Guatemala: From Silence to Memory. Report on the Guatemalan police archives now available in English
Saturday, December 07, 2013
Guatemala: From Silence to Memory. Report on the Guatemalan police archives now available in English
These materials are reproduced from www.nsarchive.org with the permission of the National Security Archive
~snip~
Political violence depends on secrets and lies.
During the height of Guatemala's civil conflict in the 1980s, government death squads roamed the streets of the capital in unmarked cars, windows blackened, to hunt their victims. The unidentified agents of army intelligence and the police took thousands of people away to clandestine interrogation centers to torture information out of them. Once it was determined that the prisoners had nothing more to give, they were murdered and their bodies dumped in secret graves. Relatives of the disappeared were left in the dark, reduced to trolling the morgues, hospitals and graveyards, begging the government to tell them something, anything about the fates of their loved ones. Their pleas were met with hostility and silence.
When the archives of the defunct National Police were discovered in 2005, Guatemalans got their first glimpse inside the machinery of state terror. The documents were hidden in plain sight in a cluster of buildings on an active police base in the heart of Guatemala City. Years of neglect had left them in a chaos of disorder. Stacked from floor to ceiling, the old files were rotting away inside the dark and deteriorated spaces, dank and laced with mold, infested with vermin. That the records had survived at all seemed miraculous; their very existence had been denied by the authorities for decades to victims of human rights abuses, families of the disappeared, and human rights defenders. Once revealed, they offered visible evidence of the corrosive effects of the secrecy imposed by the government about its role in killing its own citizens.
Their rescue told a different story: one of civil society in action, intent on the recovery of its history. Personnel from the Human Rights Prosecutor's Office, joined by dozens of volunteers and eventually a staff of almost 200 employees, quickly mobilized to clean, scan, and organize the estimated eight linear kilometers of records. Governments and institutions from around the world contributed to the project, providing funds, equipment, and technical assistance, as well as the expertise needed to help professionalize the staff. By 2011, some 12 million images of the documents found had been made public without restriction in the archive's reading room and through a bilateral agreement with the University of Texas in Austin, which now hosts the growing digital collection on an open website.
~snip~
The report also explains how an institution charged with fighting crime and guaranteeing public order could be radically re-engineered to become an instrument of terror. The decisive moment came in 1954, when the United States supported a coup against Guatemala's democratically elected president in favor of dictatorship. Military regime leaders built an elaborate anti-communist infrastructure, bestowing new powers on the police to investigate, monitor, detain, and interrogate any citizen under the flimsiest of pretexts. In short order, the importance of the National Police's counter-subversive mission overcame their ordinary law enforcement functions, fatally infecting the culture of the institution.
More:
http://www.ionglobaltrends.com/2013/12/guatemala-from-silence-to-memory-report.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FzqKG+%28i+On+Global+Trends%29#.UqQTsJ3nYeE