories of the Archive.”
54. Mario Castañeda, “De memoria y justicia,” Plaza Pública (19 June 2011).
55. On escrache protests in Argentina, see Taylor, “You Are Here.”
56. On the Diario Militar, see Doyle, “Death Squad Diary.”
57. Bickford, “The Archival Imperative,” 1097.
58. See Huskamp Peterson, “The Nasty Truth about Nationalism,” 5; Stephen Kinzer,
“East Germans Face Their Accusers,” New York Times (12 April 1992); and McAdams,
Judging the Past; also, for a more longue durée perspective, see part V of Blouin and Rosen-
berg, eds., Archives, Documentation, and Institutions, 379–496.
59. See Huskamp Peterson, “Privacy Is Not a Rose.”
60. Martín Almada, “The Man Who Discovered the Archives of Terror,” The unesco
Courier 9 (2009); Mike Ceasar, “Paraguay’s Archives of Terror,” bbc News (11 March
2002).
61. unesco, “Memory of the World Programme,” www.unesco.org/webworld/en
/mow.
62. “Tendremos Archivo de la Memoria,” La República, Uruguay (12 November 2008).
63. The online service, “Memorias Reveladas,” is maintained by Brazil’s Arquivo
Nacional.
64. Osorio, “Argentina.”
65. “Inauguración museo de la memoria en Chile,” Los Andes (8 January 2010).
66. Aguilar, “Transitional or Post-­transitional Justice”; José Andrés Rojo, “Conflict
That Never Ends: Civil War Oral Testimony on Trial,” El País (4 August 2008).
67. Iraq Memory Foundation Documentation Project, www.iraqmemory.org/en
/Projects_Documentation.asp; on the U.S. military’s seizure of Iraqi records, see Hus-
kamp Peterson, “Archives in Service to the State.”
68. The work of the National Security Archive merits particular recognition (dis-
cussed in Blanton, “Recovering the Memory”), as does that of Germany’s federal com-
missioner for the Stasi archives, which has worked with former Soviet bloc countries on
the handling of their secret service records.
69. Borzou Daragahi, “In Tunisia, Where Record Keeping Is Good, Some Seek to
Preserve Documents of Tyranny,” Los Angeles Times (16 April 2011).
70. Interview, Estuardo Galeano, 6 February 2008.
71. Ketelaar, “Archival Temples, Archival Prisons”; Ketelaar, “Recordkeeping and So-
cietal Power.”
72. Benjamin, Illuminations.
73. For meditations on this, see Steedman, Dust; Felman, The Juridical Unconscious.
74. On “archival truth claims,” see Stoler, “Colonial Archives”; see also Huskamp
Peterson, “The Probative Value.”

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION   — 261

 75. Jelin, State Repression.
76. Years later, now that the digitized documents are accessible online thanks to
the Project’s partnership with ut Austin, more traditional historical studies can be con-
ducted using the pn records.
77. Interview, prahpn010, 16 October 2007.
78. Interview, prahpn007, 10 October 2007.

ONE. EXCAVATING BABYLON

1. Interview, prahpn005, 8 October 2007.
2. Interview, Alberto Fuentes, 21 February 2008.
3. For the denial of the archives as a matter of state policy, see the more than one
hundred pages’ worth of correspondence between the truth commissioners and Arzú
government functionaries appended to the ceh report, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio,
vol. 12, annex 3, 31–196; also see Tomuschat, “Clarification Commission in Guatemala.”
4. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 20–23.
5. On archival description as the control of information and the construction of
meaning, see Duff and Harris, “Stories and Names.”
6. Ketelaar writes, “Here we see an essential connection between archives and hu-
man rights: the violation of those rights has been documented in the archives, and citi-
zens who defend themselves appeal to the archives. The archives have a twofold power:
being evidence of oppression and containing evidence required to gain freedom, evi-
dence of wrongdoing and evidence for undoing the wrong.” Ketelaar, “The Panoptical
Archive,” 146.
7. Guha, “The Prose of Counter-­insurgency.”
8. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 28.
9. Nancy Arroyave, “Vuelve la calma tras explosión en brigada Mariscal Zavala,”
Prensa Libre (18 June 2005).
10. Interview, Edeliberto Cifuentes, 10 November 2007.
11. Grandin writes that “Latin America’s move away from military dictatorships in
the 1980s was less a transition than it was a conversion to a particular definition of
democracy . . . by abandoning social-­democratic principles of development and welfare,
opening up their economies to the world market, and narrowing their conception of de-
mocracy to focus more precisely on political and legal rights rather than on social ones.”
Grandin, “The Instruction of Great Catastrophe.”
12. Morales would fall from progressives’ good graces as he maneuvered to secure his
2007 reelection.
13. Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, Molina Thiessen v. Guatemala.
14. Interview, Sergio Morales, 12 February 2008.
15. See Amnesty International, “Persecution and Resistance.” The ngo National
Movement for Human Rights reported almost two hundred attacks against human rights
defenders in 2007. See Human Rights First, “Human Rights Defenders in Guatemala.”
16. Cited in Doyle, “The Atrocity Files,” 54.
17. Interview, Ana Corado, 23 January 2008.
18. Interview, Ana Corado.
19. Interview, Anna Carla Ericastilla, 29 November 2007.

262  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

 20. The ceh did not enjoy subpoena powers, nor could it search any premises for
records, nor could it order the seizure of evidence in the possession of state institutions.
When the ceh requested documentation from the Arzú administration related to four
“test cases” under investigation, it “failed to receive any substantial response to its re-
quest for information”—the ceh was informed that the president had transmitted the
letter to the minister of defense, where it “got lost,” and when the minister of defense
finally retrieved it, he chose to transmit it to the interior minister, who sent it to the
head of police, which yielded nothing. The armed forces pursued “a deliberate strategy of
obstruction” regarding documentary disclosure; Tomuschat writes that President Arzú’s
failure to assist the ceh was a “black stain” upon his presidency. Tomuschat, “Clarifica-
tion Commission in Guatemala,” 246–51.
21. Interview, Alberto Fuentes.
22. Interview, Ingrid Molina, 11 November 2007. For gente de confianza, see chapter
6; interview, prahpn003, 1 October 2007.
23. Interview, Iduvina Hernández, 26 November 2007; interview, Mario Polanco, 20
February 2008. The emp records will be discussed in detail in chapter 2.
24. Interview, prahpn028, 22 January 2008.
25. On “studied indifference” and why a society plagued by authoritarianism and
impunity might find itself the victim of poor “archival culture,” see chapter 2 and Ingrid
Roldán Martínez, “Guardián de la memoria escrita,” Revista D (Prensa Libre), 20 January
2008.
26. Letter, Anna Carla Ericastilla to Julio Galicia Díaz, 24 August 2005; copy in au-
thor’s files.
27. Only in 2009 was custody of the archives transferred from the pdh to the Minis-
try of Culture and the agca.
28. Interview, Frank La Rue, 7 February 2008.
29. Interview, Frank La Rue.
30. Interview, Carla Villagrán, 12 October 2007.
31. Interview, Anna Carla Ericastilla.
32. As Ericastilla told me, “The pdh has enough social capital to make the contacts
with the necessary institutions around the world and to win the support and connections
that they have so far. If this had been under the purview of the Ministry of Culture and
thus the agca, we simply don’t have the same kind of social capital, connections. I can’t
just show up at different institutions, places, or embassies like the pdh can. . . . We have
to recognize this, the fact that the pdh’s taking control of these archives has gotten a
lot of attention, which has in turn sparked a lot of donations, which is very positive.”
Interview, Anna Carla Ericastilla.
33. Interview, Åsa Wallton, 28 November 2007.
34. Interview, Michael Moerth, 8 February 2008.
35. Interview, Christina Elich, 4 December 2007.
36. Interview, Christina Elich.
37. Confidential interview, 15 November 2007.
38. Bickford, “The Archival Imperative.”
39. Interview, Åsa Wallton.
40. Interview, Agnes Bernzen, 12 February 2008.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1   — 263

 41. Comisión Provincial por la Memoria, www.comisionporlamemoria.org.
42. unesco information officer Gloria Alberti distinguishes between “archives of
terror,” records produced by repressive state agencies, and “archives of pain,” records
produced by human rights groups gathering information about human rights violations.
Alberti, “Archives of Pain.”
43. The best English-­language account of the challenges presented by the Stasi ar-
chives is McAdams, Judging the Past. Reconstructing the shredded files will be acceler-
ated with the introduction of a specialized computer/scanner machine, known as the
E-­puzzler, that is currently in development in Berlin.
44. Stephen Kinzer, “East Germans Face Their Accusers,” New York Times (12 April
1992).
45. Wolf Biermann’s file, for example, held forty thousand pages; writer Jürgen Fuchs
merited thirty binders’ worth. Garton Ash expresses disappointment that his own file fit
into a single binder, exhibiting the desire to have been a more “worthy” archival subject
and thus a more influential dissident. Garton Ash, The File, 20–23.
46. González Quintana, “Archives of the Security Services.”
47. Mike Ceaser, “Paraguay’s Archive of Terror,” BBC News, 11 March 2002.
48. Blanco-­Rivera, “Transitional Justice,” 5.
49. Archives, history, and impunity are closely linked; one Impunity Watch report
identifies the three major obstacles to truth-­seeking in Guatemala as (1) the lack of po-
litical acknowledgment or adequate dissemination of the ceh report, (2) minimal state
support for exhumations and efforts to locate victims of forced disappearance, and (3)
state reluctance to open archives bearing information about the armed conflict. Impu-
nity Watch, Recognising the Past.
50. Louis Bickford writes that the English word “impunity” “does not capture the
richness of meaning that the word impunidad confers in Spanish. In Spanish, this term
encompasses more than simply exemption from punishment for evil deeds. It also im-
plies systemic corruption, the fundamental absence of the rule of law (especially as it
applies to those in positions of power), distorted norms of justice and fairness, and the
constant sabotaging of democracy through the erosion of democratic institutions.” Bick-
ford, “The Archival Imperative.”
51. Interview, Gustavo Meoño, 3 December 2007. Scattered details about Meoño’s
life appear in Konefal, For Every Indio; Saxon, To Save Her Life; Figueroa Ibarra, Los que
siempre estarán en ninguna parte; Ludec, “Voces del exilio guatemalteco”; McAllister,
“Good People.”
52. Interview, Gustavo Meoño.
53. Interview, Gustavo Meoño.
54. Cited in Anne Marie O’Connor, “Payments and Apologies for Victims of Guate-
mala’s Civil War,” Washington Post (6 May 2009).
55. Interview, Carla Villagrán.
56. Interview, Carla Villagrán.
57. The account par excellence of this dynamic is Goldman’s Art of Political Murder.
58. Interview, Carla Villagrán.
59. Coralia Orantes, “Juez denuncia intimidaciones: Ordenó traslado de archivos de
Policía a la pdh,” Prensa Libre (11 May 2006).

264  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

 60. Juan García, “Tratan de quemar archivos policiales,” La Hora (11 May 2006). By
February 2008, there had been five suspicious fires at the archives site and two Molotov
cocktail incidents. Leonardo Cereser, “Intentan quemar archivos de pn,” Prensa Libre
(9 February 2008).
61. Interview, prahpn006, 9 October 2007.
62. Interview, prahpn008, 11 October 2007.
63. For literary-­minded discussions of “archivist’s lung,” see Steedman, Dust; also
Lowenthal, “Archives, Heritage, and History.”
64. Reuters, “Hole opens in Guatemala neighborhood, 3 missing,” 23 February 2007.
65. Interview, prahpn010.
66. Interview, prahpn004, 3 October 2007.
67. Interview, prahpn004.
68. The experts were Jean-­Marc Comment and Erwin Oberholzer, sent by Switzer-
land to advise the Project in digital preservation and archival fumigation.
69. On Spain’s efforts to prosecute human rights abusers under the principle of uni-
versal jurisdiction, see Roht-­Arriaza, The Pinochet Effect.
70. See Coralia Orantes, “Llega comisión española,” Prensa Libre (25 June 2006).
71. Field notes, June 2006.
72. Interview, prahpn022, 29 November 2007.
73. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 20.
74. Hetherington discusses related dynamics in his Guerrilla Auditors.

TWO. ARCHIVAL CULTURE, STATE SECRETS, AND THE ARCHIVE WARS

1. “Urinate with contentment, urinate happily, but please, urinate neatly!”
2. Interview, Lizbeth Barrientos, 29 January 2008.
3. Field notes, 2008.
4. See chapter 1; interview, Alberto Fuentes; interview, Ana Corado.
5. Mario Cordero, “La situación de los archivos históricos en el país,” La Hora (17
May 2008).
6. Stoler, “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance,” 100.
7. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain; Riles, ed., Documents.
8. Cordero, “La situación de los archivos históricos.”
9. Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
10. I thank Gustavo Palma for his turn of phrase about how “memory is a sickness” in
official Guatemala; interview, 14 November 2007.
11. Constitution of Guatemala, 1985 with 1993 reforms. On the secreto de estado de-
fense, see Delgado Duarte, Aproximación al secreto de estado; Garrido, ed., Secreto de
estado; Gramajo Valdés, El derecho de acceso.
12. See Stoler on the state secret as state fetish: Along the Archival Grain, 26.
13. For “war of position” see Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
14. See, for example, Stern, Peru’s Indian Peoples; Burns, Into the Archive; Rama, La ciu-
dad letrada; González Echeverria, Myth and Archive; Sellers-­García, “Distant Guatemala.”
15. John Sullivan, “Guatemalan Held in Document Sale in New York,” New York Times
(28 June 1995). The stolen documents were eventually returned.
16. I do not include the archives held at cirma because they are not a state collection.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2   — 265

 17. Ingrid Roldán Martínez, “Guardián de la memoria escrita,” Revista D, Prensa Libre
(28 January 2008).
18. Roldán Martínez, “Guardián de la memoria escrita.”
19. The colonial ayuntamiento of Guatemala of course kept an archive, though it was
less centralized than its modern iterations; many of its documents would later be housed
in the agca. Sellers-­García, “Distant Guatemala.”
20. Chinchilla Aguilar, “La clasificación”; italics mine.
21. “Reconocen al archivo nacional su categoría centroamericana,” La Hora (26 Feb-
ruary 1968); “Directores de archivos subscribieron resolución,” Prensa Libre (26 February
1968).
22. For more on the agca see Roldán Martínez, “Guardián de la memoria escrita.”
23. “Discurso del Licenciado Héctor Mansilla Pinto, Ministro de Gobernación,” in
Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación, Segunda Epoca (1967).
24. Interview, Ingrid Molina.
25. Interview, Ingrid Molina.
26. Interview, Alberto Fuentes.
27. Interview, Anna Carla Ericastilla.
28. Barrientos, “Importancia de la conservación,” 2.
29. Interview, Ingrid Molina.
30. See Compendio de leyes sobre la protección del patrimonio cultural guatemalteco
(Guatemala City: unesco, 2006). For a probing analysis of the concept of patrimony,
see Ferry, Not Ours Alone.
31. Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Ley para la protección del patrimonio cultural de
la nación, 19. See also Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Políticas culturales y deportivas
nacionales. For more on the techniques of cultural genocide deployed during the war,
see Arriaza and Arias, “Claiming Collective Memory”; Schirmer, The Guatemalan Mili-
tary Project; Nelson, A Finger in the Wound; Montejo, Voices from Exile; and the ceh and
remhi reports.
32. Interview, Anna Carla Ericastilla; Leonardo Cereser, “Historia del país se
pierde entre miles de papeles,” Prensa Libre (14 May 2009). The unesco Memoria del
Mundo project is generating a central Guatemalan archival registry. Interview, Lizbeth
Barrientos.
33. Gramajo Valdés, El derecho de acceso, 28.
34. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy.
35. González Quintana, “Archives of the Security Services”; Huskamp Peterson, Final
Acts; Huskamp Peterson, “The Nasty Truth about Nationalism.”
36. Bickford, “The Archival Imperative”; Agamben, State of Exception; Gramajo
Valdés, El derecho de acceso; Bobbio, The Future of Democracy; Weber, “Bureaucracy.”
37. Bickford, “Human Rights Archives and Research on Historical Memory.”
38. Interview, Mario Polanco.
39. Organizations with similar objectives, like conavigua (National Coordination
of Widows of Guatemala), famdegua (Families of the Detained-­Disappeared of Guate-
mala), and cerj (Council for Ethnic Communities “We Are All Equal”), came into being
slightly later, during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
40. Departamento de Información y Divulgación del Ejército, “El Ejército de Gua-

266  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 2

temala Remite al gam ante la Opinión Pública,” Guatemala City, 17 September 1986,
cirma: Colección de Documentos, 2807.
41. Interview, Mario Polanco.
42. Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, Del silencio a la memoria, 18.
43. “Denuncian propósitos para destruir archivos de Investigaciones Técnicas,” Prensa
Libre (1 March 1993).
44. “Denuncian propósitos para destruir archivos de Investigaciones Técnicas.”
45. “Archivos del Gabinete de Identificación no serán destruidos, dice Guerra,” Siglo
Veintiuno (2 March 1993).
46. “Otorgan virtual amnistía a millares de delincuentes,” Prensa Libre (1 July 1993).
47. See Guadamuz, “Habeas Data.”
48. González Quintana, “Archives of the Security Services.” It was Brazil that first
incorporated habeas data into its constitution; Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Paraguay, and
the Philippines followed suit. See Guadamuz, “Habeas Data.”
49. Roht-­Arriaza, The Pinochet Effect, 102. Of course, securing habeas data rights was
more difficult in cases like that of the National Intelligence Directorate, or dina, in
Chile, in which security forces argued that they had destroyed their archives before the
establishment of civilian government. See Rzeplinski, “Habeas Data.”
50. Interview, Mario Polanco.
51. Cited in Higonnet, Quiet Genocide, 214.
52. Letter, Jean Arnault (minugua) to Eduardo Stein Barillas, 12 December 1997;
reprinted in ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, vol. 12, annex 3, 15.
53. Letter ct008-­97/sp, Christian Tomuschat to Alvaro Arzú Irigoyen, 9 September
1997; reprinted in ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, vol. 12, annex 3, 37–45.
54. Letter No. 002-­mdn-­acom/98, Héctor Mario Barrios Celada to Christian Tomus-
chat, 5 January 1998; reprinted in ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, vol. 12, annex
3, 109–11.
55. Letter, Christian Tomuschat et al. to Alvaro Arzú Irigoyen, 19 February 1998;
reprinted in ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, vol. 12, annex 3, 136–39.
56. Interview, Sergio Morales.
57. All Tomuschat citations from his “Clarification Commission in Guatemala.”
58. Gobierno de la República de Guatemala, urng, and Naciones Unidas, Acuerdo
Sobre el Fortalecimiento y Función del Ejército en una Sociedad Democrática, 30–31. More
on the passage of the access to information law is found in Gramajo Valdés’s El derecho
de acceso. On the spotty implementation of the Peace Accords by postwar governments,
see Spence et al., eds., Promise and Reality; Sieder et al., Who Governs?; Montejo, “Con-
vention 169”; Jonas, Of Centaurs and Doves; Sieder, Guatemala after the Peace Accords; and
Stanley and Holiday, “Broad Participation, Diffuse Responsibility.”
59. Personal communication, Trudy Huskamp Peterson.
60. Four organizations co-­published the document: the National Security Archive,
Human Rights Watch, the Washington Office on Latin America, and the American Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Science. They obtained the document from unidentified
individuals, who paid the smuggler two thousand dollars for it. See Doyle, “Death Squad
Diary,” 52–53, and Blanton, “Recovering the Memory,” 61.
61. Pavel Arellano, “Sin golpes de Estado,” Prensa Libre (20 July 1999); Olga López

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2   — 267

Ovando, “Aumentan denuncias,” Prensa Libre (20 June 1999); Pavel Arellano and Olga
López, “Ejército rechaza el ‘diario militar,’ ” Prensa Libre (26 May 1999).
62. Arellano and López, “Ejército rechaza el ‘diario militar.’ ” Mejía Víctores made the
same appeal to absent markers of archival provenance—military seals, signatures, and
letterhead—to justify his rejection of the Diario’s authenticity. Carlos Arrazola, “Entre­
vista con Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores,” El Periódico (21 May 1999).
63. “ ‘Ni lo aceptamos, ni lo rechazamos,’ ” Prensa Libre (22 May 1999).
64. Ramón Hernández S., “ ‘Yo no ordené matar a nadie,’ ” Prensa Libre (21 May
1999).
65. Marco Tulio Trejo, “Ejército reitera que no ha destruido documentos,” Siglo Vein-
tiuno (12 August 1999).
66. Ronaldo Robles, “Ejército no lo niega, solo lo pone en duda,” El Periódico (22 May
1999).
67. “pdh actuará como querellante adhesivo,” Prensa Libre (26 May 1999).
68. Ramón Hernández S., “Se abre gran polémica,” Prensa Libre (21 May 1999);
“Piden abrir expedientes secretos del Ejército,” El Periódico (2 June 1999).
69. “Exigen esclarecer desapariciones,” El Periódico (29 May 1999).
70. Interview, prahpn023, 3 December 2007.
71. Marta Sandoval, “El diario militar y su relación con los archivos de la Policía,” El
Periódico (24 May 2009).
72. On dissolving the emp, see Gutiérrez, Hacia un paradigma democrático; Garst,
Military Intelligence and Human Rights; Hernández, “A Long Road.”
73. See Goldman, The Art of Political Murder.
74. Interview, prahpn015, 2 November 2007; interview, prahpn023.
75. Interview, prahpn015; interview, prahpn023.
76. Interview, prahpn012, 30 October 2007.
77. Interview, prahpn023.
78. Interview, Estuardo Galeano.
79. Interview, Iduvina Hernández.
80. Interview, Iduvina Hernández.
81. Interview, Estuardo Galeano.
82. Interview, Iduvina Hernández.
83. Interview, Lizbeth Barrientos.
84. Interview, Iduvina Hernández.
85. Interview, Estuardo Galeano.

THREE. HOW­ THE GUERRILLERO BECAME AN ARCHIVIST

1. See ahpn, El Archivo en cifras.
2. Huskamp Peterson, “Records of the Policía Nacional de Guatemala.” The Prove-
nienzprinzip, or principle of provenance (pp), was first introduced by the Privy State
Archive in Berlin, in 1881; for more, see Spieker, The Big Archive, 17–18.
3. See Douglas, How Institutions Think.
4. See Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 25; and Douglas, How Institutions Think.
5. Interview, Lizbeth Barrientos.
6. Morán and Samayoa, “Evolución de las estructuras.”

268  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

 7. Interview, prahpn008.
8. Morán and Samayoa, “Evolución de las estructuras,” 61.
9. War and crisis affect archival production and description; as Ketelaar notes, “Files
created under unprecedented circumstances or in an extraordinary era—for example,
during or after war, revolution, natural or man-­made disasters, or political or economic
crises—have to be appraised differently from those created in the course of ‘normal’
human business.” Ketelaar, “The Panoptical Archive,” 145.
10. Field notes, August 2006.
11. prahpn, “Informe de Avances—Diciembre 2006,” 17.
12. Interview, prahpn022.
13. Field notes, May 2006.
14. Interview, prahpn022.
15. Doyle discusses this case in “The Atrocity Files.”
16. Interview, prahpn028.
17. Interview, prahpn007.
18. In 2007, the Project initiated a mental health program featuring monthly group
meetings where workers could process the emotional strains of their labor. prahpn,
“Informe de Avances—Marzo 2008,” 8–10.
19. See Cereser, “Capturaban sin orden de juez,” Prensa Libre (19 January 2008);
interview, Anna Carla Ericastilla.
20. Interview, Jorge Villagrán, 21 February 2008.
21. hrdag subsequently become independent from Benetech.
22. Interview, Iduvina Hernández. For a previous statistical analysis of Guatemalan
state terror, see Davenport and Ball, “Views to a Kill.” The utility of statistical instru-
ments for human rights research is also seen in Steinberg et al., “Mapping Massacres,”
62–68.
23. On Benetech’s involvement, see Harrison, “Guatemalan National Police Archive
Project.”
24. Interview, Jorge Villagrán.
25. Interview, Jorge Villagrán; Ana Miza, “Críticas contra justicia por deceso en im-
punidad,” La Hora (19 February 2008).
26. Interview, Jorge Villagrán.
27. Interview, Gustavo Meoño.
28. Interview, prahpn007, and field notes.
29. Its members included Patrick Ball, director of Benetech’s Human Rights Program;
Ana Cacopardo, executive director of Argentina’s Comisión Provincial para la Memoria;
Wynne Cougill, of the Documentation Center of Cambodia; Kate Doyle, senior analyst
at the National Security Archives; archivist Antonio González Quintana; Hassan Mneim-
neh, director of the Iraq Memory Foundation; Manfred Nowak, un special rapporteur
on torture; Nobel Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel; Fina Solà, international secretary
of Archivists without Borders; and Maria Paz Vergara, director of the Documentation
Foundation and Archive of the Vicariate of Solidarity in Chile.
30. Interview, Jorge Villagrán; prahpn, “Informe de Avances—Marzo 2008,” 8–10.
31. The isad(g) and the International Standard Archival Authority Record (isaar)
are the general descriptive frameworks endorsed by archivists’ professional associations.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3   — 269

The isad(g) is used to describe records’ contents; the isaar is used to describe the orga-
nizational unit that created the records. They outline standard formats for the establish-
ment of archival reference codes and for describing documents’ dates, creators, archival
histories, contents, cross-­references, relationships to other documentary fonds, sources
of acquisition, systems of arrangement, and access conditions.
32. Interview, Lizbeth Barrientos.
33. The Project’s first archivist, Ingrid Molina, was the first archivist to graduate in
Guatemala; Barrientos, its second, was the second.
34. E-­mail to author, 28 August 2006.
35. Interview, Lizbeth Barrientos.
36. Interview, Ingrid Molina.
37. Interview, Anna Carla Ericastilla.
38. Not infrequently, when I was at the Project, I served as her translator.
39. Interview, Anna Carla Ericastilla.
40. Interview, Ingrid Molina.
41. prahpn, “Informe de Avances—Agosto 2007,” 2.
42. The damage was not irreversible; it simply signified more work down the line,
when keen archival thinkers would need to reopen the boxes and integrate the docu-
ments into their proper archival fonds and subfonds.
43. Interview, prahpn018, 9 November 2007.
44. Interview, prahpn022.
45. Interview, prahpn028.
46. Interview, prahpn027, 22 January 2008; interview, prahpn028; interview,
prahpn006; interview, prahpn002, 28 September 2007; field notes. By August 2007,
some 65 percent of the Project’s more than two hundred personnel were under the age
of thirty. prahpn, “Informe de Avances—Agosto 2007,” 1.
47. Interview, prahpn002.
48. Interview, Alberto Fuentes.
49. Interview, Christina Elich.
50. Huskamp Peterson, “The End of the Beginning.”
51. Interview, Lizbeth Barrientos.
52. Interview, Carla Villagrán.
53. Interview, Åsa Wallton; interview, Michael Moerth; interview, Agnes Bernzen.
54. prahpn, “Informe de Avances—Agosto 2007,” 4.
55. As one archivist writes, “All fonds are not created equal.” Millar, “Creating a Na-
tional Information System,” 182–92. For a summary of archivists’ thinking on this ten-
sion between objectivity and subjectivity, dating back to the Dutch Manual, see Ridener,
From Polders to Postmodernism.
56. Interview, Ingrid Molina.
57. Huskamp Peterson, “Records of the Policía Nacional de Guatemala,” 12.
58. Interview, Gustavo Meoño.
59. The qualitative investigation focused on three main areas: the pn’s structural
history, its role in the counterinsurgency, and particular cases of death and forced dis-
appearance attributed to state security forces, including the pdh’s casos de averiguación
especial. prahpn, “Informe de Avances—Agosto 2007,” 8.

270  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 3

 60. Huskamp Peterson, “Records of the Policía Nacional de Guatemala,” 10.
61. Interview, prahpn022.
62. Interview, prahpn003.
63. Rachel Donadio writes, “Access to archives is a barometer of any government’s
commitment to transparency.” Rachel Donadio, “The Iron Archives,” New York Times
(22 April 2007).
64. Interview, prahpn004.
65. Interview, Estuardo Galeano.
66. On impunity in Guatemala, see Impunity Watch, Recognising the Past.
67. Interview, prahpn007.
68. Cited in Paul Jeffrey, “Secret Files Open Window on Guatemala’s Violent Past,”
National Catholic Reporter (3 August 2007).
69. Cited in Ginger Thompson, “Mildewed Police Files May Hold Clues to Atrocities
in Guatemala,” New York Times (21 November 2005).
70. On this, see Ketelaar, “Recordkeeping and Societal Power.”
71. Interview, prahpn010.
72. For “parallel powers,” see Peacock and Beltrán, Poderes ocultos.
73. As Andrzej Rzeplinski writes, “One should realize that the temptation to use archi-
val resources of the [defunct] security services for further repressive purposes may emerge
any time, should the rule of law ever get overthrown. . . . such documents may always turn
up as instruments of blackmail or other lawlessness.” Rzeplinski, “Habeas Data.”

FOUR. BUILDING COUNTERINSURGENCY ARCHIVES

1. On Arbenz’s fall, see Gleijeses, Shattered Hope; Cullather, Secret History; Kinzer and
Schlesinger, Bitter Fruit.
2. International Cooperation Administration (ica), “Report on the National Police of
Guatemala,” Washington, DC, 9 April 1956, dnsa, gu00019.
3. ica, “Report on the National Police of Guatemala.” In fact, Castillo Armas’s envoy
to the ica had already lamented the “absence of a central filing system to which the
Government could turn for rapid information.” U.S. Embassy in Guatemala (use/g) to
U.S. Secretary of State (SecState), “Guatemalan Request for Technical Assistance in In-
telligence,” 18 August 1955, nacp, rg 286, Office of Public Safety (ops), Latin America
Branch (lab), Country File: Guatemala (cf:g), Box 65, Folder ips 1/General/Guatemala.
4. ica, “Report on the National Police of Guatemala.”
5. ica, “Report on the National Police of Guatemala.” He notes that the Sección de
Defensa Contra el Comunismo had processed 600,000 records without a single lost
file—this after only two years in existence, and in a country with a population of only
3.2 million.
6. ica, “Report on the National Police of Guatemala.”
7. ica, “Reply to November and December Public Safety Reports,” Washington, DC,
13 January 1959, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g, Box 68, Folder ips 2–2/Monthly Reports
/Guatemala.
8. United States Operations Mission to Guatemala (usom/g), “Recent Activities of
Public Safety Program, Guatemala,” 8 September 1958, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g,
Box 69, Folder ips 2–3/Programs/Guatemala 2.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4   — 271

 9. ica, “Reply to November and December Public Safety Reports.”
10. Rubottom to Atwood, “Overseas Internal Security Program,” 3 June 1957, nacp,
rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g, Box 69, Folder ips 2–3/Programs/Guatemala 2.
11. There is but one substantive account of the U.S. role in shaping the ragtag pn into
a counterinsurgent force; though excellent, it is more than twenty-­five years old, and
many government documents have been declassified since. McClintock, The American
Connection.
12. The ceh ruled that only the 1981–1983 period, in four rural departments, could
be termed “genocide.” ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio.
13. usaid Bureau on Latin America, “Use of Firearms by the National Police of Gua-
temala,” 28 March 1962, dnsa, gu00077.
14. For the United States’ use of similar tactics in the Philippines, see McCoy, Policing
America’s Empire, 61.
15. Kuzmarov, “Modernizing Repression.” See also Langguth, Hidden Terrors; McCoy,
Policing America’s Empire; and Huggins, “U.S. Supported State Terror.”
16. Huggins, Political Policing, 60.
17. Lobe, “The Rise and Demise,” 190. On the institutional evolution that led to the
creation of usaid, see Huggins, Political Policing.
18. rea/Williams to u/nsa/Mr. de Lima, “Overseas Internal Security Program—
Guatemala,” 26 April 1957, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g, Box 69, Folder ips 2–3/Programs
/Guatemala 2.
19. usom/g, “Recent Activities of Public Safety Program, Guatemala,” 8 September
1958, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g, Box 69, Folder: ips 2–3/Programs/Guatemala 2.
20. Huggins, Political Policing, 79.
21. Huggins, Political Policing, 81.
22. For “exotic horrors,” see Orden—Organo de la Policía Nacional de la República de
Guatemala, C.A. (24 September 1955), cirma. Siekmeier notes that communism, “in
the argot of U.S. officialdom, clearly was a more inclusive term than simply rule by a
Marxist-­Leninist regime or a Soviet-­backed or Soviet-­dominated government,” and sug-
gests that the primary U.S. objective in the Americas was the containment of all forms
of economic nationalism. Siekmeier, Aid, 164.
23. use/g to SecState, “Guatemalan Request for Technical Assistance in Intelligence,”
18 August 1955, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g, Box 65, Folder: ips 1/General/Guatemala.
24. McClintock, The American Connection, 29. McClintock notes that although many
were detained, probably only three hundred leftists were killed in the aftermath of the
coup, and that such relative “softness” compared to the post-­1960s can be explained by
the fact that “in 1954 there was neither an apparatus, nor a counter-­insurgency orienta-
tion encouraging wholesale murder along modern lines” (30).
25. McClintock, The American Connection, 35; and Doyle, “The Art of the Coup.”
26. use/g to SecState, “Guatemalan Request for Technical Assistance in Intelligence,”
18 August 1955, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g, Box 65, Folder: ips 1/General/Guatemala.
27. Decree-­Law 553, cited in Contreras Cruz and Sinay Álvarez, “Historia de la Policía
Nacional de Guatemala 1881–1997,” 65. The General Directorate of National Security
was created because the Committee against Communism’s mandate put it into conflict
with the new 1956 Constitution, particularly concerning the permitted length of preven-

272  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

tive detentions. The committee had come under fire from labor unions, who asserted
that the workers being arrested by the committee were innocents being denounced by
employers for engaging in legal union activities. The Committee against Communism’s
name switch was only one of many such cosmetic changes by security forces during the
war; any time that a group’s extralegal methods attracted excessive attention, its agents
were recycled into a new group with a new moniker. See William B. Connett Jr. to State
Department (dos), “Establishment of General Office of National Security,” Guatemala
City, 6 March 1956, dnsa, gu00018.
28. ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 47.
29. ica, “Report on the National Police of Guatemala.”
30. D. L. Crisostomo, “Briefing Report for the Washington Evaluation Team on the
Public Safety Program in Guatemala,” 23 October 1964, nsa, McClintock Collection, Box
4, Folder: Guatemala Evaluation of ops 1961–69.
31. ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 479–505.
32. usom/g, “Recent Activities of Public Safety Program, Guatemala,” 8 September
1958, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g, Box 69, Folder: ips 2–3/Programs/Guatemala 2. On
Piloña’s comments, see “Hoy Asume Casado la Policía,” El Imparcial, 17 July 1958.
33. ica to use/g, “Reply to August Public Safety Report,” Washington, DC, 29 Sep-
tember 1959, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g, Box 68, Folder: ips 2–2/Monthly Reports
/Guatemala.
34. usom/g to ica, “Special Police Investigation Services,” Guatemala City, 25 August
1960, dnsa, gu00032.
35. This dovetailed with Kennedy’s expansion of the usaid police assistance program
worldwide; see Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World.
36. usom/g to ica, “Special Police Investigation Services.”
37. usom/g to ica, “Special Police Investigation Services.”
38. ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 51.
39. ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 280.
40. ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 50–52.
41. For Ubico’s “auxiliary army,” see Crisostomo, “Briefing Report,” 23 October 1964.
McClintock notes that Ubico’s secret police were by far the most effective state security
force at the time—more so than the military, which played a secondary role in internal
security until the 1960s. See McClintock, The American Connection, 18.
42. Interview, prahpn018.
43. use/g to dos, 24 August 1966, nacp, rg 59, Central Foreign Policy Files 1964–
1966, Box 2253, Folder: pol 23—Guat—1/1/66.
44. For “common thug and assassin,” see aid Bureau on Latin America, “Use of Fire-
arms by the National Police of Guatemala.”
45. “Ningún vestigio: Judiciales se llevaron instrumentos de tortura,” El Imparcial,
7 July 1966. Gamexán (alternately spelled as gamesán or gamezan) was an insecticide
used in the torture practice of “hooding,” in which interrogators covered victims’ heads
with a rubber hood impregnated with the poison. McClintock, The American Connection,
119n105.
46. Crisostomo, “Briefing Report,” 23 October 1964.
47. Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 157.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4   — 273

 48. “Policía: Gobierno elimina el departamento judicial,” El Imparcial, 1 November
1966.
49. All citations in this paragraph from aid Bureau on Latin America, “Use of Fire-
arms by the National Police of Guatemala.”
50. The Days of March and April reflected momentum built up by strikes in 1960 and
1961, and absent brutal repression could well have resulted in Ydígoras’s overthrow. See
Ramírez, La guerra de los 36 años; and Rosada Granados, Soldados en el poder.
51. “Academia de la Guardia Judicial,” Orden: Organo de la Policía Nacional de Guate-
mala, Tomo II, Segunda Epoca, No. 2 (Guatemala City: 1960), 18, cirma: Colección de
Documentos.
52. Jonas, “Dangerous Liaisons,” 146.
53. cia Directorate of Intelligence (cia/doi), “Intelligence Handbook for Special
Operations: Guatemala,” Washington, DC (June 1967), 166, nacp, cia-­crest Database.
54. use/g to SecState, 24 September 1963, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g, Box 65,
Folder: ips 1/General/Guatemala.
55. Byron Engle to David Laughlin, “Program Adequacy Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador,
Guatemala, and Venezuela,” 1 April 1964, dnsa, gu00170.
56. D. L. Crisostomo, “Report on Police Progress and Development in Guatemala,”
Guatemala City, January 1965, nsa/gdp.
57. cia/doi, “Guatemala—A Current Appraisal,” 8 October 1966, ddrs.
58. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 76.
59. McClintock, The American Connection, 71.
60. ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 438.
61. McClintock, The American Connection, 72–73.
62. See Grandin’s book The Last Colonial Massacre for the best account of the 1966
disappearances.
63. For “Communist big-­leaguers,” see use/g to SecState, “Internal Security Situation
and Needs,” Guatemala City, 22 May 1961, dnsa, gu00047.
64. John P. Longan to Byron Engle, “tdy Guatemala: November 7 through December
27, 1965,” 4 January 1966, dnsa, gu00244.
65. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 95–96.
66. For “unconfirmed rumors” and “a considerable success,” see Mein/use/g to aid/
Washington, “Public Safety Monthly Report, March 1966,” 13 April 1966, dnsa,
gu00279. For increased Public Safety engagement after Mein’s death, see “Summary
Statement of aid Program in Guatemala,” 1971, nacp, ops, Office of the Director, Nu-
merical File 1956–74, Box 1, Folder: History of ps Program—Guatemala fy 70–72.
67. Jennifer Schirmer dates the birth of the G-­2 to this period and identifies U.S.
military assistance as its key architect. See Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 6.
68. The Ford Bronco was routinely used by special police squads for arrests and dis-
appearances. In this case, the fifty-­four vehicles in question were purchased by the Gua-
temalan military and given to the pn as a gift to help them “guarantee the security and
tranquility the Guatemalan people need in order to dedicate themselves to honorable
activities”; see “54 Radiopatrullas entrega el Ejército a la Policía Nacional,” El Imparcial
(1 March 1967). The gift shows how aid to the military sometimes was, by extension, aid
to the police, because of resource sharing between the forces, their special-­ops collabo-

274  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

rations, and the fact that army colonels, usually trained by the United States, ran the pn
for almost the entire conflict.
69. “Arzobispo bendijo nuevos vehículos de la policía,” El Imparcial (14 March 1967).
For the relationship between Ponce Nitsch and Ríos Montt, see use/g to SecState, “Gua-
temalan Coup Developments: Thunder on the Right, Dissatisfaction by Young Officers,”
Guatemala City, 25 March 1982, ddrs.
70. ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 160.
71. For “counterinsurgency coordinator,” see use/g to SecState, “Police Vehicles,”
28 October 1966, nacp, Record Group 286, ops, Technical Services Division, General
Correspondence Relating to Geographic Areas, 1965–71, Guatemala–Ivory Coast, Box
4, Folder: Guatemala Chron 3/25/66–12/27/68. Sosa was a close ally of defense minis-
ter Rafael Arriaga Bosque, a powerful political actor who had directed the execution of
Operación Limpieza.
72. Ted Brown, “Meeting with Colonel Manuel Francisco Sosa, Director General
of the National Police,” 17 July 1967, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g, Box 71, Folder ips
3/Meetings/Guatemala.
73. cia/doi, “Intelligence Handbook for Special Operations: Guatemala.”
74. Additional corps were added later, as both the city and its police force expanded.
75. use/g to dos, “Students Sight in on New Minister of Government,” 30 June 1969,
nacp, rg 59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–1969, Political and Defense, Box 2160,
Folder pol 13—Guat—1/1/67.
76. Thomas L. Hughes/inr to SecState, “Guatemala: A Counterinsurgency Running
Wild?,” 23 October 1967, dnsa, gu00348.
77. cia, February 1968, dnsa, gu00355.
78. use/g to dos, “Weeka No. 42,” Guatemala City (22 October 1967), nacp, rg
59, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–69; Political and Defense; Box 2158 Folder pol
2–1—Guat—7/1/67.
79. Reprinted in cidc, Violencia y contraviolencia, 103.
80. cia/doi, “Intelligence Handbook for Special Operations: Guatemala.”
81. Really, it was not much of a bet at all, since during this period aid sent hefty
shipments of weapons to both the pn and the Judicial Police. In June 1967, Peter Costello
announced to delighted police chiefs that among aid’s partner countries, Guatemala had
been identified as the highest-­priority recipient for a major delivery of “the most modern
weapons available on the market.” See “Armamentos entregará la aid la la Policía Nacio-
nal,” El Imparcial (27 June 1967).
82. Interview, prahpn018; and Ramírez, La guerra de los 36 años, 92.
83. “Medidas policíacas,” Prensa Libre (June 1967).
84. ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 290.
85. “Medidas policíacas.”
86. “Ciento cuarenta policías adiestrados en nuevo plan,” El Imparcial (28 June 1967).
87. Streeter, “Nation-­Building.”
88. McClintock, The American Connection, 95; and Krujit, Sociedades de terror, 36.
89. Cited in use/g to dos, “Students Sight in on New Minister of Government.”
90. cia, “Back-­Up Material for dci’s June Briefing,” 6 June 1969, nacp, cia—crest
database.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4   — 275

 91. use/g to dos, “Students Sight in on New Minister of Government.”
92. “Una policía en la fusión desde mañana,” El Imparcial (30 November 1970).
93. “Ocho jefes y ex-­jefes de la Policía Secreta han sido muertos a tiros,” El Imparcial
(2 May 1974).
94. cia/doi, “Guatemala’s Political Transition,” 11 March 1970, nacp, cia-­crest
database.
95. For “civilian extremists” and “history of violent, irrational activity,” see cia/doi,
“Guatemala’s Political Transition.”
96. See Discursos del Presidente Arana Osorio, as well as use/g to dos, “Biweekly Polit-
ical Review: November 14–27, 1970,” 27 November 1970, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g,
Box 68, unlabeled folder.
97. usac students’ nicknames for Arana are documented in the satirical Huelga de
Dolores publication No Nos Tientes (Don’t Tempt Us) through the 1970s and 1980s.
98. Cited in cidc, Violencia y contraviolencia, 108.
99. From “Mensaje de paz y esperanza dirigido al pueblo en la vigilia de Navidad,”
reprinted in Discursos del Presidente Arana.
100. State Department, “fy 72 Program Review,” 27 July 1970, nsa/gdp.
101. For the spike in violence after Arana took office, see cidc, Violencia y contravio­
lencia, 105.
102. Viron P. Vaky to Covey T. Oliver, “Guatemala and Counter-­terror,” 29 March
1968, dnsa, gu00367.
103. U.S. Embassy/Guatemala to State Department, “Debriefing of Sean M. Holly,”
Guatemala City, 16 March 1970, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g; Box 73, Folder: ips 14/
Kidnapping/Guatemala. In his statement, Holly noted with surprise that his captors did
not seem to view Arana with any particular rancor, seeing him merely as a “puppet” of
the far right; they did, however, single out Colonel Sosa as a “butcher.”
104. use/g to SecState, “Ojo Por Ojo,” 19 May 1970, nacp, rg 286, ops, lab, cf:g,
Box 73, Folder: ips-­8/Narcotics Training/Guatemala.
105. Mario Ramírez Ruiz, “Experiencias que deben aprovecharse dentro de la organi-
zación policial,” Revista de la Policía Nacional 4, no. 7 (September–October 1970): 12, hn.
106. “Escuela de Capacitación de la Policía Nacional,” Revista de la Policía Nacional 5,
no. 8 (February–April 1971): 8, hn.
107. Héctor René Rivera Méndez, “La instrucción como medio de superación en el
servicio policial,” Revista de la Policía Nacional 5, no. 8 (February–April 1971): 40, hn.
As of 1971, the pn required all applicants for new or renewed driver’s licenses to register
their fingerprints in the archives, thus tightening control over everyday Guatemalans.
See pdh, El derecho a saber, 178.
108. ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 288. Applying for the new cedula cards required
Guatemalans to provide photographs along with their birthplace, birth date, sex, civil
state, nationality, age, skin color, height, weight, hair color, hair texture, general state of
health, eye and nose shape, profession, address, parents’ names, and any other physical
or psychological data deemed necessary by the intake official. See ahpn, Del silencio a
la memoria, 470, for a representative cedula application in the name of Anastacio Sotz
Coy, who headed a campesino organization in 1980 when he was captured, tortured, and
executed, allegedly by the military. Though the pn had documented Sotz Coy’s death and

276  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 4

mutilation, it never released this information to his family or to lawyers investigating
his case, such that the murdered Sotz Coy remained “disappeared” for more than thirty
years before the Project’s research revealed his fate.
109. Joseph Sobotta, “Survey of the Guatemala Police Forces Weapons System,” 9
October 1970, Courtesy nsa/gdp.
110. David R. Powell to dos, “Review of fy 72 Country Field Submission (cfs) Gua-
temala,” 10 August 1970, Courtesy nsa/gdp.
111. Grandin points out this argument’s recurrence in declassified U.S. documents in
his Denegado en su totalidad.
112. use/g to SecState, “University Rector’s Life Threatened by ‘Ojo Por Ojo,’ ” 6 Oc-
tober 1971, nacp, rg 59, snf 1970–1973, Political and Defense, Box 2337, Folder: pol
23—Guat—1/1/71.
113. For “unscrupulous persons,” see use/g to SecState, “Disappearance of Commu-
nist Leaders,” 29 September 1972, nacp, rg 59, snf 1970–1973, Political and Defense,
Box 2336, Folder: pol 12—Guat. For “police sources,” see use/g to dos, “Internal Secu-
rity: Monthly Report of Incidents, November 1972,” 19 December 1972, nacp, rg 59, snf
1970–1973, Political and Defense, Box 2337, Folder: pol 23—Guat—1/1/70.
114. use/g to SecState, “Internal Security: Monthly Report of Incidents, January
1973,” 9 February 1973, nacp, rg 59, snf 1970–1973, Political and Defense, Box 2337,
folder pol 23—Guat—1/1/70.
115. Byron Engle to Robert A. Hurwitch, “Creation of a Special Action Unit within the
National Police to Assume Death Squad Functions,” 11 October 1972, nacp, rg 286, ops,
lab, cf:g, Box 72, Folder: ips-­8/Telegrams/Guatemala. The memorandum, recently de-
classified, is heavily redacted.
116. John H. Caldwell, “Guatemala casp, fy 73–74,” 9 March 1972, nacp, rg 286,
ops, lab, cf:g, Box 4, Folder: ips 1–1.
117. nsc, “Country Analysis and Strategy Paper—fy 73–74—Guatemala,” 4 May 1972,
nsa/gdp.
118. nsc, “Country Analysis and Strategy Paper.”
119. McClintock, The American Connection, 101.
120. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere
Affairs, Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, staff memorandum, Pat Holt (Washing-
ton, DC: Government Printing Office, 1971); cited in McClintock, The American Con-
nection, 101.
121. See Lobe, “The Rise and Demise,” 192; also Langguth, Hidden Terrors; Kuzmarov,
“Modernizing Repression.”
122. Cited in Huggins, Political Policing, 187.
123. Huggins, Political Policing, 187.
124. Kuzmarov’s account of ops trainees’ abuses in South Vietnam is chilling. Kuzma-
rov, “Modernizing Repression,” 209–19.
125. Huggins, Political Policing, 192.
126. Huggins, Political Policing, 195.
127. See Abourezk’s statement on the Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act
before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 21 June 1974, nacp, cia-­crest
database.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4   — 277

 128. Kuzmarov, “Modernizing Repression,” 220.
129. Caesar P. Bernal et al., “Termination Phase-­Out Study—Public Safety Project
Guatemala,” 1 July 1974, dnsa, gu00486.
130. “Summary Statement of aid Program in Guatemala,” 1971.
131. McClintock, The American Connection, 54.
132. ica, “Report on the National Police of Guatemala.”
133. Lobe, “The Rise and Demise,” 187.
134. Vaky to Oliver, “Guatemala and Counter-­terror.”
135. Streeter, “Nation-­Building,” 65.
136. John P. Longan to Byron Engle, 12 April 1968, dnsa, gu00369.
137. ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, vol. 1, annex 1.
138. Doyle, “The Atrocity Files.”
139. In 1958, during the height of U.S. archival assistance, the pn switched from
the five-­by-­eight-­inch fichas in use since 1943 to the three-­by-­five-­inch fichas it would
use thereafter. See César Edgar Yon García, “Cronología de una ficha de antecedentes
policíacos,” Revista de la Policía Nacional 13, no. 27 (1979): 37–38.

FIVE. RECYCLING THE NATIONAL POLICE IN WAR, PEACE, AND POST-­PEACE

1. See United Nations Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, De La Locura a La
Esperanza.
2. Mirna Jiménez, “Asesinatos fueron premeditados, asegura Presidente Saca,” Diario
Co Latino (San Salvador), 20 February 2007.
3. Lorena Seijo, “Matan a los 4 policías implicados en crimen de diputados salvador-
eños,” Prensa Libre, 26 February 2007.
4. M. A. Bastenier, “Guatemala, ¿Estado fallido?,” El País, 21 January 2008; Sonia
Pérez, “Impunidad afecta funciones del Estado,” Prensa Libre, 3 March 2007.
5. Sonia Pérez, “Iglesia, pdh y la Usac demandan clausura de Dinc,” Prensa Libre, 14
March 2007; “Impunidad uniformada,” el Periódico, 23 February 2007.
6. Lorena Seijo, “Nuevo jefe depurará el Dinc,” Prensa Libre, 12 April 2007.
7. Julio Caballeros Seigné cited in Human Rights in Guatemala: Delegation Report, the
Human Rights Project, 1991, nsa, box labeled “Guatemala Incoming foias.”
8. Byrne, Stanley, and Garst, Rescuing Police Reform.
9. Lorena Seijo and Leonardo Cereser, “Depuración afecta a la Dinc,” Prensa Libre, 28
August 2007; and ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, vol 1.
10. ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, vol. 2, 93.
11. William Robinson adapts the term “polyarchy,” originally defined by Robert Dahl,
to describe political contexts in which electoral democracy does exist, but in which mass
participation is limited to casting votes only for members of a tiny power-­holding elite.
Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy.
12. See, for example, Nelson, “Maleficium Jingle.”
13. Call and Stanley, “Protecting the People.”
14. “Informe señala que Guatemala es uno de los países más violentos del mundo,”
Prensa Libre (25 March 2009); pdh, Informe Anual 2008; C. Méndez Villaseñor and
M. Marroquín Cabrera, “Crimen deteriora salud mental de guatemaltecos,” Prensa Libre (29
March 2009); “Impunidad alcanza el 98% en el país,” Prensa Libre (27 November 2007).

278  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

 15. “Ante la inseguridad los policías se encomiendan a Dios,” Prensa Libre (24 March
2009).
16. “Texto del discurso del Ministro de la Defensa General Vassaux,” reprinted in El
Imparcial (17 February 1975).
17. U.S. documents identify Laugerud’s victory as “the most blatant electoral fraud in
modern Guatemalan history.” See U.S. Southern Command, “Brigadier-­General (ret.)
Kjell Laugerud García,” February 1976, dnsa, gu00498.
18. Cited in McClintock, The American Connection, 127.
19. Kobrak, Organizing and Repression, 43–51.
20. McClintock, The American Connection, 126.
21. See cidc, Violencia y contraviolencia, 96; and Levenson-­Estrada, Trade Unionists,
106. On Guatemalan trade unionism, see Levenson-­Estrada, Trade Unionists; asies, Más
de cien años; Obando Sánchez, Memorias; and Albizures, Tiempo de sudor y lucha.
22. For the “waves” to “system” transition, see cidc, Violencia y contraviolencia, 109.
23. Levenson-­Estrada, Trade Unionists, 124–25.
24. See Walker, “Economic Fault Lines”; Buchenau and Johnson, eds., Aftershocks;
and Davis, Planet of Slums. On the quake’s impact amid a larger reconfiguring of society,
particularly youth culture, see Castañeda, “Historia del rock,” 66.
25. egp, “Boletín Interno de Noticias,” no. 1 (May 1976), cirma: Colección Payeras-­
Colom. On the egp’s inception, see Ricardo Ramírez de León’s (or “Rolando Morán’s”)
chapter “Interpretando la historia del egp,” in his Saludos revolucionarios, as well as Pay-
eras’s Los días de la selva.
26. egp, Compañero: Boletín Internacional, no. 2 (February 1976), cirma; Colección
Payeras-­Colom.
27. Levenson-­Estrada, Trade Unionists, 122.
28. Kobrak, Organizing and Repression, 46–47.
29. Arias, “After the Rigoberta Menchú Controversy,” 489. On the Maya movement,
see Konefal, For Every Indio Who Falls; Fischer and Brown, eds., Maya Cultural Activism;
Montejo, Voices from Exile; Wilson, Maya Resurgence; Warren, “Interpreting La Violen-
cia”; Smith, ed., Guatemalan Indians and the State.
30. One example of how the pn’s reach extended beyond the capital: in January 1977,
three campesinos from Nebaj, suspected of being egp sympathizers, were dragged from
their homes by individuals identified by U.S. documents as “ ‘plain-­clothes policemen’
(probably from the Corps of Detectives).” The campesinos’ corpses appeared days later
with signs of torture. use/g to dos, “Monthly Report on Political Violence and Human
Rights: January 1977,” 1 March 1977, dnsa, gu00507.
31. ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 285.
32. aeu, Jornadas de Agosto de 1977, 21 September 1977, cirma: Colección de Docu-
mentos.
33. Paola Hurtado, “Los archivos de la Policía Nacional,” El Periódico (29 January
2006).
34. Hurtado, “Los archivos de la Policía Nacional.”
35. Cohen, States of Denial, 82–85.
36. Cifuentes Cano would later direct the Special Operations Commando (coe), also
known as broe (Special Operations and Reaction Brigade), one of the pn’s shadowiest

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5   — 279

counterinsurgency units. In 1982 its existence was made official as the Fifth Corps. See
Juan Francisco Cifuentes Cano, “La Institución Policíaca Ante Sus Difamantes,” Revista
de la Policía Nacional 11, no. 21 (February–April 1977): 18–19, hn.
37. Capitalization his. All quotations in this paragraph from Cifuentes Cano, “La In-
stitución Policíaca Ante Sus Difamantes.”
38. Cifuentes Cano, “La Institución Policíaca Ante Sus Difamantes.”
39. egp, “Boletín Interno de Noticias,” no. 1 (May 1976), cirma: Colección Payeras-­
Colom. Ramírez had run the Regional Telecommunications Center since at least the
early 1970s, according to one heavily redacted U.S. document indicating that U.S. ad-
visers were kept well informed about the center’s activities. Department of State (dos),
“Guatemalan Security Force Activities,” 22 September 1971, dnsa, gu00460.
40. For Panzós as moment of rupture, see Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre.
41. Cited in Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 18.
42. For “neither sloppy ones nor lazy ones,” see “Entrega de despachos en la policía,”
El Imparcial (7 July 1978). For “civilian corps,” see “Será depurado el Cuerpo de Detec-
tives,” El Imparcial (12 July 1978).
43. The term “Special Agents” was, after the structural transition within the pn that
saw the Detective Corps replaced by the dit, superseded by “Collaborators.” pdh, El
derecho a saber, 113. Orejas had always been used, though never as a matter of official
protocol.
44. gt pn 51-­01-­s002 28.10.1981, reproduced in ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 90.
45. gt pn 51-­01-­s002, cited in ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 256–57.
46. pdh, El derecho a saber, 22.
47. “Será depurado el Cuerpo de Detectives,” El Imparcial (12 July 1978).
48. ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, vol. 2, chap. 2.
49. For example, “Movilización ante el crimen recrudecido,” El Imparcial (28 July 1978).
50. “Gobierno llama a los ciudadanos a abstenerse de los actos ilegales,” El Imparcial
(5 August 1978); “15 heridos de bala hubo hoy,” El Imparcial (10 October 1978); “10 heri­
dos de bala hoy,” El Imparcial (11 October 1978).
51. Kobrak, Organizing and Repression, 58.
52. Kobrak, Organizing and Repression, 59.
53. “dc investigará la actuación del nominado Batallón de la Muerte,” El Imparcial
(7 August 1978).
54. “Organización Cero elimina a tres bajo el lema: ‘Matar por justicia,’ ” El Imparcial
(5 March 1979).
55. “600 guatemaltecos muertos en 28 días,” El Imparcial (12 March 1979). The Es-
cuadrón de la Muerte was likely a front for police-­perpetrated social cleansing of urban
“undesirables,” such as street children—a practice that continues to this day. See Tierney,
Robbed of Humanity. The egp, for its part, believed that the “Escuadrón de la Muerte”
was an appendage of the National Police’s Second Corps; they may have been confusing
it with Commando Six. egp, “Boletín de prensa: El Ejército Guatemalteco de los Pobres
golpea a los cabecillos del terror reaccionario,” 2 January 1978, cirma: Colección de
Documentos. As Schirmer points out, the police were also used by the military leader-
ship of crio/La Regional to carry out killings. See Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military
Project, 159.

280  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

 56. For example, see “Hallan cadáveres posible de dos que fueron escuadronados,”
El Imparcial (14 March 1979); “Cadáver de un escuadronado al parecer,” El Imparcial (16
March 1979); “Otro delincuente escuadronado,” El Imparcial (21 March 1979); “Siete
escuadronados más aparecieron,” El Imparcial (22 March 1979).
57. See Rebeca Alonso’s essay in Sánchez del Valle, ed., Por el delito de pensar.
58. ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 397–423.
59. The National Police had been surveilling Colom Argueta for more than twenty
years; Leonardo Cereser, “Policía controló 22 años a líder Colom Argueta,” Prensa Libre
(19 October 2008).
60. Secret untitled cable, cia, March 1980, dnsa, gu00634.
61. In 1980, more than 125 usac students and professors were killed or disappeared.
Kobrak, Organizing and Repression, 70.
62. See pdh, El derecho a saber; Kobrak, Organizing and Repression, 63.
63. For U.S. knowledge of the Guatemalan government’s role in running death
squads, see use/g to dos, “Right-­Wing Terrorism,” 11 April 1979, dnsa, gu00574. For
“part of the Cold War,” see McAllister, “Rural Markets,” 350.
64. “Decapitan busto de Castillo Armas,” El Imparcial (24 March 1979).
65. Figueroa Ibarra, Los que siempre estarán en ninguna parte, 142.
66. Figueroa Ibarra, Los que siempre estarán en ninguna parte, 152.
67. cia, “Clandestine Mass Grave Near Comalapa,” April 1980, dnsa, gu00640. When
the clandestine cemetery was made public, Guatemalan officials pled ignorance; see “Ex-
haustiva investigación sobre el aparecido cementerio clandestino, ordenó Lucas,” El Im-
parcial, 21 March 1980. The corpse of usac student Liliana Negreros, kidnapped by police
after the funeral procession for those killed in the Spanish embassy fire, was among the
dozens exhumed from the Comalapa cemetery. Kobrak, Organizing and Repression, 67–68.
68. Doyle, “Remains of Two of Guatemala’s Death Squad Diary’s Victims Found”;
Doyle and Willard, “Remains of Three Death Squad Diary Victims Identified.”
69. ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, vol. 2, chap. 2, para. 437. For more on the
Frozen Area Plan, see chapter 4, as well as Grandin’s The Last Colonial Massacre and
Denegado en su totalidad.
70. ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, vol. 1, annex 1, illustrative case no. 51.
71. use/g to dos, “Guatemala: Trade Union Leaders Abducted,” 23 February 1984,
dnsa, gu1001.
72. On the embassy fire, see Cajal, Saber quién puso fuego ahí!; for the “official” (gov-
ernment) position, see Luján Muñoz, La tragedia de la Embajada de España en Guatemala;
also see Amézquita, Guatemala; remhi, Guatemala: Nunca Más!; and frequent references
in Arias, ed., The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. What I cite as the “consensus” explana-
tion is Kobrak’s in Organizing and Repression, supported in the ceh’s Illustrative Case
No. 79.
73. Cited in Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú.
74. Siete Días en la usac, Epoca I, Año 3, no. 67 (10–16 March 1980).
75. For example, “Policía muere tras ataque a tiros por desconocidos,” El Imparcial
(30 January 1980), or “Tiroteo en la zona 5: Uno perece,” El Imparcial (28 January 1980).
76. It was rumored that “El Chino” Lima bore responsibility for Oliverio Castañeda
de León’s assassination. ahpn, Del silencio a la memoria, 417.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5   — 281

 77. “Ametrallado 2do. jefe del Comando 6 de la pn,” El Imparcial (15 January 1980); for
“El Chino” Lima as torturer, see McClintock, The American Connection, as well as “Siguen
pista a quienes dieron muerte al 2do jefe del Comando 6,” El Imparcial (16 January 1980).
78. “Policía muere, señorita de gravedad en atentado armado,” El Imparcial (6 Feb-
ruary 1980); egp, Guerra Popular, no. 10 (April 1980), cirma: Colección Luis Pedro
Taracena.
79. egp, “Comunicado de prensa” (15 July 1980), cirma: Colección Luis Pedro
Taracena.
80. For the egp’s attempts on Álvarez and Chupina’s lives, see egp, “Boletin de
prensa: A Donaldo Álvarez y a Hermán [sic] Chupina tratamos de ajusticiarlos por crim-
inals, represores y terroristas,” February 1980, cirma: Colección Luis Pedro Taracena.
Also see “Álvarez Ruiz escapa de atentado,” El Imparcial (11 February 1980). For the far’s
plans to assassinate Chupina and Valiente Téllez, see cia, “National Workers Central
Hostages and Guatemalan Government Forces,” 6 July 1980, dnsa, gu00659.
81. egp, “Boletin de prensa: A Donaldo Álvarez y a Hermán [sic] Chupina.”
82. use/g to dos, “Political Violence and Inter-­agency Rivalry within Guatemalan
Police Forces,” 29 December 1980, nsa/gdp.
83. In one incident that demonstrated military intelligence’s authority over the pn,
Valiente ordered the execution of a navy captain in Escuintla who had been investigating
cattle thefts in the area; one of the thieves was a relative of Valiente’s who had asked his
powerful family member for help. Valiente dispatched three detectives to the area and
eliminated the inquisitive captain. When military intelligence traced the killing back to
Valiente, they offered him two choices: kill the detectives who carried out the hit and
the matter would be dropped, or else resign from the corps. The cadavers of the three
detectives were found shortly thereafter, on the old road to Lake Atitlán. Secret untitled
cable, cia, March 1980, dnsa, gu00634.
84. For “bad blood,” see use/g to dos, “Political Violence and Inter-­agency Rivalry.”
For attacks on Los Vigilantes, see “Gobierno investigará las denuncias del ex-­jefe del
cuerpo de detectives,” Prensa Libre (9 July 1981). For attacks on García Arredondo, see
“Jefe policíaco emboscan,” El Imparcial (3 June 1980).
85. “Despido masivo en Cuerpo de Detectives,” El Imparcial (2 September 1980); “10
muertos, 6 heridos: Ataque a Vigilantes,” El Imparcial (6 July 1981).
86. “Valiente se repone de heridas,” El Imparcial (11 December 1981); “Valiente
Téllez acusa al jefe de detectives,” Prensa Libre (8 July 1981); “Atacada con morteros la
casa de Valiente Téllez,” El Imparcial (29 December 1981); “Valiente en proceso de re-
cuperación,” El Imparcial (30 December 1981); “Valiente Téllez abandonará el país,” El
Imparcial (31 December 1981).
87. McClintock, The American Connection, 159.
88. pdh, El derecho a saber, 37; use/g to dos, “Political Violence and Inter-­agency
Rivalry.”
89. Carlos Díaz, “Detectives: Un dinámico cuerpo de la Policía Nacional,” Revista de
la Policía Nacional 15, no. 29 (1981): 39–40, hn.
90. use/g to dos, “Political Violence and Inter-­agency Rivalry.”
91. On the 1981 urban offensive, see Payeras, El trueno en la ciudad. It was hard-­
fought; from mid-­December 1981 to mid-­January 1982, the egp reported that it had

282  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

undertaken forty-­one successful “guerrilla actions” in the department of Guatemala,
compared with just nine in El Quiché, eleven in Chimaltenango, and eleven in Alta Ve-
rapaz. egp, “Número de acciones guerrilleras realizadas por las organizaciones politico-­
militares del 16 de diciembre de 1981 al 15 de enero de 1982,” Informador Guerrillero (15
December 1981–15 January 1982): 1.
92. Ríos Montt’s words to a Reuters journalist in December 1982 were “We have
no scorched-­earth policy. We have a policy of scorched Communists.” Americas Watch
Committee, “Guatemala Revised: How the Reagan Administration Finds ‘Improvements’
in Human Rights in Guatemala,” September 1985, cirma: Colección Infostelle.
93. McClintock notes that Argentine and Israeli intelligence assistance was instru-
mental in the government’s final rout of the urban insurgency, playing a decisive role in
training the Guatemalans in “network analysis”—the computerized review of telephone
calls and utility bills for suspect houses, which allowed the state to identify safe houses by
their unusually high electricity consumption. McClintock, The American Connection, 219.
94. Garrard-­Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit.
95. “No habrá más asesinatos, ni más corrupción en Guatemala,” El Imparcial (24
March 1982).
96. Albizures, El movimiento sindical; Garrard-­Burnett, Terror in the Land of the Holy
Spirit.
97. use/g to dos, “Guatemalan Coup Developments: Thunder on the Right, Dissatis-
faction by Young Officers,” 25 March 1982, dnsa, gu00785. For School of the Americas,
see “Hernán Orestes Ponce Nitsch,” 12 January 1983, nsa/gdp, Box 13, Folder: Military
Bios #4— 950118dia011.
98. For Álvarez’s arsenal, see “Catearán casas de otros ex-­funcionarios,” El Imparcial
(27 March 1982).
99. pdh, El derecho a saber, 39.
100. Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 167.
101. “Ningun asesinado a tiros, hoy,” El Imparcial (27 March 1982).
102. Asociación de Estudiantes Universitarios, No Nos Tientes (1982), hn.
103. Cited in McClintock, The American Connection, 230; also see Schirmer, The Gua-
temalan Military Project, 291.
104. Secret cable, cia, February 1983, dnsa, gu00897.
105. The process was interrupted by Mejía Víctores’s coup.
106. For “often unruly,” see cia/doi, “Latin America Review,” 23 May 1983, dnsa,
gu00919. For “corrupt Lucas García-­Álvarez-­Chupina model,” see Schirmer, The Guate-
malan Military Project, 32.
107. “Los generales no quieren que el pueblo piense,” Claridad: Organo Periodístico del
pgt-­cc no. 7 (1–15 March 1983), cirma: Colección Holandés.
108. Kobrak, Organizing and Repression, 90.
109. For example, “2 muertos, 14 heridos por bombazo,” El Imparcial (11 April 1983);
“Operativo de registro de carros siguió en la ciudad,” El Imparcial (8 April 1983); “Ra-
dio fue intervenido para pasar propaganda subversiva,” El Imparcial (23 May 1983). The
far carried out several high-­profile kidnappings in the second half of 1983, capturing
the sisters of both Ríos Montt and Mejía Víctores in an attempt to force the release of
kidnapped activists. far, “Declaración de las Fuerzas Armadas Rebeldes (far) ante la

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5   — 283

escalada intervencionista del gobierno de Ronald Reagan en Centroamérica,” printed in
El País (24 October 1983).
110. McClintock, The American Connection, 260n50.
111. A sampling of Ríos Montt’s messianic rhetoric can be found in his weekly Sunday
night radio addresses, compiled in Mensajes del Presidente de la República. Ríos Montt’s
evangelical connections did net him certain benefits; for example, his embargoed gov-
ernment was able to privately purchase cut-­rate helicopter parts from Canadian “reli-
gious fundamentalists.” nsc/Alfonso Sapia-­Bosch, “Message from Guatemalan President
Ríos Montt,” 31 May 1983, ddrs.
112. “De Guatemala salen informes interesados,” El Imparcial (21 September 1983).
113. Alonso, 15 fusilados al alba.
114. “Guatemala no da importancia mayor a resolución de la onu sobre derechos
humanos,” El Imparcial (14 December 1983).
115. “Alrededor de 50 universitarios han desaparecido ultimamente,” El Imparcial
(7 November 1983).
116. Kobrak, Organizing and Repression, 95.
117. Levenson-­Estrada, Trade Unionists, chap. 6.
118. cia/doi, “Recent Kidnappings: Signs Point to Government Security Forces,”
2 February 1984, dnsa, gu00995.
119. dos Bureau of Intelligence and Research, “Central American Highlights—
Guatemala: Political Violence Up,” 23 February 1984, dnsa, gu01000.
120. Amézquita, Guatemala, 63.
121. Mejía Víctores cited in use/g to SecState, “Mutual Support Group (gam) Up-
date,” June 1985, nsa/gdp/Box 7; Americas Watch Committee, “Guatemala Revised,”
September 1985.
122. use/g to SecState, “Background on Case of Héctor Orlando Gómez Calito, Mur-
dered ‘Mutual Support Group’ (gam) Member: Embassy Discussions with Two Sources,”
3 April 1985, dnsa, gu01037.
123. On the Cuevas case, see Figueroa Ibarra, Los que siempre estarán en ninguna parte,
165–169; and Amézquita, Guatemala, 61–66.
124. See Amézquita, Guatemala, 59–65; and ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio,
vol. 1, annex 1, Illustrative Case No. 35.
125. In 1987, gam activists led by Nineth Montenegro presented a legal brief naming
seventeen military and ex-­dit officers as responsible for the Holy Week murders. use/g
to dos, “The Mutual Support Group (gam) Asks for Justice,” 20 October 1987, nsa/gdp,
Box 13, Folder 950114DIA010.
126. Letter, Ronald Reagan to Oscar Mejía Víctores, 30 October 1985, ddrs.
127. Letter, Ronald Reagan to Oscar Mejía Víctores.
128. McCleary, Dictating Democracy, 27–28; Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Proj-
ect, 22.
129. cia, “National Intelligence Estimate: Guatemala: Prospects for the New Gov-
ernment,” nie 82-­86, 30 January 1986, cia/f. Also see McCleary, Dictating Democracy, 6.
130. The most prosaic example of this strategy was Ríos Montt’s “frijoles y fusiles”
campaign in the highlands; Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 22–25.
131. cia, “National Intelligence Estimate: Guatemala: Prospects for the New Government.”

284  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

 132. cia, “National Intelligence Estimate: Guatemala: Prospects for the New Government.”
133. McCleary, Dictating Democracy, 29.
134. Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 1.
135. pgt, “La democratización forma parte del proyecto contrainsurgente,” Verdad,
1984, cirma: Colección de Documentos.
136. Abrams, “An End to Tyranny in Latin America.”
137. The United States allocated $103 million in assistance to Guatemala in fiscal year
1986; in October 1986, $300 million more was promised by Belgium, Spain, Germany,
France, and Italy. Bureau of Inter-­American Affairs, “Guatemala’s Transition Toward
Democracy,” Public Information Series (Washington, DC: State Department Bureau of
Public Affairs, November 1986).
138. According to Schirmer, the broe was trained by two hundred Israeli military
experts and armed with $750,000 worth of military equipment. Schirmer, The Guate-
malan Military Project, 165.
139. Nairn and Simon, “Bureaucracy of Death,” 14.
140. use/g to dos, “Rising Violence in Guatemala Again Causing Concern,” 12 De-
cember 1987, dnsa, gu01139.
141. ceri-­gua, “Cerezo recibe ayuda para las fuerzas policiales,” Vistazo Mensual, no.
8 (October 1986), cirma: Colección cirma, Serie Trudeau. As Nairn and Simon write,
the abolition of the dit “won the armed forces international praise, while G-­2’s assassi-
nations continue[d] as before.” Nairn and Simon, “Bureaucracy of Death,” 17.
142. Representación Unitaria de Oposición Guatemalteca (ruog), “La disolución del
dit,” 1986, cirma: Colección Infostelle.
143. Hugo Arce, “La sombra del coronel,” Siglo Veintiuno (26 July 1990).
144. Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 180.
145. Cited in Kobrak, Organizing and Repression, 100.
146. Glebbeek, In the Crossfire of Democracy, 107.
147. Elliott Abrams to use/g, “Reply to the Interior Minister’s Letter to the President
Requesting Police Aid S/S No. 8619593,” 8 July 1986; italics mine.
148. Elliott Abrams to use/g, “Reply to the Interior Minister’s Letter to the Presi-
dent.” Kuzmarov discusses the U.S. transition from providing police counterinsurgency
aid to providing police counternarcotics aid in his Modernizing Repression.
149. Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 197; United States Army Intelligence
and Security Command, “Army Country Profile—Guatemala, Part II (U),” February
1994, dnsa, gu01793. Also see Department of Defense Joint Staff, “iir (redacted) In-
telligence Directorate (D-­2) of the Guatemalan National Defense General Staff (U),” 16
February 1990, dnsa, gu01308.
150. Glebbeek, In the Crossfire of Democracy, 107; and Schirmer, The Guatemalan Mil-
itary Project, 198–200.
151. “Ex-­soldados serán empleados como agentes policíacos,” Prensa Libre (17 March
1992).
152. Jonas, The Battle for Guatemala, 164.
153. Quoted in Schirmer, The Guatemalan Military Project, 198.
154. Kobrak, Organizing and Repression, 100–101; Washington Office on Latin Amer-
ica, “Cases Where the Guatemalan Military or Police Have Been Directly Implicated in

NOTES TO CHAPTER 5   — 285

Human Rights Abuses,” March 1988, cirma: Colección de Documentos. Also see ceh,
Guatemala: Memoria del silencio.
155. Department of Defense, “iir [redacted] Visit to National Police hq—A Step
Backward in Time,” 6 May 1987, dnsa, gu01109.
156. ceri-­gua, “Otros dos asesinatos y un secuestro,” and “Jefe policial justifica
asesinatos” (10 March 1987).
157. cia, untitled cable, February 1989, nsa/gdp.
158. Glebbeek, In the Crossfire of Democracy, 101; and McClintock, The American Con-
nection, 160. Here the two systems overlapped: while the pn used its rebajados to carry
out undesirable labors and the military did the same with its own rebajados, the pn was
also encouraged to hire former military soldiers into the regular force as a means of
“strengthening” the police. “Reforzarán Policía Nacional: Soldados de baja del ejército
podrían ser contratados,” El Gráfico (1 March 1992).
159. cia, untitled cable, February 1989, courtesy nsa/gdp.
160. cia, untitled cable, February 1989.
161. These materials include wola’s series of publications on police training, Temas
y debates en la reforma de la seguridad pública; also see un High Commission on Human
Rights, Derechos humanos y aplicación de la ley; iepades, Manual de casos para el curso de
derechos; and the undp/iccpg publication La actuación policial y los derechos humanos
en Guatemala. Human rights training was also emphasized for the military: for exam-
ple, as of 1993, army soldiers were required to carry a “code of conduct” document in
their pockets detailing how they needed to “respect human rights.” use/g to dos, “Hu-
man Rights Awareness for Guatemalan Army Troops,” 23 March 1993, nsa/gdp, Box 13,
Folder: 950114dia010.
162. Glebbeek, In the Crossfire of Democracy, 107.
163. Despite such strong words, it is worth remembering that functionaries like
Stroock were often not permitted to comment on the full range of intelligence available.
Before giving a press conference on Central American violence in September 1989, his
preconference talking points indicated, “Mr. Stroock was advised . . . [to] avoid the
words right and left. Use the word extremists or dissident elements. Don’t use the term
private sector as a source of the violence.” Unlabeled, unpublished document, September
1989, nsa/gdp, Box: Guatemala Incoming foias.
164. use/g to dos, “Ambassador Calls on New National Police Director Col. Julio
Caballeros,” 5 July 1990, dnsa, gu01347.
165. For “spies,” see use/g to dos, “National Police Director on His Plans.” On efforts
to purge the pn, see “Cosas del lado oscuro de la Policía Nacional,” Prensa Libre (8 Sep-
tember 1991); on civil society’s calls for more police purges, see “Urge la depuración de la
Policía Nacional,” La República (30 September 1994); on cynicism about the possibility of
police reform, see “frg afirma que depuración en la Policía Nacional es ‘show politico,’ ”
La República (1 February 1996).
166. Interview, prahpn014, 31 October 2007. The anniversary of the 1944 revolution
was 20 October.
167. Interview, prahpn014.
168. On the inadequacies of postwar security reform, see Arévalo de León, Función
militar; Gutiérrez, Hacia un paradigma democrático; Peacock and Beltrán, Poderes ocul-

286  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 5

tos; Byrne, Stanley, and Garst, Rescuing Police Reform; Garst, Military Intelligence and
Human Rights; Hernández, “A Long Road.” On police reform in postconflict transitions,
see Stanley and Holiday in Steadman et al., eds., Ending Civil Wars; on police reform in
other settings, see Chevigny, The Edge of the Knife.
169. Gobierno de Guatemala, Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, and
Naciones Unidas, Acuerdo sobre el fortalecimiento del poder civil y función del Ejército en
una sociedad democrática.
170. Many details in this paragraph come from Jonas, Of Centaurs and Doves, 151.
171. icitap began assisting the pn in 1986, after the Reagan administration’s reversal
of the 1974 congressional ban on U.S. foreign police aid.
172. minugua, “La Policía Nacional Civil,” 2001; Stanley and Holiday, “Broad Partic-
ipation, Diffuse Responsibility,” 451.
173. Byrne, Stanley, and Garst, Rescuing Police Reform, 4; Pérez, “Iglesia, pdh y la Usac.”
174. Seijo, “Nuevo jefe depurará el Dinc.”
175. Bayley, Patterns of Policing, 189; Bittner, Aspects of Police Work, 22.

SIX. REVOLUTIONARY LIVES IN THE ARCHIVES

1. The murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi by army officers after the release of the remhi
report in April 1998 is the best-­known, but by no means the only, such case.
2. Interview, Alberto Fuentes; italics mine.
3. For example, interview, prahpn006; interview, prahpn018; interview, prahpn014;
interview, prahpn022.
4. Interview, prahpn022.
5. Interview, prahpn024.
6. Interview, prahpn022.
7. All names used, except for those of public figures like the Project’s director and as-
sistant director, are pseudonyms. Some workers’ stories will be familiar to others within
the Project, given the long histories some of them share; the goal, simply, is that they
be untraceable beyond the Project. I do not obscure details of workers’ past political
involvement; scholars opposed to the “shock anthropology” of those who compile tales
of abstracted horror deracinated from the political conditions of their production have
exposed the reactionary politics of such an approach. See McAllister, The Good Road. The
people interviewed for this chapter constitute a small minority of the Project staff, and
some are no longer employed there, which muddies the waters of personal identifica-
tion. Ultimately, the pnc already knows far more about the Project staff—down to their
license plate numbers and home addresses—than I reveal here.
8. Interview, prahpn005.
9. Interview, prahpn002; Nelson, A Finger in the Wound.
10. Cohen, States of Denial, 84, 153; Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, 20.
11. Cohen, States of Denial, 130.
12. Garton Ash, The File, 108.
13. Schafer, The Soundscape.
14. Interview, prahpn014.
15. Interview, prahpn027.
16. Interview, prahpn027.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6   — 287

 17. Interview, prahpn018.
18. Interview, prahpn017, 8 November 2007.
19. On conciencia, see McAllister, “Good People.”
20. Interview, prahpn022.
21. Kate Doyle mentions this in her article “The Atrocity Files,” 63. See also inter-
views, prahpn003, prahpn005, prahpn010, prahpn022, prahpn017, prahpn006,
and Alberto Fuentes.
22. Interview, prahpn007.
23. Interview, prahpn022.
24. Interview, Edeliberto Cifuentes.
25. Interview, prahpn018.
26. See Derrida, Archive Fever; Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive,” 25.
27. Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive,” 25.
28. Interview, prahpn006.
29. Interview, prahpn006.
30. Interview, prahpn027; Doyle, “The Atrocity Files.”
31. Interview, prahpn005.
32. Interview, prahpn024. The need on the part of these survivors to have their
claims recognized by the state, even while being constantly confronted with evidence
of state violence, speaks to the magic and power of the state itself—as an interpellating
enemy but also, potentially, an interpellating friend and legitimizer. Either way, and de-
spite themselves, these memory workers remain archival subjects in ways not altogether
empowering. For many a resolution to this tension is found, as Felman writes, in the
form of criminal justice as both idea and practice—a tightly woven relationship between
law and trauma that responds to “the great catastrophes and the collective traumas of the
twentieth century.” Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 3.
33. Interview, prahpn024.
34. Interview, prahpn014.
35. Interview, prahpn018.
36. Interview, prahpn002.
37. Interview, prahpn004.
38. Interview, prahpn002.
39. Harris, “The Archival Sliver,” 63–86.
40. Interview, prahpn010.
41. Interview, prahpn017.
42. Interview, prahpn027.
43. Interview, prahpn006.
44. Interview, Alberto Fuentes; and see odhag, La memoria tiene la palabra, an after-­
the-­fact reflection by remhi participants on the process of having worked on the remhi
report.
45. Interview, Fredy Peccerelli, 30 October 2007.
46. Interview, prahpn017.
47. Interview, prahpn014.
48. Interview, prahpn006.
49. Interview, prahpn007.

288  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 6

 50. Interview, Alberto Fuentes.
51. Interview, prahpn014.
52. Interview, prahpn022.
53. Interview, prahpn007.
54. As such, the experiences of workers in the pn archives contradict interpretations
of trauma as “unspeakable,” “untranslatable,” and therefore nonspecific and impossible
to link to the political conditions of its production. See Scarry, The Body in Pain; for a
more developed version of this critique, see Grandin, introduction to Grandin and Jo-
seph, eds., A Century of Revolution.
55. On “traitors to the homeland,” see interview, Carla Villagrán.
56. On the defamation of gam, see Departamento de Información y Divulgación del
Ejército, “El Ejército de Guatemala remite al gam ante la opinion pública,” 17 September
1986, cirma: Colección de Documentos, 2807.
57. Interview, prahpn006.
58. Interview, prahpn024.
59. Interview, prahpn028.
60. Interview, prahpn024.
61. Interview, prahpn022.
62. Interview, Carla Villagrán. Villagrán lost her first husband to state-­sponsored
terror, a case featured in the Diario Militar; see Doyle, “The Atrocity Files.”
63. On engaño, see Nelson’s Reckoning.
64. Interview, prahpn018.
65. Trace, “What Is Recorded Is Never Simply ‘What Happened.’ ”
66. Interview, prahpn018.
67. Sometimes these mass raids were reported in the press, sometimes not. For an
example, see “625 Capturados en redadas,” El Imparcial (4 June 1984), in which more
than ten thousand “security agents” were deployed over the course of a week in order
to “control common delinquency,” or else “Más de mil van capturados,” El Imparcial (24
September 1984).
68. Interview, prahpn002.
69. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 84–85.
70. Cohen draws on Taussig and Feitlowitz in his discussion of “talking terror.” Co-
hen, States of Denial, 84.
71. Jelin, State Repression, 6–7.
72. Interview, prahpn010.
73. Interview, prahpn002.
74. Interview, prahpn028.
75. Interview, prahpn018.
76. “Instalaciones norteamericanas para el entrenamiento contrainsurgente,” Docu­
ment 266, Colección Payeras-­Colom, cirma. Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s,
the Guatemalan press regularly reported on groups of pn officers returning from Wash-
ington or Panamá after receiving training in, for example, “handling special weapons,”
“persecuting delinquency,” and “reducing criminality and subversive activities.”
77. Interview, prahpn027; interview, prahpn028.
78. Interview, prahpn022.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6   — 289

 79. Interview, prahpn005.
80. Interview, Alberto Fuentes.
81. Interview, Ana Corado.
82. Interview, prahpn010.
83. Interview, prahpn027.
84. Interview, prahpn022.
85. Interview, prahpn018.
86. Interview, prahpn003.
87. Interview, prahpn007.
88. Interview, Ana Corado.
89. Interview, prahpn002.
90. Interview, prahpn028.
91. Interview, prahpn007.
92. Interview, Alberto Fuentes.
93. Browning, Ordinary Men.
94. Interview, prahpn007.
95. Interview, prahpn005.
96. Interview, prahpn003.
97. Interview, prahpn028.
98. See Arriaza and Roht-­Arriaza, “Social Reconstruction”; Fletcher and Weinstein,
“Violence and Social Repair,” 573.
99. Interview, Alberto Fuentes.
100. Interview, prahpn007.
101. Interview, prahpn018.
102. A fascinating account of exiles in Mexico is found in Ludec, “Voces del exilio.”
103. Interview, prahpn006; also, see Ludec, “Voces del exilio.”
104. Interview, prahpn005.
105. Interview, prahpn022.
106. Interview, prahpn005.
107. Interview, prahpn007.
108. Interview, prahpn018.
109. Interview, prahpn024.
110. Interview, prahpn007.
111. Interview, Iduvina Hernández.
112. Interview, prahpn018.
113. Interview, prahpn022.

SEVEN. ARCHIVES AND THE NEXT GENERATION(S)

1. See editor Roque Dalton’s essay, “Otto René Castillo,” in Castillo, Informe de una
injusticia, 208–12.
2. Translation is an amalgam of Margaret Randall’s and Deborah Levenson’s trans-
lations, found in Randall, trans., Let’s Go!, and Fried et al., eds., Guatemala in Rebellion.
3. prahpn, “Informe de Avances—Agosto 2007.”
4. Susana Kaiser refers to the post-­terror generation in Argentina as “gray zoners.”
See Kaiser, Postmemories of Terror.

290  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

 5. See, for example, Dillenburger, Fargas, and Akhonzada, “Long-­Term Effects of Po-
litical Violence.”
6. Interview, prahpn023.
7. Hoffman, Complex Histories, Contested Memories, 5.
8. For example, Guatemala has nothing like the German phenomenon of Vaterliter-
atur, the literature produced by writers analyzing their fathers’ roles as Holocaust per­
petrators. See Schlant, The Language of Silence; Fuchs, Phantoms of War.
9. Hoffman, Complex Histories, Contested Memories, 19.
10. Interviews, prahpn001, 9 August 2007; prahpn009, 13 October 2007; prahpn012;
prahpn013, 30 October 2007; prahpn015; prahpn016, 6 November 2007 and 17 Jan-
uary 2008; prahpn021, 13 November 2007; prahpn023.
11. Blouin and Rosenberg, “Preface and Acknowledgments,” in their Archives, Docu-
mentation, and Institutions, ix.
12. Interview, prahpn029, 23 January 2008.
13. Interview, prahpn023; interview, prahpn015; interview, prahpn012.
14. On the Nicaraguan colmena experience, see Ramírez, dir., Las colmenas.
15. Interview, prahpn029.
16. Interview, prahpn023.
17. Children caught up in political conflicts have different ways of responding to their
parents’ involvement: some with acceptance, but others with resistance and hostility. A
well-­known case of the latter is that of Bettina Röhl, the daughter of Ulrike Meinhof—
the German journalist who cofounded the Red Army Faction. As a condition of permit-
ting the posthumous publication of her mother’s journalistic work, Röhl required that
the volume include an essay of her own in which she attacks Meinhof’s political legacy.
See Röhl, “Icon of the Left,” in Bauer, ed., Everybody Talks about the Weather . . . We Don’t,
257–63.
18. Interview, prahpn019, 9 November 2007.
19. Interview, prahpn029.
20. Interview, prahpn019.
21. Interview, prahpn012.
22. Interview, prahpn013.
23. Interview, prahpn001.
24. Interview, prahpn009.
25. Interview, prahpn021.
26. Interview, prahpn016.
27. Stern, Battling for Hearts and Minds, 5.
28. Interview, prahpn012.
29. Interview, prahpn023.
30. Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 66.
31. Hoffman, After Such Knowledge, 106.
32. Interview, prahpn013.
33. Interview, Ana Corado.
34. Interview, prahpn016.
35. Interview, prahpn013.
36. Interview, prahpn001.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7   — 291

 37. Technology coordinator Jorge Villagrán pointed out that this was a particular chal-
lenge for the team of document codifiers that he oversaw, who were frustrated with a
task that was “very monotonous in practice. So we’ve had problems, people have been
unhappy in the work, because they get bored of doing the same thing, of interpreting
the documents in the same way over and over again. . . . So that’s been one of the most
difficult aspects of this work: making sure that the staff are motivated, that they’re eager
to do the work, that they feel good about doing a job that is extremely repetitive.” Inter-
view, Jorge Villagrán.
38. For transition from “family” to “workplace,” see interview, prahpn029.
39. Interview, prahpn023.
40. Interview, prahpn029.
41. Interview, prahpn001.
42. Interview, prahpn019.
43. Interview, Alberto Fuentes.
44. Interview, Gustavo Meoño.
45. Interview, Gustavo Meoño.
46. Interview, Gustavo Meoño.
47. Interview, prahpn021.
48. Interview, prahpn005.
49. Interview, prahpn005.
50. Interview, prahpn021.
51. Interview, prahpn013.
52. Interview, prahpn005.
53. Interview, prahpn013.
54. Interview, prahpn021.
55. Interview, prahpn016.
56. Interview, prahpn021.
57. Interview, prahpn006.
58. Interview, prahpn023.
59. The small size of Guatemala’s human rights sector was not necessarily an indica-
tion that no one else cared about justice; instead, it should be interpreted in the context
of the relatively tiny size of the middle class. While most of the population had to focus
on economic survival, this did not mean they were disinterested in efforts to recover the
history of the armed conflict; one recent national survey found that 90 percent of the
population “demands and expects” reparations for war victims. Only 24 percent of those
interviewed wanted to “neither know about nor discuss the past.” However, the study
did find that youths were far less likely to be interested in learning about the past, or to
have substantive knowledge about recent history. Marcela Gereda, “Juventud, historia,
y memoria,” El Periódico (10 August 2009).
60. Zone 10 is a wealthy area of Guatemala City. Interview, prahpn029.
61. Interview, prahpn001.
62. Interview, prahpn001.
63. Interview, prahpn005.
64. Interview, prahpn005.
65. Winaq, a new political party led by Rigoberta Menchú, aimed to represent Gua-

292  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 7

temala’s Maya majority. For the 2007 presidential elections, it allied with Encuentro por
Guatemala, another new party led by Nineth Montenegro; their coalition was crushed
at the ballot box.
66. Interview, prahpn023.
67. Interview, prahpn023.
68. Interview, prahpn024.
69. Interview, prahpn021.
70. Interview, prahpn023.
71. Interview, Gustavo Meoño.
72. Interview, prahpn019.
73. Interview, prahpn018.
74. Interview, prahpn003.
75. Interview, prahpn017.
76. Interview, prahpn018.
77. hijos, a name used throughout the hemisphere by groups of young activists who
lost family members to Cold War dictatorships, was founded in Guatemala by the daugh-
ter of pgt activist Luz Haydee Méndez Calderón, whose case was among those in the
Diario Militar. See Nolin, Transnational Ruptures, 72.
78. Interview, prahpn017.
79. Interview, prahpn027.
80. Interview, prahpn001.
81. Interview, prahpn023.
82. Interview, prahpn023; interview, prahpn021.
83. Interview, prahpn021.
84. Interview, prahpn023.
85. Interview, prahpn023.
86. Interview, prahpn023.
87. Interview, prahpn016.
88. Interview, prahpn013.
89. Interview, prahpn023.
90. In 2006, Guatemala was ranked lowest in the Americas on the Human Develop-
ment Index except for Haiti. See ciidh, Situación de los derechos económicos, sociales, y
culturales en Guatemala, 2006; State Department, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights,
and Labor, 2008 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Guatemala.
91. Norma Stoltz Chinchilla details how Latin American feminists have linked au-
thoritarianism in society to authoritarianism in the family. Stoltz Chinchilla, “Marxism,
Feminism, and the Struggle for Democracy.”
92. Cited in Claudia Méndez Arriaza, “Este archivo explica por qué somos callados,
desconfiados y amishados,” El Periódico (23 July 2006).
93. Cited in Méndez Arriaza, “Este archivo explica por qué somos callados, descon-
fiados y amishados.”
94. Interview, prahpn016.
95. Interview, prahpn016.
96. Interview, prahpn001.
97. Interview, prahpn009.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7   — 293

 98. Interview, Alberto Fuentes.
99. Interview, prahpn029.

EIGHT. CHANGING THE LAW OF WHAT CAN BE SAID, AND DONE

1. On the agca, see interview, Anna Carla Ericastilla; on the Project’s budget, see
Leonardo Cereser, “Capturaban sin orden de juez,” Prensa Libre (19 January 2008).
2. Lucía Escobar, “Uli Stelzner en la isla del horror,” El Periódico (29 March 2009);
also see Uli Stelzner, dir., La isla.
3. “Sale a luz tráfico de niños durante la guerra interna,” El Periódico (24 March
2009); editorial, “Los huérfanos del conflicto,” Prensa Libre (24 March 2009); Ligia
Flores, “Archivo de sbs podría esclarecer adopciones ilegales durante guerra,” La Hora
(10 March 2009).
4. Interview, Ingrid Molina.
5. “Luchan por encontrar la identidad perdida,” Prensa Libre (8 August 2009); inter-
view, Fredy Peccerelli.
6. Interview, Gustavo Palma; interview, Alberto Fuentes.
7. Interview, Alberto Fuentes.
8. Leonardo Cereser, “Archivo histórico peligra por falta de mantenimiento,” Prensa
Libre (4 May 2009).
9. Guatemala lagged, regionally, in passing an access to information law—Honduras
and Nicaragua passed theirs in 2006, Panamá in 2002, and Belize in 1994.
10. Hugo Alvarado, “Carlos Barreda: Queremos más y mejor acceso a información,”
Prensa Libre (15 September 2008); Leonardo Cereser, “Avanzan preparativos para verifi-
car nueva Ley de Acceso a la Información,” Prensa Libre (15 February 2009).
11. The law’s main proponents were Acción Ciudadana, a watchdog outfit that mon-
itored public administration; the local chapter of Transparency International; and the
Association of Guatemalan Journalists. Luisa F. Rodríguez, “Diversos sectores urgen
aprobación de ley de acceso a información,” Prensa Libre (2 April 2008); “Guatemala
muestra atrasos en lucha contra la corrupción,” El Periódico (7 December 2007); Leslie
Pérez, “Guatemaltecos, sin acceso a la información pública,” Prensa Libre (20 January
2008).
12. Letter, Andrew Hudson et al. to General Abraham Valenzuela González, 3 Febru-
ary 2009, www.humanrightsfirst.org/pdf/090204-­HRD-­ltr-­mil-­arch-­esp.pdf.
13. Audit culture operated here in full force. See Nelson, Reckoning, 27; Strathern,
Audit Cultures; Power, The Audit Society; Hetherington, Guerrilla Auditors.
14. Anonymous intelligence official cited in Gramajo Valdés, El derecho de acceso, 99.
15. Lorena Seijo, “Plan Sofía confirma autoría de masacres,” Prensa Libre (18 March
2007).
16. “Ejército dice que ‘desaparecieron’ dos informes militares,” Prensa Libre (26 Feb-
ruary 2009). In December 2009, human rights organizations presented Plan Sofía as
evidence in Spain’s genocide case against eight Guatemalan military and police officials.
See Doyle, “Operation Sofía.”
17. Carmen Esquivel Sarría, “Apertura de archivos militares,” Prensa Latina (3 March
2008); “Aplausos y críticas por anuncio de apertura,” Prensa Libre (25 February 2009).
18. See editorial, La Hora (27 February 2009); “Aplausos y críticas por anuncio de

294  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 8

apertura,” Prensa Libre (25 February 2009); Miguel Angel Albízures, “El ofrecimiento de
Colom,” El Periódico (4 March 2009).
19. Javier Estrada Tobar, “pdh acompañará investigaciones en archivos militares,” La
Hora (4 March 2009).
20. Field notes, 2008.
21. Juan Luis Font, “Abrir archivos es poca cosa,” El Periódico (29 February 2009).
22. Guy Adams, “The Lawyer Taking on Guatemala’s Criminal Gangs,” Independent
(4 January 2012).
23. Hugo Alvarado, “Ejército se niega a entregar archivos,” Prensa Libre (22 October
2008).
24. Linares and Pérez Molina are cited in “Aplausos y críticas por anuncio de aper-
tura,” Prensa Libre (25 February 2009). On Pérez Molina and the Gerardi killing, see
Goldman, The Art of Political Murder.
25. “Gobierno abre más de 12 mil archivos militares,” Prensa Libre (20 June 2011).
26. Danilo Valladares, “The Best-­Kept Secrets: The Military’s,” Inter Press Service News
Agency (9 March 2010).
27. This text was once available on the “Fundamentos” section of the Presidential
Peace Secretariat’s website, www.sepaz.gob.gt, but ceased to be available after president
Otto Pérez Molina shut down the Peace Archives Directorate in 2012.
28. This included the push for a freedom of information law, which included political
pressure and implementation suggestions from the un and the Organization of Ameri-
can States. Gramajo Valdés, El derecho de acceso, 96.
29. See Memoria del Mundo, Directrices para la salvaguardia del patrimonio docu-
mental; Manual técnico para la administración, manejo, y conservación del patrimonio
documental.
30. Interview, Michael Moerth.
31. Interview, Michael Moerth; interview, Agnes Bernzen; interview, Åsa Wallton.
32. Nelson highlights the “two-­facedness” of international aid in Guatemala—neither
wholly beneficent nor wholly counterinsurgent. Nelson, Reckoning, 310–11.
33. Interview, prahpn005.
34. See Hernández Pico, Terminar la guerra; Sandoval and Ríos, La izquierda; Sáenz
de Tejada, Revolucionarios.
35. Interview, Mario Polanco; interview, Estuardo Galeano; interview, Iduvina
Hernández.
36. Interview, Iduvina Hernández.
37. Interview, Estuardo Galeano.
38. R. Estrada and R. Quinto, “Piden acceso a archivos de la pn,” El Periódico (26
February 2008).
39. For reactions to Chupina’s death, see Leonardo Cereser and Julio Lara, “Murió
Germán Chupina Barahona,” Prensa Libre (18 February 2008); Miguel Angel Albizures,
“Chupina no fue absuelto,” El Periódico (19 February 2008); Ana Miza, “Críticas contra
justicia por deceso en impunidad,” La Hora (19 February 2008).
40. Interview, Alberto Fuentes.
41. The Spanish filed international arrest warrants for the accused in July 2006; sur-
prisingly, the Guatemalan courts initially upheld the warrants and arrested both Guevara

NOTES TO CHAPTER 8   — 295

and García Arredondo. But in 2007, Guatemala’s highest court overturned that decision,
ruling that Spain did not have jurisdiction in the case and releasing Guevara and García
Arredondo back into civilian life. The Spanish, undeterred, began in 2008 to interview
witnesses for the case. See Roht-­Arriaza and Bernabeu, “The Guatemalan Genocide
Case in Spain,” 1–4; Roht-­Arriaza, “Making the State Do Justice.” In 2011 and 2012, Ríos
Montt, Mejía Víctores, and Pedro García Arredondo were all indicted by the domestic
court system for crimes against humanity.
42. As of the time of this writing, that is.
43. See, for example, Leonardo Cereser, “Revela estrategia represiva de pn,” Prensa
Libre (25 March 2009).
44. Tomuschat, “Clarification Commission in Guatemala”; Nelson, A Finger in the
Wound; Grandin, “Chronicles.”
45. See Sergio Fernando Alvarado Morales, Informe Anual Circunstanciado: 2003 and
the corresponding yearly reports for 2004, 2005, and 2006.
46. Interview, Alvarado Morales; “Harán museo,” El Periódico (12 January 2008).
47. Reappointment required the support of two-­thirds of the members of Congress.
48. Interview, Iduvina Hernández.
49. Miguel Angel Albizures, “A qué juega el Procurador,” El Periódico (10 September
2009); on memory as a political commodity, see Bilbija and Payne, eds., Accounting for
Violence.
50. Nelson, Reckoning.
51. Interview, prahpn027.
52. Field notes, February 2008; “Doctor Pablo Werner Ramírez,” El Defensor del
Pueblo (January 2008): 7.
53. Interview, prahpn028.
54. Interview, prahpn027.
55. Field notes, 2006–2008.
56. Interview, prahpn027.
57. Field notes, February 2008.
58. See pdh, Accord No. sg-­003-­2009, “Reglamento del Servicio de Referencia Sobre
Violaciones a los Derechos Humanos,” published in Diario de Centroamérica (27 February
2009). After the archives were transferred from pdh to agca custody, serevidh was
eliminated and replaced by the Unidad de Acceso a la Información.
59. Leonardo Cereser, “pdh señala agresiones, amenazas, y persecuciones en caso
García,” Prensa Libre (20 March 2009); Juan Manuel Castillo, “pdh denuncia amenazas
contra su personal,” El Periódico (20 March 2009).
601. “Día cruento deriva en caos vial en varias arterias de la capital,” Prensa Libre (24
March 2009).
61. “Comercio cierra sus puertas antes de lo acostumbrado,” Prensa Libre (24 March
2009).
62. “No es necesario un estado de Excepción, dice Colom,” Prensa Libre (24 March 2009).
63. González Quintana, “La respuesta del terror.”
64. I attended this ceremony; the following descriptions are taken from my notes.
65. Nothing more was heard from Luis de Lión (this was his nom de plume; his given
name was José Luis de León Díaz) until his name appeared in the Diario Militar.

296  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 8

 66. Quoted in Manuel Roig-­Franzia, “Sending a Brutal Message about Human
Rights,” Washington Post (11 April 2009).
67. Leonardo Cereser, “Procurador repudia ataque contra su esposa,” Prensa Libre (27
March 2009).
68. For Castresana’s quote and “dead or alive,” see Claudia Méndez Arriaza, “La his-
toria detrás de la petición,” El Periódico (4 August 2009).
69. Miguel Angel Sandoval, “La pdh está bajo la lupa” (23 June 2009), www.albedrio.
org; Erwin Pérez, “Los aprietos del Procurador Sergio Morales” (26 June 2009), www
.i-­dem.org.
70. cicig, Caso No. 01071-­2009-­00678, Juzgado Undécimo de Primera Instancia Pe-
nal, 2do Oficial, briefing available at www.cicig.org.
71. Alejandro Pérez, “pdh sin recursos para mantener archivos de la Policía Nacio-
nal,” El Periódico (20 June 2009).
72. R. Sandoval and O. Herrera, “El Gobierno no puede financiar el trabajo de los
archivos de la pn,” El Periódico (27 June 2009).
73. Claudia Méndez Arriaza, “Exigen captura de ex-­jefe de Cuarto Cuerpo de Policía,”
El Periódico (26 June 2009).
74. Various organizations, “ONGs exigen protección de Archivo Histórico de la
Policía Nacional,” www.albedrio.org (29 June 2009).
75. Ricardo Quinto, “Archivos de la extinta pn serán públicos,” Prensa Libre (30 June
2009).
76. “Presidente oficializa traslado de archivos de la pn al Ministerio de Cultura,”
Prensa Libre (30 June 2009).
77. prahpn, “Se inicia nueva fase en el proyecto ‘Archivo Histórico de la Policía
Nacional.’ ”
78. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 129.
79. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 130.
80. Robertson, “Mechanisms of Exclusion.”
81. On “thinkability,” see Hacking, Historical Ontology.
82. Interview, prahpn007.
83. Combe, Archives interdites, 321.

NINE. CONCLUSION
1. Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man.
2. Cook and Schwartz, “Archives, Records, and Power,” 13.
3. Cited in Ketelaar, “Recordkeeping and Societal Power,” 6.
4. Cited in Stephen Kinzer, “East Germans Face Their Accusers,” New York Times (12
April 1992); the case is also discussed in Garton Ash, The File.
5. Garton Ash, The File, 231.
6. Guadamuz, “Habeas Data.”
7. See www.un.org/en/events/righttotruthday/; see also the iachr’s Office of the Spe-
cial Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression, “Right to the Truth,” www.cidh.org/relatoria
/showarticle.asp?artID=156&lID=1; and “Promotion and Protection of Human Rights:
Report of the ohchr,” ecosoc e/cn.4/2006/91, 8 February 2006.
8. See Open Society Justice Initiative et al., “Amicus Curiae Submission in the Case

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9   — 297

of Gomes Lund and Others v. Brazil,” June 2010; Inter-­American Court on Human Rights,
sentence, Gomes Lund and Others v. Brazil, November 24, 2010, both available at www
.soros.org/initiatives/justice/litigation/brazil.
9. Sikkink, The Justice Cascade.
10. Roht-­Arriaza, The Pinochet Effect; Rory Carroll, “Latin America Confronts State
Atrocities of Bloody Past,” Guardian (25 January 2012).
11. Two previous cases, those of Choatalúm and El Jute, were the first convictions for
the crime of forced disappearance; both involved military perpetrators.
12. Doyle and Willard, “27 Years Later, Justice for Fernando García.”
13. Statement by Alejandra García Montenegro, 1 November 2010, casofernando
garcia.org.
14. Doyle, “ ‘I Wanted Him Back Alive’: An Account of Edgar Fernando García’s Case
from Inside ‘Tribunals Tower,’ ” in Unredacted: The National Security Archive, Unedited and
Uncensored (26 October 2010), http://nsarchive.wordpress.com.
15. “Guatemala Jails Former Police Chief over Student Kidnapping,” Telegraph (22 Au-
gust 2012). As of this writing, García Arredondo’s lawyers were appealing the sentence.
16. Raúl Minondo Ayau, “Comentarios,” elPeriódico (22 June 2011).
17. Emphasis in original. “La Asociación de Veteranos Militares de Guatemala
avemilgua Ante la opinión Nacional e Internacional manifiesta,” Prensa Libre (July
22, 2011).
18. Weld, “Dignifying the Guerrillero.”
19. Oswaldo J. Hernández, “La marcha de los veteranos,” Plaza Pública (15 November
2011); Julio Revolorio, “Exigen terminar con la persecución contra militares,” elPeriódico
(15 November 2011); “Militares rechazan que haya habido genocidio,” Prensa Libre (14
November 2011).
20. Jose Andrés Ochoa, “Méndez Ruiz,” Plaza Pública (27 January 2012).
21. “Sí, es contra Claudia Paz y Paz,” elPeriódico (29 November 2011).
22. Ricardo Méndez Ruiz, “Y lo sostengo, por el amor de Dios!,” elPeriódico (5 Feb-
ruary 2012).
23. Daniela Castillo, “En Guatemala no hubo genocidio,” elPeriódico (31 January
2012); Martín Rodríguez Pellecer, “Quiero que alguien me demuestre que hubo genoci-
dio,” Plaza Pública (25 July 2011).
24. ceh, Guatemala: Memoria del silencio, Conclusions, para. I:49.
25. Weld, “Dignifying the Guerrillero.”
26. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths, 5.
27. Interview, prahpn018.
28. McAdams notes of the Stasi archives that “above and beyond the challenge of
retrieving lost data from the archives, a more serious objection to the use of the MfS
files to reconstruct the past was that they were factually unreliable.” McAdams, Judging
the Past, 67.
29. On history and memory, see Jelin, State Repression, chap. 4; Oglesby, “Educating
Citizens in Postwar Guatemala.”
30. Derrida, Archive Fever, 4.
31. This point echoes the argument that Guatemalan terror was not a function of
state decomposition but rather was a component of state formation—the foundation of

298  —  NOTES TO CHAPTER 9

the military’s plan of national stabilization through a return to constitutional rule. See
Grandin, “The Instruction of Great Catastrophe.”
32. Gramajo Valdés writes that increased access to state information can “form the
genesis of a modification in the established relations between government and gov-
erned.” Gramajo Valdés, El derecho de acceso, 68.
33. Derrida, Archive Fever.
34. The permanent preservation of the digitized records was guaranteed by the Swiss
Federal Archives; their accessibility online was made possible by the University of Texas
at Austin.
35. Interview, prahpn002.
36. The murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi in 1998 illustrated this all too well.
37. “Suciedad civil” is a pun on “sociedad civil,” or “civil society,” translating to some-
thing like “civil filth.” Raúl Minondo Ayau, “Comentarios,” El Periódico (1 July 2009).
38. For a detailed discussion of this process, see Grandin, “The Instruction of Great
Catastrophe.”
39. Interview, prahpn029.
40. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 232–33.
41. Interview, prahpn005.
42. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 45.
43. Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
44. Castillo, “La Tumba de Dios,” in Castillo, Informe de una injusticia, 222–23.
45. Zinn, “Secrecy, Archives, and the Public Interest.”
46. I borrow “eternal tyranny” from Jean-­Marie Simon.
47. Interview, prahpn024.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 9   — 299

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
Research for this book was conducted at the Historical Archives of the National Po-
lice (ahpn), the Archivo General de Centroamérica (agca), the Centro de Investiga-
ciones Regionales de Mesoamérica (cirma), the Hemeroteca Nacional (hn), the Na-
tional Security Archive’s Guatemala Documentation Project (nsa/cgp), the archives of
the Tipografía Nacional (tn), and the U.S. National Archives at College Park (nacp).
I also obtained digitized documents from the Declassified Documents Reference Sys-
tem (ddrs), the Digital National Security Archive (dnsa), and the Central Intelligence
Agency foia Reading Room (cia/f). Periodicals cited in the notes are listed below. Most
can be found in the Hemeroteca Nacional, in cirma’s press clippings archive, or in the
agca’s own hemeroteca. Interviews with workers at the Project for the Recovery of the
National Police Historical Archives (prahpn) were conducted confidentially, except in
the cases of a handful of leaders who had already identified themselves to the national or
international press. I assigned an internal code number to each interview with a prahpn
worker, and gave each worker a pseudonym in the text. Interviews with external figures
were nonconfidential. All interviews were conducted in Guatemala City.

PERIODICALS
Agencia ceri-­gua. Centro de Reportes Informativos Sobre Guatemala. Guatemala. 1983–
2010.
Boletín Internacional. Guatemalan Human Rights Commission. Mexico. 1983–1988.
Claridad. Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo. Guatemala. 1982–1984.
Compañero. Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres. Guatemala. 1976–1981.
Defensor del Pueblo, El. Procuraduría de los Derechos Humanos. Guatemala. 2005–2010.
Gaceta de la Policía. Policía Nacional. Guatemala. 1921–1940.
Gráfico, El. Guatemala. 1980–1985.
Imparcial, El. Guatemala. 1950–1984.
Informador Guerrillero. Ejército Guerrillero de los Pobres. Guatemala. 1982–1986.
Informador del Ministerio de Gobernación. Interior Ministry. Guatemala. 1964–1973.
Inforpress Centroamericana. Inforpress. Guatemala. 1975–1990.
New York Times. United States. 1954–2010.
No Nos Tientes. Guatemala. 1978–1990.
Orden: Organo de la Policía Nacional de la República de Guatemala. Guatemala. 1955–1963.
Periódico, el. Guatemala. 1995–2012.
Prensa Libre. Guatemala. 1980–present.
Revista de la Policía Nacional. Guatemala. 1969–1985.
Siete Días en la usac. Guatemala. 1978–1982.
Siglo Veintiuno. Guatemala. 1990–2012.
Sucesos de la Semana. 1970–1982.
Verdad. Partido Guatemalteco de Trabajo. 1982–1985.

INTERVIEWS
prahpn001, 9 August 2007
prahpn002, 28 September 2007
prahpn003, 1 October 2007
prahpn004, 3 October 2007
prahpn005, 8 October 2007
prahpn006, 9 October 2007
prahpn007, 10 October 2007
prahpn008, 11 October 2007
prahpn009, 13 October 2007
prahpn010, 16 October 2007
prahpn011, 18 October 2007
prahpn012, 30 October 2007
prahpn013, 30 October 2007
prahpn014, 31 October 2007
prahpn015, 2 November 2007
prahpn016, 6 November 2007, 17 January 2008
prahpn017, 8 November 2007
prahpn018, 9 November 2007
prahpn019, 9 November 2007
prahpn020, 12 November 2007
prahpn021, 13 November 2007
prahpn022, 29 November 2007
prahpn023, 3 December 2007
prahpn024, 5 December 2007
prahpn025, 6 December 2007
prahpn026, 21 January 2008
prahpn027, 22 January 2008
prahpn028, 22 January 2008
prahpn029, 23 January 2008, 27 February 2008
prahpn030, 9 February 2008
Barrientos, Lizbeth, 29 January 2008
Bernzen, Agnes, 12 February 2008
Cifuentes, Edeliberto, 10 November 2007
Corado, Ana, 23 January 2008
Elich, Christina Maria, 4 December 2007
Ericastilla, Anna Carla, 29 November 2007
Fuentes, Alberto, 21 February 2008
Galeano, Estuardo, 6 February 2008
Guzmán Böckler, Carlos, 6 December 2007

302  —  BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hedvall, Ulla-­Britt, 18 January 2008
Hernández, Iduvina, 26 November 2007
La Rue, Frank, 7 February 2008
Meoño, Gustavo, 3 December 2007
Moerth, Michael, 8 February 2008
Molina, Ingrid, 11 November 2007
Morales, Sergio, 12 February 2008
Palma, Gustavo, 14 November 2007
Peccerelli, Fredy, 30 October 2007
Polanco, Mario, 20 February 2008
Salvadó, Rodrigo, 26 February 2008
Turner, Lucy, 15 November 2007
Velásquez Nimatuj, Irmalicia, 26 October 2007
Villagrán, Carla, 12 October 2007
Villagrán, Jorge, 21 February 2008
Villagrán, Marina de, 15 November 2007
Wallton, Åsa, 28 November 2007

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 INDEX

Italicized page numbers point to tables Amílcar (Project worker), 190–91, 193–96,
and illustrations. Page numbers in paren- 201–2, 205–6, 209
theses following endnote locators, e.g., Amnesty International, 20, 113, 138
260n39(10), point to the page the endnote Anderson, Jack, 114
refers to, where the context for the note Andrade Díaz-Duran, Fernando, 138
can be found. Andrade Roca, Manuel Lisandro, 131
Arab Spring, 18
Abourezk, James, 114–15 Arana Osorio, Carlos, 105, 108–10, 112,
Abrams, Elliott, 145 124, 142, 276n103
Acción Ciudadana, 294n11 Arango, Julio, 65
Accord on the Strengthening of Civil Arbenz Guzmán, Jacobo, 8, 24, 87, 91,
Power and the Role of the Armed 95–96, 118, 183
Forces in a Democratic Society (afpc, archival culture, 15–19, 25–26, 50–68,
1996), 62–63, 148–49. See also Peace 184–85, 215–18, 233–35, 248–49
Accords (1996) archival practice and science, 67–68,
aeu (Association of University Students), 70–84, 169–70, 269n9
62, 108, 125–26, 130, 200, 202, 205 “Archival Temples, Archival Prisons”
agca (Archivo General de Centroamérica), (Ketelaar), 236
35–36, 38–39, 50–51, 53–58, 214, 232, archival thinking, 13–19, 25–26, 68–88,
251, 266n19, 301 236–37, 252–53, 260n45
ahpn (National Police Historical Ar- archives: human rights and transitional
chives), 233, 301. See also Project for justice, 40–43, 238–40, 262n6; surveil-
the Recovery of the National Police lance and counterinsurgency, 15, 56,
Historical Archives (prahpn) 58, 59, 117–18, 244–45. See also Project
Ak’abal, Humberto, 254 for the Recovery of the National Police
Alberti, Gloria, 4, 264n42 Historical Archives (prahpn); specific
Alejos, Roberto, 229 archives
Alliance for Progress, 107–8 Archives and Documentation Center for
Alvarado, Mayra, 228 the Defense of Human Rights (Para-
Alvarado Monzón, Bernardo, 112, 228 guay), 214
Álvarez Ruiz, Donaldo, 59, 126–27, 134–37, Archives and Support Services of the
223 Presidential General Staff (agsaemp),
American Association for the Advance- 136. See also El Archivo (Archives and
ment of Science, 267n60(63) Support Services of the Presidential
American Connection, The (McClintock), General Staff)
272n11 Archives of Terror (Paraguay), 4
archive wars, 24, 49, 52, 53, 234–35, 248, Belize, 294n9
264n49; Diario Militar case, 60–65; Benetech, 76, 269n21, 269n29(79)
Free Access law and Peace Archives Benjamin, Walter, 19, 83, 258n14
Directorate, 215–21; gam campaign, Berger, Oscar, 42, 121
58–59 Bickford, Louis, 16, 40, 58, 260n45,
Archivists without Borders, 214, 264n50
269n29(79) Biermann, Wolf, 264n45
Arena, Luis (Tiger of the Ixcán), 124 Bittner, Egon, 149
arena political party (El Salvador), 119 Blouin, Francis, 185
Arendt, Hannah, 170, 253 Bol de la Cruz, Héctor Rafael, 138, 241,
Arevalo, Juan José, 102 243, 245
Argentina, 17, 42, 61, 214, 239–40, 267n48, Bomberos Voluntarios (Guatemala City),
283n93 214
Argueta, Arnolfo, 112 Bravo Soto, Ivan Alfonso, 131
Armas González, Julio César, 106 Brazil, 17, 61, 96, 114, 239, 261n63, 267n48
Army Day annual protest, 16, 205, 206 broe (Special Operations Reaction Bri-
Arriaga Bosque, Rafael, 108, 275n71 gade), 21, 141, 143, 279n36
Arzú Irigoyen, Alvaro, 4, 35–36, 62, 65, Browning, Christopher, 177
148, 166, 263n20 Buitre Justiciero (Avenging Vulture) death
Association for Justice and Reconciliation squad, 113
(ajr), 216
Association of Guatemalan Journalists, Caballeros Ramírez, Aníbal Leonel, 125–26
294n11 Caballeros Seigné, Julio Enrique, 144,
Authenticity of the Military Logbook in Light 146–47
of the Historical Documents of the Na- Cabrera y Cabrera, Julio César, 131
tional Police (Peace Archives), 218–19 cacif (Coordinating Committee of Agri-
avancso (Asociación para el Avance de cultural, Commercial, Industrial, and
las Ciencias Sociales de Guatemala), Financial Associations), 142, 245
260n39(10) Cacopardo, Ana, 41, 269n29(79)
avemilgua (Association of Military Veter- cadeg (Anti-Communist Council of Gua-
ans), 7, 44–45, 243–45 temala), 106, 108
Avenging Jaguar (Jaguar Justiciero), 146 caldh (Center for Human Rights Legal
Action), 66, 216
Bachelet, Michelle, 17 Call, Charles, 122
Ball, Patrick, 76, 269n29(79) Cambodia, 17–18, 214, 240, 247
Bámaca Velásquez, Efraín, 64 Camilo (Project worker), 187, 190, 194,
Barreno Juárez, Cayetano, 106 196, 200–201, 203, 206–8
Barrientos, Lizbeth, 67, 72, 79–80, 83, Casariego, Mario, 105, 108
270n33 Castañeda, Mario, 16
Barrios, Alberto, 104 Castañeda de León, Oliverio, 130, 170,
Barrios, Justo Rufino, 10 200–201, 233, 281n76
Barrios Celada, Héctor Mario, 4, 62, 64 Castillo, Otto René, 183–85, 210, 254
Barrios Klee, Hugo, 112 Castillo Armas, Carlos, 8, 91, 96–97, 131
Basque Country, 40 Castillo Flores, Leonardo, 104
Battalion of Death, 130 Castresana, Carlos, 230, 258n18
Bayley, David, 149 Catalonia, 40
Belgium, 147, 285n137 Catholic Action, 125

324  —  INDEX
cedulas, 37, 112, 276n108 Coca-Cola bottling plant strikes, 93
ceh (Historical Clarification Commission), cocp (Joint Operations Center), 21, 123,
4, 61–64, 252; analysis of human rights 128–29
violations, 7, 66, 203, 272n12; attempts Cohen, Stanley, 126, 155, 170, 289n70
to access state archives, 36, 62–63, 163, Cold War, 6, 9, 14–15, 61, 94, 131, 179
257n10; Memoria del silencio report, 16, Colom, Álvaro, 216–19, 227, 232
166, 223, 246, 252, 264n49 Colom Argueta, Manuel, 93, 97, 131, 218,
Center for Military Studies (cem), 142 281n59
Central American Common Market, 142 Colombia, 61, 96, 240
Central American Glass Industry union Comalapa mass graves, 132, 281n67
(cavisa), 131 Combe, Sonia, 235
Central Intelligence Agency foia Reading Commando Six death squad, 21, 48, 71,
Room, 301 129, 131–34, 280n55
Central Records Bureau (National Police), Comment, Jean-Marc, 265n68
96, 98–99 Committee against Communism, 272n27
Cerezo, Vinicio, 60, 121, 143–47 conavigua (National Coordination of
cerj (Council for Ethnic Communities Widows of Guatemala), 266n39(58)
“We Are All Equal”), 266n39(58) confianza, 153–54
chain of custody (archival), 48, 67, 71, 74, conic (National Indigenous and Campes-
76–77, 79, 83 ino Coordinating Council), 204
children: exiled, 25, 179–80, 186–88; Constitution (Guatemala), articles 28 and,
forced disappearances, 214; as govern- 30, 52, 58–59, 62, 217. See also secreto
ment targets, 1, 150, 280n55; of insur- de estado (state secrecy)
gents, 31, 185, 228, 291n17 Cook, Terry, 236
Chile, 17, 147, 214, 267n49 copredeh (Presidential Human Rights
Chinchilla, Danilo, 241 Commission), 38–39
Choatalúm case, 298n11 Corado, Ana, 33–36, 174–76, 195
Christian Democrats, 130 Córdova Molina, Jorge, 99, 101, 106
Chupina Barahona, Germán, 48, 72, 77, Coronado Lima’s Investigative Group
119, 127–30, 133–37, 222–23 (Guatemala), 96
Church, Frank, 114 Costa-Gavras (Constantinos), 114
cia (Central Intelligence Agency), 8, 20, Costello, Peter, 105, 275n81
87, 94, 106, 118, 132 Cotí, Alejandro, 131
Ciani, Antonio, 131 Cráter (Catholic student group), 43
cicig (International Commission against crio (Regional Telecommunications Cen-
Impunity in Guatemala, un), 43, 120, ter). See Regional Telecommunications
224, 230, 258n18 Center (crio)
Cifuentes, Edeliberto, 32–33, 35, 37, 158 Crisostomo, D. L., 102–3
Cifuentes Cano, Juan Francisco, 126–27, Cuba, 98, 106, 139, 179, 186–88
279n36 cuc (Campesino Unity Committee), 133, 204
cirma (Center for Mesoamerican Re- Cuevas del Cid, Rafael, 110, 112
search) archives, 265n16, 301 Cuevas Molina, Carlos, 60, 139
Civil Police (Guatemala), 96 Cuthbertson, Robert, 112
cnt (National Workers’ Central), 62, 93, Czechoslovakia, 17
133–34
cnus (National Committee on Trade da Costa e Silva, Artur, 114
Union Unity), 123–25, 130 Dahl, Robert, 278n11

INDEX  — 325
Daniel, Hugh, 79 dit (Department of Technical Investi-
d’Aubuisson, Roberto, 119 gations), 60, 121, 136–41, 143–44,
Davíd (Project worker), 189, 194 280n43, 284n125, 285n141
Davis, Nathaniel, 108 Documentation Center of Cambodia, 17, 214
Day against Forced Disappearances, 133 Dolores (Project worker), 156, 163, 172–74,
Day of the Dead festival (Sumpango 205
Sacatepéquez), 7–8, 9 Dominican Republic, 94, 114
Death-Squad Diary. See Diario Militar double discourse, 126, 155, 170
(Death-Squad Diary) Doyle, Kate, 41, 64, 269n29(79)
Declassified Documents Reference System
(ddrs), 301 earthquake (1976), 124–25, 154, 159
Decree-Law 17-68 (1968), 38, 55–56, 215 economy and economic change: as motiva-
de la Torre Morel, Enrique, 106 tion for Project workers, 184, 186–87,
de León Carpio, Ramiro, 60 191, 201, 203, 206–8; and Project,
de Lión, Luis (José Luis de León Díaz), 207–8, 234, 247; trade policy and local
228, 296n66 elites, 14, 142, 187, 221; U.S. interests
Del silencio a la memoria (Project for the in, 94–95, 98, 112–13; weakness and
Recovery of the National Police Histor- inequality, 5, 134, 240, 250–52, 293n90
ical Archives), 12 Ecuador, 61, 267n48
Department of Defense (U.S.), 20 egp (Guerrilla Army of the Poor), 8–9,
derecho a saber, El (Project for the Recov- 63, 124–25, 127, 130, 133–34, 280n55,
ery of the National Police Historical 282n91
Archives), 223, 225–32 Egypt, 18
Derrida, Jacques, 16, 159, 247, 260n44, El Archivo (Archives and Support Services
261n53 of the Presidential General Staff),
desaparecidos. See forced disappearance 63–66, 103, 136–37, 144–45. See also
Detective Corps (Cuerpo de Detectives): Diario Militar (Death-Squad Diary);
forced disappearances, 112, 132–35, emp (Presidential Staff); Regional Tele-
141, 149, 241, 279n30, 281n67; forma- communications Center (crio)
tion, purges, and replacement, 108, El Bizonte arms warehouse raid, 127
121, 129, 135–36, 280n43; orejas (spies), Elich, Christina, 40
128 El Jute case, 298n11
de Torrebiarte, Adela, 215 El Salvador, 119, 122, 214, 239
dgsn (General Directorate for National emdn (National Defense General Staff),
Security), 97 67, 123
Diario Militar (Death-Squad Diary), 16, emp (Presidential Staff): archives, 37, 63,
63–65, 64, 132, 141, 242, 268n62 65–68, 186, 190, 220, 222; and police
dic (Department of Criminal Investiga- violence, 128–29, 182
tions), 121, 144, 146, 148–49 Engle, Byron, 106, 113
Dien Bien Phu, 95 Ericastilla, Anna Carla, 36, 39, 70, 80–82,
Digital National Security Archive (dnsa), 263n32
301 escuadronados, 130
dina (National Intelligence Directorate, Escuadrón de la Muerte (Death Squad),
Chile), 267n49 130
dinc (Criminal Investigations Division), Espada, Rafael, 223, 228–29
120–21, 149 Esperanza (Project worker), 159–60,
disappeared. See forced disappearance 163–64, 167, 179, 200, 202

326  —  INDEX
Espinoza, Marco Tulio, 64–65 ment of Technical Investigations); gam
Esteban (Project worker), 50, 158, 165–66, (Mutual Support Group); specific cases
179–81, 234 Foreign Assistance Act (U.S., 1961) amend-
exmibal mine, 113 ments, 114
formación política (political training), 188
“Faces of Infamy, The” (Foundation against Foucault, Michel, 18, 218, 232–33
Terrorism), 245 Foundation against Terrorism, 245
fafg (Forensic Anthropology Foundation Fourth Corps (Cuarto Cuerpo), 106, 108,
of Guatemala), 163, 214, 249 112, 134, 141, 231–32, 241
Falla, Ricardo, 260n39(10) France, 285n137
famdegua (Families of the Detained- Franco, Francisco, 17, 245
Disappeared of Guatemala), 266n39(58) Free Access to Public Information Law
far (Rebel Armed Forces), 8–9, 102–5, (2008), 215
108, 110–12, 123, 130, 134, 257n13, frg (Guatemalan Republican Front),
283n109 215–16, 224–25
Farfán, Rubén Amílcar, 65 Frozen Area Plan, 104, 133
fbi (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 94 Fuchs, Jürgen, 264n45
Feitlowitz, Marguerite, 170, 289n70 Fuentes, Alberto, 37, 56, 69, 82, 174, 178,
Felman, Shoshana, 288n32 196, 210, 215
ferg (Robin Garcia Student Front), 133 Fuentes Mohr, Alberto, 93, 131
fichas, 2–3, 37–38, 38, 69, 74, 112, 118, fur (United Revolutionary Front), 131
278n139
Fifth Corps (Quinto Cuerpo), 141, G-2 (Army), 96, 121, 132, 144, 274n67,
279–80n36 285n141
Figueroa, Marco Antonio, 129 gacaca courts (Rwanda), 240
Figueroa Ibarra, Carlos, 132, 150 gam (Mutual Support Group): archives’
Fimbres, Fred G., 91–92, 97, 116 recovery, 37, 67, 186, 190, 214, 220,
flacso (Facultad Latinoamericana de 222; forced disappearances, 58–61, 93,
Ciencias Sociales de Guatemala), 139, 140, 141, 166, 284n125
260n39(10) Gamboa, Víctor Manuel, 105
Flores (city), 214 García, Edgar Fernando, 60, 222, 226,
fonds (archival), 70, 82 231–32, 241, 252
Font, Juan Luis, 217 García, Marco Tulio, 217
Foppa, Alaíde, 228 García Arredondo, Pedro: legal proceed-
forced disappearance: archival infor- ings against, 223, 241–42, 245,
mation, 23, 36, 63–65, 248–49, 249; 295–96n41, 298n15; and police vio-
children, 214; development of tactic, lence, 48, 129, 133–36, 138
104; government and military re- García Dávila, Robin Mayro, 125, 133, 200
sponses, 166, 219, 239, 252, 264n49; García Montenegro, Alejandra, 241
Guatemalan opposition, 49, 53, 58, Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 260n39(10)
125, 132–33, 141, 150, 174; international Garton Ash, Timothy, 42, 155, 264n45
opposition, 113–14, 229; as motivation Gathering for Guatemala (Encuentro por
for Project workers, 1–2, 156–57, 160, Guatemala), 202
165, 187, 189–90, 217; scope and im- Gee, Arlen W., 112
pact, 9, 11–12, 109, 138–39; trials, 241, genocide, 2–4, 7, 145–47, 166, 242, 259n37,
252, 298n11. See also Detective Corps 272n12. See also under Spain
(Cuerpo de Detectives); dit (Depart- Gerardi, Juan, 66, 230–31

INDEX  — 327
Germany and East Germany, 17, 40–42, Historical Memory Laws (Spain, 2008), 17
48, 147, 170, 237, 261n68, 285n137, history (politics of), 3–4, 6–7, 29–31, 238,
291n8. See also Nazi activity and ar- 258n14, 258n21
chives; Stasi (East German Ministry for Hoffman, Eva, 184–85, 194
State Security) archives Holly, Sean, 110–12, 276n103
Gil Aguilar, Julio Roberto, 54 Holy Week murders (1985), 139, 140, 141,
Glebbeek, Marie-Louise, 147 284n125
Godoy de Cuevas, María del Rosario, 60, Honduras, 294n9
139, 140, 141 hooding, 99, 273n45
Goldman, Francisco, 119 House of Representatives (U.S.), 114, 142
Gomes Lund v. Brazil (2010), 239 hrdag (Human Rights Data Analysis
Gómez, Jorge Alberto, 231–32, 241 Group), 76, 78, 269n21
Gómez Calito, Héctor, 60, 139, 140 Huggins, Martha, 95
González Quintana, Antonio, 227, Human Rights Convergence, 67
269n29(79) Human Rights First, 220
Good Neighbor Policy (U.S.), 94 Human Rights Watch, 20, 267n60(63)
Government Investigative Police (Guate- Humberto (Project worker), 157, 163,
mala), 96 204–5
Gramajo, Héctor, 128, 144–46 Hunapú Task Force, 145
Gramajo Valdés, Silvio René, 57–58, 216, Huskamp Peterson, Trudy, 41, 80–85
299n32
Grandin, Greg, 103, 259n37, 260n39(10), ica (International Cooperation Admin-
262n11, 277n111 istration), 91–92, 94–97. See also
Greece, 42, 96, 239–40 usaid (U.S. Agency for International
Gregorio (Project worker), 153, 155, 161, Development)
171, 176, 251 iccpg (Instituto de Estudios Comparados
Guatemalan Association of Archivists en Ciencias Penales de Guatemala),
(Argua), 54 260n39(10)
Guatemala: Never Again (Human Rights icitap (International Criminal Investiga-
Office of the Archdiocese of Guate- tions Training Assistance Program),
mala), 16, 230 144, 147–48, 287n171
Guerra, Leopoldo, 60 Identification Bureau (Gabinete de Identi-
Guevara, Aníbal, 223 ficación), 60
Gutiérrez, Víctor Manuel, 37, 104, 117–18, Immigration Investigative Service (Guate-
230 mala), 96
Gutiérrez Valle, Oscar, 230 impunity, 58, 86, 88, 234, 240,
264nn49–50. See also cicig (Inter­
habeas data, 61, 239 national Commission against Impunity
Haiti, 94 in Guatemala, un)
Hardin, Herbert O., 101 Impunity Watch, 264n49
Héctor (Project worker), 186, 190, 196, Institute of Inter-American Affairs (iiaa),
201, 210 94. See also ica (International
Hemeroteca Nacional (hn), 301 Cooperation Administration);
Hernández, Iduvina, 67, 224 usaid (U.S. Agency for International
Hernández Nova, Luz, 60 Development)
hijos (Sons and Daughters for Identity insurgency and civil war: apolitical
and Justice and against Forgetting and accounts of, 9–10; defeat, 68, 87,
Silence), 66, 205, 293n77 123, 138, 147, 158, 203–4, 229, 251;

328  —  INDEX
 divisions, 172–73, 247, 259n36; exile Jelin, Elizabeth, 5, 22, 170
during, 179–80, 186–88; internal hu- Joinet, Louis, 17
man rights and democracy, 43–44, 143, Jonas, Susanne, 148
217, 247; women in, 198. See also Left José Antonio (Project worker), 69, 162,
and progressive forces today 170–71
inta (National Institute for Agrarian Joseph, Gustavo, 10
Transformation) bombing, 127 Juárez Villatoro, Abel, 112
Intelligence Directorate (Buenos Aires Judicial Police (Judiciales), 99–104, 100,
police), 42 109, 121, 149
Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights, 65, 113 Kaiser, Susana, 290n4
Inter-American Court on Human Rights Kaltschmitt, Alfred, 44
(iachr), 20, 239, 242 Kennedy, John F., 95, 102, 273n35
Inter-American Police Academy (Panama Kennedy, Robert F., 102
Canal Zone), 102 Ketelaar, Eric, 18, 236–37, 262n6, 269n9
International Convention on Forced Dis- kgb archives, 18, 42, 237, 261n68
appearance, 229 Khmer Rouge archives, 17–18, 214, 247.
International Day for the Right to the See also Cambodia
Truth Concerning Gross Human Rights Kobrak, Paul, 130, 138
Violations and for the Dignity of Vic- Konefal, Betsy, 11, 260n39(10)
tims (March 24), 239 Kundera, Milan, 237
International Development Agency Kuzmarov, Jeremy, 115, 277n124,
(Sweden), 40 285n148
International Human Rights Law Clinic
(UC-Berkeley), 65 la isla (the island), 2
International Police Academy (Washing- La Lechu, 75
ton, DC), 102, 111, 114–15, 136 La Regional, 100, 136. See also Regional
International Railways of Central America, Telecommunications Center (crio)
113 La Rue, Frank, 39
International Standard Archival Authority Las Jornadas de Marzo y Abril de 1962
Record (isaar), 269n31 (Days of March and April 1962), 101
International Standard Archival Descrip- La Tigrera police compound, 99
tion (General) [isad(g)], 79 Latin American Studies Association, 113
Investigative Squad of Civil Police (Guate- Laugerud García, Kjell, 123–27, 129, 142,
mala), 96 279n17
Iraq Memory Foundation, 17, 214 Laughlin, David, 97
Isabel (Project worker), 192–94, 198–200, La Verbena mass graves, 249
203, 207 Left and progressive forces today, 168,
Israel, 173, 283n93, 285n138 202–8, 221
Italy, 285n137 Leonora (Project worker), 161
Ixil Triangle counterinsurgency cam- Levenson-Estrada, Deborah, 124
paigns, 182, 216, 219, 245 Ligorría, Fernando, 60
Ixtahuacán miners’ strike and march Lima López, Juan Antonio (El Chino), 112,
(1977), 125 129, 134
Linares, Fernando, 217
Jacinto (Project worker), 156–57, 161, Lithuania, 42
168–69, 172, 175, 179, 181, 204 Lobe, Thomas, 117
Jaschek, Ingrid, 41 Longan, John P., 104, 107, 117, 133

INDEX  — 329
Long Night of White Chickens, The (Gold- Méndez Calderón, Luz Haydee, 293n77
man), 119 Méndez Montenegro, Julio César, 55, 105,
López Fuentes, Héctor, 242, 242–43, 245 107–8, 124
López Larrave, Mario, 125–26, 133, 200 Méndez Ruiz, Ricardo, 244–45
“Los 28” forced disappearance case, 62, 93 Mendoza, Rodolfo, 4
Los Vigilantes, 134–35 Meoño, Gustavo: on effect of political
Lucas García, Benedicto, 223 repression, 208; on Project, 43, 69, 78,
Lucas García, Romeo, 127–28, 133, 137–38, 83–84, 197–98, 203–4; right-wing law-
142, 201, 222–23, 228, 242 suit against, 244; struggle over Project
Luisa (Project worker), 147, 156, 163–65 control, 225, 227, 229, 231–32
Lula da Silva, Luiz Inácio, 17 Mérida, Mario, 64, 243
methodology of study, 19–26, 287n7, 301
Mack, Helen, 149 Meyer, Eduardo, 138
Mack, Myrna, 66 military: archives, 216–19, 243–46, 253,
Manning, Chelsea, 20 263n20; collaboration with police,
Mano Blanca death squad, 99, 103, 106 105–6, 111, 127–28, 132–33; control over
Manz, Beatriz, 260n39(10) police, 103, 121, 137, 144–47, 274n68,
María Elena (Project worker), 154–55, 160, 282n83; and internal security, 273n41;
173, 177, 179–80, 198–99, 202, 253 threats to Peace Accords, 243–45
Marisol (Project worker), 192–95, Ministry of Culture and Sports, 39, 55, 232
199–200, 203, 207–9 Ministry of Education, 55
Martínez Solórzano, Ricardo, 131 Ministry of the Interior, 54
Master Location Registry (rmu), 76–77, 84 Minondo Ayau, Raúl, 243, 252
material humano, El (Rey Rosa), 214 minugua (United Nations Verification
Mayas, 9–11, 16, 202, 259n36, 260n41 Mission in Guatemala), 147–48
Mbembe, Achille, 159 Mitrione, Dan, 114
McAdams, A. James, 298n28 mln (Movement of National Liberation),
McAllister, Carlota, 10–11, 121, 149, 99, 103, 108–9, 130, 166, 245
260n39(10) Mneimneh, Hassan, 87, 269n29(79)
McCleary, Rachel, 142 Mobile Military Police (pma), 131, 145, 148
McClintock, Michael, 103, 115, 272n11, Model Platoon (Pelotón Modelo), 129
272n24, 273n41, 283n93 Moerth, Michael, 220
Mein, John Gordon, 104–5 Molina, Ingrid, 37, 55–56, 69–70, 80–81,
Meinhof, Ulrike, 291n17 84, 270n33
Mejía Víctores, Oscar Humberto, 64, Molina Thiessen, Marco Antonio, 33
138–43, 217, 222–23, 242, 268n62, Montenegro, Nineth, 60, 222, 284n125,
295–96n41 292–93n65
Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la Monterroso, Gladys, 230–31
conciencia (Menchú), 9, 259n36 Morales, José Vicente, 109
Memories Revealed website (Brazil), 17 Morales, Sergio, 33, 35, 43–44, 203,
Memory Museum (Chile), 17 223–32, 241
Memory of the World archival register Morris, Rex D., 98–99
(unesco), 17, 266n32 Mujía Córdova, Mario Rolando, 129, 131
Menchú Tum, Rigoberta, 9, 259n36, Multi-Institutional Authority for Peace and
292n65 Understanding (Instancia Multi-Insti-
Méndez, Wendy, 293n77 tucional para la Paz y la Concordia), 65
Méndez Arriaza, Claudia, 230 Myrna Mack Foundation (fmm), 65

330  —  INDEX
Nairn, Allan, 285n141 Oberholzer, Erwin, 265n68
narcotrafficking and U.S. counternarcotics October Revolution (1944), 103, 130. See
aid to Guatemala, 111, 115, 144–45, 149, also Revolutionary Spring (1944–1954)
285n148 odhag (Human Rights Office of the Arch-
Natareno Salazar, Miguel Angel, 134 diocese of Guatemala), 16, 66
National Archives at College Park (nacp), Office of the Coordinator of Inter-Ameri-
301 can Affairs (ocia), 94
National Archives of Remembrance (Uru- Oglesby, Elizabeth, 260n39(10)
guay), 17 Ojo por Ojo death squad, 111–12
National Commission on Historical Mem- Operación Limpieza, 104–5, 275n71
ory, 232 ops (Office of Public Safety), 20, 95, 101–18,
National Committee for Defense against 277n124. See also usaid (U.S. Agency
Communism, 96–97 for International Development)
National Day of Dignity for the Victims orejas (spies), 128–29, 280n43
of the Armed Conflict (February 25), Orentlicher, Diane, 17
216 Organization of American States, 239
National Defense General Staff (emdn), 67 Organization Zero death squad, 130
National Historical Archives (Spain), 42 original order (archival), 67, 70–71, 79,
National Movement for Human Rights, 81–83
262n15 orpa (Revolutionary Organization of
National Movement of Pobladores People in Arms), 8–9, 63–64
(monap), 124 Oslo Accord (1994), 61. See also Peace
National Police Historical Archives Accords (1996)
(ahpn), 233, 301. See also Project for Otto René Castillo Front (egp), 127, 134
the Recovery of the National Police
Historical Archives (prahpn) pacs (Civil Self-Defense Patrols), 145
National Security Agency (nsa), 20, 113 Palma, Gustavo, 265n10
National Security Archive (Washington, Panamá and Panama Canal Zone, 102,
DC), 21, 41, 64, 66, 220, 238, 261n68, 294n9
267n60(63), 301 Pan Am airline, 113
National Security Council (nsc), 20, 95, Panel Blanca (White Van) murders, 146
113 Panzós peasant massacre (1978), 127
Naurocki, Alfred, 103 paper cadavers, 2–3, 26, 168, 209, 256
Nazi activity and archives, 4, 18, 94, 170, Paraguay, 4, 17, 42, 61, 214, 267n48
237, 291n8 Pardo, José Joaquín, 54
Negreros, Liliana, 281n67 Parlacen (Central American Parliament)
Nelson, Diane, 225, 260n39(10) murders, 119–21, 146, 149
neoliberalism, 173, 187, 193, 251, 260n41 Payeras, Mario, 127
Netherlands, 40 Paz Vergara, Maria, 269n29(79)
network analysis, 283n93 Paz y Paz, Claudia, 241, 244
New Detective Corps, 135. See also Detec- pdh (Human Rights Ombudsman’s Of-
tive Corps (Cuerpo de Detectives) fice), 203, 220, 263n32; emp archives’
Nicaragua, 94, 130–31, 179, 186–87, 294n9 recovery, 66–67; memory museum
noa (New Anti-Communist Organiza- and rose garden, 224, 226; and Project,
tion), 106, 108 2, 29, 32–41, 43, 67–69, 209, 222–32;
No Nos Tientes (usac), 136 Special Cases Unit, 33; Unified Register
Nowak, Manfred, 269n29(79) of Forced Disappearances, 186

INDEX  — 331
Peace Accords (1996), 4, 9, 52–53, 87–88, pnr (National Reparations Program), 44,
147–49, 240, 250, 257n1; and archival 214
access, 62–63, 65; military threats Polanco, Mario, 58–59, 61
against, 243–44; and police reorgani- “Police Institution Faced by Defamers,
zation, 121 The” (Cifuentes Cano), 126–27
Peace Archives Directorate, 218–19, 234 polyarchy, 278n11
Peccerelli, Fredy, 163 Ponce Nitsch, Hernán, 105, 136–38
Peralta Azurdia, Enrique, 102–3 Popa, John, 97
Pérez Esquivel, Adolfo, 60, 269n29(79) Portillo, Alfonso, 66, 68
Pérez Molina, Otto: and archives, 171, Portugal, 239–40
181–82, 217, 219, 295n27; and military, post-peace, 25, 119–22, 148–49, 185, 229,
149; and Peace Accords, 243; and trials 250
of government officials, 245; and war prahpn (Project for the Recovery of the
crimes, 182, 219, 245 National Police Historical Archives).
Peru, 61, 240 See Project for the Recovery of the
pgt (Guatemalan Workers’ Party), 8–9, National Police Historical Archives
62–63, 139, 143, 257n13; attacks on (prahpn)
leaders, 103–4, 106–7, 117, 228 Pratt, José H., 10
Philippines, 61, 94, 267n48, 272n14(94) Presidential Guard, 145, 218
Plan Firmeza, 216 Presidential Intelligence Agency, 103
Plan Sofía, 216, 294n17 Presidential Police (Guatemala), 96
Plan Victoria, 216 Preventive Penal Law against Communism
pn (National Police), 126; archives, 4, (1954), 92
14–15, 17, 29, 87, 91–93, 97–99, 118; Principles for the Protection and Promo-
assassinations and reorganization tion of Human Rights through Action
(early 1980s), 134–35; depuración and to Combat Impunity (United Nations
reciclaje pattern, 120, 129, 135–36, 138, Human Rights Commission), 17
141, 148–49; fingerprinting, 14, 74, Program for the Promotion of Peace (Swit-
98, 111–12, 276n107; founding (1881), zerland), 40
10; and growing counterinsurgency Project for the Recovery of the National
(1966–1974), 105–18; importance of, Police Historical Archives (prahpn):
11, 93, 149–50, 238; military collab- age and experience of archives work-
oration, 105–6, 111, 127–28, 132–33; ers, 25, 82, 153–54, 183–85, 270n46;
military control, 103, 121, 137, 144–47, archives’ effect on Project workers, 157,
274n68, 282n83; reform after 1985 159–66, 164, 178–85, 209; archives’
elections, 143–47; replaced by pnc size, 257n3; conditions today, 29, 254,
(1996), 120, 148, 257n1; response to 255; digitization of archives, 12, 23,
growing insurgency (1974–1985), 78–80, 213, 223, 262n76, 265n68,
122–41; restructuring after 1954 coup, 299n34; discovery of archives, 1–7,
91–97, 101–4. See also Project for the 12, 22, 24, 29–30, 30, 32–36, 34, 51,
Recovery of the National Police His- 57, 257n10; early stages of Project, 12,
torical Archives (prahpn); other police 24–26, 30–32, 37–49, 38, 69–76, 153–
agencies 55, 162; funding, 30, 40, 43, 54, 76, 80,
pnc (National Civil Police): and National 83, 232; International Advisory Board
Police archives, 32–33, 35; and police (cci), 230; international support, 69,
reform, 120–22, 148, 257n1; and Proj- 78–80, 85, 207, 213–14, 220–22, 230,
ect, 44, 47–48, 173–78, 194–98, 247 250–51; interviews with archives work-

332  —  INDEX
 ers, 287n7, 301; motivations of archives and Support Services of the Presiden-
workers, 156–59, 166–70, 186–94; tial General Staff)
and pnc (National Civil Police), 44, reivindicación (redemption or vindication),
47–48, 173–78, 194–98, 247; previous 19, 166, 246
archives projects and expansion of ar- remhi (Interdiocesan Project for the
chival access, 49, 67–68, 214–16, 219; Recuperation of Historical Memory),
professionalization, 76–84, 171–73; 66, 163, 166, 224
proof value and historical reliability Revolutionary Party (pr), 103
of archives, 12, 70–84, 169–70, 247; Revolutionary Spring (1944–1954), 8, 24,
reconstructing police structure, 46–48, 87, 91, 99, 103, 130
71–73, 73, 81; renamed National Police Rey Rosa, Rodrigo, 214
Historical Archives (ahpn), 233; role Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation, 43
of women, 198, 200; security concerns, Ríos Montt, José Efraín: rule of, 135–42,
23, 117, 170–72; social and political im- 137, 253, 283n92, 284n111, 284n130; on
pact, 14–19, 84–86, 122, 149, 177–79, trial, 222–23, 242, 245–47, 295–96n41
203–8, 218, 232–35, 240–56; statistical Robertson, Craig, 233–34
sampling methods, 76–79; struggle for Robinson, William, 278n11
control of, 209, 222–33; threats and Rogers, William Pierce, 91
attacks on, 20, 21, 22, 44–46, 181–82, Röhl, Bettina, 291n17
225, 242–46, 265n60; triangulating Rohrmoser, María Elisa, 53–54
data, 141, 169, 241, 249; why archives Roldán, María Ester, 45
were never destroyed, 50, 86–88; Romania, 17
working conditions, 83–84, 171–73, Romero, Oscar, 119, 239
195, 198–203, 223 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 94
Property and Real Estate Registry, 214 Rosa (Project worker), 157, 165, 168,
provenance (archival), 63, 67, 70–71, 173–75, 179–80, 187–88
79–84, 268n2 Rosario (Project worker), 156, 175, 204
Provincial Commission for Memory Rosenberg, William, 185
(Argentina), 41–42, 214 Rubottom, R. Richard, 92–93
psp (Public Safety Program), 92, 95, 97– Rwanda, 240
98, 101–18, 122 Rzeplinski, Andrzej, 271n73

Rafael (Project worker), 187, 190, 196, 204, Saca, Tony, 119–20
207 Saénz Calito, Edgar, 242
Ramírez, Elías, 127 Sandoval Alarcón, Mario, 123
Ramírez, Morales, 122 Schirmer, Jennifer, 143–44, 260n39(10),
Raúl (Project worker), 1, 3; future of 274n67, 280n55, 285n138
struggle, 181, 203, 256; National Police Schwartz, Joan M., 236
archives, 1–3, 154, 160–61, 167, 256; scuga (Special Commando Unit), 106, 111
pnc agents, 173–74, 176–77 Sebastián (Project worker), 191–94
Reagan, Ronald, 112, 141–42, 144, 287n171 Second Corps (Segundo Cuerpo), 129, 141,
rebajados, 146, 286n158 175, 280n55
reconciliation, 173–77, 184, 216, 218–21, Secret Anti-Communist Army (esa), 130
238, 248, 252 Secretariat of Social Welfare (sbs), 214
Regional Telecommunications Center secreto de estado (state secrecy), 52, 58–59,
(crio), 100, 103, 110, 123, 136, 280n39, 62, 216–17, 239
280n55. See also El Archivo (Archives Secret Police (Guatemala), 96

INDEX  — 333
Section for Defense against Communism Spear, Joseph, 114
(pn), 92 Special Investigations and Narcotics Bri-
sedem (Security in Democracy), 37, 66– gade (bien), 144
67, 186, 190, 215, 220, 222 Special Investigations Bureau, 98
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Sperisen, Erwin, 120
114 Stanley, William, 122
sepaz (Presidential Peace Secretariat), Stasi (East German Ministry for State
218, 295n28 Security) archives, 83, 86, 155, 237,
Serbia, 17 264n43; opening of, 17–18, 41–42,
serevidh (Reference Service on Human 261n68, 298n28
Rights Violations), 226, 296n58 State Department (U.S.), 20
Serrano, Jorge, 145 state formation, 13–14, 88, 251, 298n31
sic (Criminal Investigations Section), 121, State of Siege (1973), 114
148–49 statistical sampling methods, 76–79
Siekmeier, James, 272n22 Stein, Eduardo, 38–39, 217
Sierra Leone, 240 Stern, Steve, 193–94
Sikkink, Kathryn, 239–40 Stoler, Ann Laura, 15, 48, 51, 253
Silva Jonama, Mario, 112 Stoll, David, 259n36
Simón (Project worker), 189–90, 195, 199, Stoltz Chinchilla, Norma, 293n91
208 Streeter, Stephen M., 107, 117
Simon, Jean-Marie, 285n141 Strobel, Margaret, 260n45
siproci (Civilian Protection System), Stroessner Matiauda, Alfredo, 17, 42
145–46 Stroock, Thomas, 147, 286n163
social cleansing, 25, 60, 146, 150, 280n55 Sumpango Sacatepéquez, 7–8
Social Democratic Party (psd), 97, 125, Sweden, 39–40, 69
130–31, 218, 234 Switzerland, 39–40, 47, 69, 78, 80, 220,
social reconstruction, 16, 19, 25, 155, 159, 265n68, 299n34
177–81, 237, 250–51
Solà, Fina, 269n29(79) Tacitus, 250
Solórzano Foppa, Julio, 228 Taussig, Michael, 170, 289n70
Sosa Ávila, Luis Ernesto, 64 Terror Archives (Paraguay), 17
Sosa Ávila, Manuel Francisco, 105–8, 111, Thompson, E. P., 3–4, 258n21
275n71, 276n103 tiger cage cells (South Vietnam), 114
Soto, Carlos Rafael, 144 Tipografía Nacional (tn), 301
Sotz Coy, Anastacio, 276n108 Tischler Guzmán, Rafael, 106
South Africa, 122, 246 Tomuschat, Christian, 61–62, 263n20
South Korea, 96 transitional justice, 4–5, 40, 58, 83,
South Vietnam, 95–96, 114, 277n124 220–21, 238–41, 250
Spain: aid to police, 147, 285n137; aid to Transparency International, 294n11
Project, 40, 69; archives from Franco Treasury Guard, 145
dictatorship, 17, 42, 246; Civil War, Treasury Police, 96, 103, 146
245–46; embassy fire (1980), 47–48, Tribunales de Fuero Especial, 137
93, 133–34, 242, 281n67; genocide Trinidad Oliva, Enrique, 97
case against Guatemalan officials, 133, Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 4, 6, 29–32, 52,
195–96n42, 222–23, 265n69, 294n16, 258n22
295n41 Tunisia, 18

334  —  INDEX
Tuol Sleng genocide museum (Phnom activity, 108, 125, 129, 133, 173, 185,
Penh), 17 187, 192
Tupamaros, 114 usaid (U.S. Agency for International De-
velopment), 20, 91–92, 94–98, 101–6,
Ubico, Jorge, 8, 54, 87, 99, 101, 273n41 115–16
Ukraine, 42
Unidad de Acceso a la Información, Vaky, Viron P., 110, 112, 117
296n58 Valenzuela, Abraham, 216
Unified Register of Forced Disappearances Valiente Téllez, Jesús Manuel, 134–35,
(pdh), 186 282n83
United Fruit Company, 113 “Vámonos patria a caminar” (Castillo), 183
United Nations (un), 63, 147–48, 239 Vassaux Martínez, Leonel, 123, 127
United Nations Development Program Vaterliteratur, 291n8
(undp), 40 Vázquez, Tabaré, 17
United Nations Human Rights Commis- Vela Castañeda, Manolo, 260n39(10)
sion, 17, 40 Verdad (pgt), 143
United States: and assassination of U.S. Vicariate of Solidarity (Chile), 214
ambassador John Gordon Mein, 104–5; Victoriano (Project worker), 167, 172–73,
and Cuban revolution, 98; and Dien 176–77, 183
Bien Phu, 95; and G-2 (Army), 274n67; Vielman, Carlos, 35, 120
narcotrafficking as rationale for restor- Villagrán, Carla, 33, 44, 83, 289n62
ing police aid, 111, 115, 144–45, 149, Villagrán, Jorge, 76–78, 292n37
285n148; and 1954 coup, 8, 87; and
police abuses and blacklist, 55, 91–118, Wallton, Åsa, 40
131–32; police aid after 1985 elections, Washington Office on Latin America, 220,
143–45, 147, 287n171; police aid after 267n60(63)
psp shut down (1974), 122–23, 142; Wikileaks, 20, 238
police aid in support of growing coun- Winaq party, 202
terinsurgency (1966–1974), 105–6, Wollenberger, Vera, 237
110–13, 115–16; police aid objectives women, 198, 200
in the Americas, 94–95, 272n22; and
police archives, 15, 17, 87, 92, 97, 118; Xolón Yat, Oswaldo, 136
police formation (1881), 10; police
restructuring after 1954 coup, 91–97, Ydígoras Fuentes, Miguel, 98–99, 101,
101–4 274n50
University of Texas at Austin, 262n76, Youth and Adolescent Appeals Court (Sala
299n34 de Apelaciones de Niñez y Adolescen-
urng (Guatemalan National Revolution- cia), 214
ary Unity), 8–9, 146–47, 202 Yugoslavia, 240
Uruguay, 17, 96, 114 Yujá Xoná, Gregorio, 133
usac (University of San Carlos): govern-
ment and right-wing attacks on, 110, Zapatero, José Luis (Rodríguez), 17
138, 146, 281n61; and left-wing Zinn, Howard, 254

INDEX  — 335