'The Atrocity Files: Deciphering the Archives of Guatemalas Dirty War'

From the National Security Archive:

 

"...New! The December issue of Harpers Magazine includes a feature
article by Archive senior analyst Kate Doyle with nine pages of
full-color photographs.

The Atrocity Files: Deciphering the Archives of Guatemalas Dirty
War

Contact: Kate Doyle, kadoyle@gwu.edu 646-613-1440, ext. 238

December 4, 2007Harpers Magazine carries a feature article this
month by the National Security Archive's Kate Doyle on what has
been described by the New York Times as the biggest trove of files
found in the history of Latin America. Titled The Atrocity Files:
Deciphering the Archives of Guatemala's Dirty War, the 7,000-word
article describes the massive effort underway to rescue the recently
discovered records of the brutal former Guatemalan National Police
estimates are that the collection may reach 50 million pages  and
how analysts and human rights investigators are sifting through the
documents for evidence of human rights crimes.

Doyle directs the Guatemala Documentation Project at the National
Security Archive. She has played a key role in organizing international
efforts to secure, preserve, and analyze records from the National
Police Archive. The discovery of this stunning cache of police files
offers Guatemalans an unparalleled opportunity to recover a secret
history, says Doyle, and confirms through official records a
government policy of repression and terror that left more than
200,000 citizens dead or disappeared after 36 years of civil conflict.

Sample text:

As we moved from room to room, the policewomen accompanied us,
obligingly yanking open drawers when requested or slipping pages
out of bound folders to show us. They balked only once, when we
came upon a pile of records from the old Detective Corps, a greatly
feared special-operations squad that existed in the 1970s and early
1980s, notorious for the kidnapping, torture, and execution of
suspected subversives. We asked the woman in charge to hand us some
file folders, but she began shaking her head no and then her finger,
shaking it at us, no, no, No se puede, no se puede, that cant be
done. It took us a few minutes to understand: we werent prohibited
from looking at them, but she still had strict orders, almost ten
years after the abolition of the National Police, not to touch.

Buy Harpers Magazine at your local news stand or bookstore now!

Subscribers can read the article here:

http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/12/page/0054 ... "

See the original posting from the National Security Archives Guatemala
Documentation Project about the police archives here:

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB170/index.htm

 

Washington, D.C., November 21, 2005 - On July 5, officials from the Guatemalan government's human rights office (PDH - Procuraduría de Derechos Humanos) entered a deteriorating, rat-infested munitions depot in downtown Guatemala City to investigate complaints about improperly-stored explosives. During inspection of the site, investigators found a vast collection of documents, stored in five buildings and in an advanced state of decay. The files belonged to the National Police, the central branch of Guatemala's security forces during the war - an entity so inextricably linked to violent repression, abduction, disappearances, torture and assassination that the country's 1996 peace accord mandated it be completely disbanded and a new police institution created in its stead.

The scope of this find is staggering - PDH officials estimate that there are 4.5 kilometers - some 75 million pages - of materials. During a visit to the site in early August, I saw file cabinets marked "assassinations," "disappeared" and "homicides," as well as folders labeled with the names of internationally-known victims of political murder, such as anthropologist Myrna Mack (killed by security forces in 1990). ..."