RIGHTS-GUATEMALA:
Digitizing Police
Archives to Clarify Past
Abuses
By Julio Godoy
GUATEMALA CITY, (IPS)
- With international
support, experts in
Guatemala are salvaging
and digitizing millions
of National Police
records discovered two
years ago in a munitions
depot. Thanks to their
painstaking work, light
could be shed on the
tens of thousands of
murders and forced
disappearances committed
during the country’s
bloody 36-year civil
war.
The vast collection of
documents, comprised of
roughly 80 million
pages, was found by
accident in mid-2005 in
a half-finished building
on the north side of
Guatemala City. The
messy bundles of records
were stacked floor to
ceiling in dozens of
rooms infested by rats,
bats and cockroaches,
and many of the files
were in an advanced
state of decay.
But thanks to an
ambitious plan designed
by the Procuraduría de
los Derechos Humanos (PDH)
-- the office of
Guatemala’s human rights
ombudsman -- the
archives documenting
official policies of
political terror and
repression followed in
this Central American
country since the late
19th century are being
cleaned, catalogued, and
scanned into databases.
"We are in the process
of recuperating the
National Police records
that were kept from the
force’s creation in 1881
until its transformation
in 1997," Alberto
Fuentes, assistant
project director for the
archive, told IPS.
In 1997, the National
Police force was
disbanded and replaced
by the National Civilian
Police, as a result of
the 1996 peace agreement
that put an end to the
country’s armed
conflict.
The PDH, human rights
groups and victims’
families hope the
treasure trove of
documents will help
clarify some of the
innumerable human rights
violations committed
during the 1960-1996
civil war, which left
200,000 people -- mainly
Indians from rural
villages -- dead
(including 45,000
victims of forced
disappearance) and over
one million refugees.
According to the United
Nations Truth Commission
-- the Historical
Clarification Commission
-- the army and other
security forces like the
National Police were
responsible for over 90
percent of the
atrocities.
The archive project
forms part of a broader
process aimed at the
"recovery of the
country’s historical
memory," which was
stipulated by the
December 1996 peace
accord signed by the
government of Álvaro
Arzú and the Guatemalan
National Revolutionary
Unity (URNG), which was
made up of four
insurgent groups.
"In the process of
classification, we have
ordered the documents
according to three
National Police
structures: the Joint
Operations Centre, which
linked the army with the
National Police, the
Criminological
Investigation
Department, and the
Identification Unit,"
said Fuentes.
These three offices
formed the backbone of
the National Police’s
political control and
repressive activities in
the capital.
A cross comparison of
Identification Unit
documents and records on
the 45,000 people
"disappeared" in
Guatemala City and its
surroundings, many of
whom were buried without
a name in the local La
Verbena cemetery, could
finally lead to the
identification of some
of the remains.
"The civil war and
political repression not
only derived thousands
of victims of the right
to life, but also of
their right to death,
while depriving their
families of the right to
mourn them properly,"
said Fuentes.
"There are tens of
thousands of Guatemalan
families who have never
been able to identify
the remains of their
loved ones, and thus
were never able to
conclude their mourning
process," he said.
The hope is that the
recovery of the National
Police archives could
help them reach a sense
of closure. "As soon as
we identify any of the
victims, we immediately
inform the families, so
they can demand that the
authorities give them
back the remains of
their murdered loved
ones," he explained.
The massive cache of
records includes mundane
documents like traffic
tickets, drivers’
licence applications,
invoices for new
uniforms and personnel
files, as well as
snapshots of
unidentified bodies,
detainees and
informants, heaps of
identification
documents, surveillance
reports, interrogation
records, fingerprint
files, rolls of film and
videos, transcripts of
radio communications,
computer discs, and
ledgers full of
photographs and names.
A sub-category of
documents includes
records kept by the
notorious National
Police Second Corps’
Commando Six, which
operated as a death
squad during the
bloodiest years of the
repression, from 1975 to
1985.
The archive project also
attempted to obtain
police documents on the
northwestern province of
Quiché, where 344 of the
669 documented massacres
were committed.
"But the National Police
did not leave a single
piece of paper on El
Quiché," said Fuentes.
In the massacres, more
than 400 villages were
completely destroyed and
all of their inhabitants
killed by the army and
the "civil defence
patrols", paramilitary
bodies formed at
military behest that
operated under military
orders.
The abandoned National
Police archives were
stumbled onto by chance
two years ago when an
explosion in a police
munitions depot in the
densely populated
northern part of
Guatemala City was
investigated by
historian Edeliberto
Cifuentes, who was
commissioned by the PDH.
During the inspection,
Cifuentes visited the
half-finished building
that was to have been
the National Police
hospital but was never
completed, and
discovered room upon
room of mildewed
documents.
The PDH immediately
applied for and
obtained, through the
Justice Ministry, a
legal resolution
ordering the archive to
be closed and guarded,
so that nothing could be
removed or destroyed.
The resolution also gave
the PDH custody of the
documents and the
authority to investigate
the role of the National
Police in human rights
crimes.
The analysis and
classification of the
documents finally got
underway in November
2006, after the arduous
work of cleaning and
safeguarding the files
from vermin and mildew,
and shelving and crating
them, while repairing
the building itself.
For the project, the PDH
has received financial
support from countries
like Switzerland, the
Netherlands, Sweden and
Spain, and international
experts in the recovery
and preservation of
archives have visited to
assist in salvaging the
reams of documents.
The enormous
classification effort is
following the United
Nations’ ISAD(G) system,
and is being carried out
with the assistance of
Benetech, a nonprofit
technology development
company based in the
U.S. state of
California.
Benetech’s Human Rights
Data Analysis Group (HRDAG)
has worked with truth
commissions in a number
of countries, including
El Salvador, Kosovo,
Sierra Leone and East
Timor, building
statistical evidence of
human rights abuses.
The archive project’s
staff members are
scanning and entering
the data from the
documents into encrypted
bulletins, which are
backed up over the
Internet to three secure
servers, one of which is
located directly in the
old archive building,
another in the PDH, and
the third in
Switzerland.
Through the electronic
archives, the documents
will be accessible to
the public without the
need for anyone to
handle the fragile,
deteriorated files, some
of which date back over
100 years.
This work, which is
still in the initial
stages, has already
enabled investigators to
fully identify some of
those responsible for
human rights violations.
In Guatemala, which has
one of the highest
murder rates in the
world, so few crimes are
solved that a joint
Guatemalan - United
Nations Commission
against Impunity (CICIG)
was recently set up. It
will begin its work
investigating the
national police and the
prison and customs
systems. Impunity also
remains the norm for the
human rights crimes of
the past.
The PDH investigators
have also found
inexplicable gaps in the
National Police’s
documentation and
investigation of
high-profile political
crimes.
For example, the
archives contain no
report or information on
the Oct. 20, 1978 murder
of university student
leader Oliverio
Castañeda de León, who
was chased down by
several vehicles, one of
which had government
licence plates, and shot
and killed by a death
squad in broad daylight
just 100 metres from the
seat of government.
The documentary value of
the archives goes beyond
recent history, all the
way back to 1881. By
preserving the crumbling
old records and files
and entering the
information into an
electronic database, the
investigators will
enable scholars to carry
out in-depth studies
into the mechanisms of
political control and
repression used by
Guatemala’s
dictatorships in the
first half of the 20th
century, like those of
Manuel Estrada Cabrera
(1898-1920) and Jorge
Ubico (1931-1944).
"For the oligarchic
agro-export state that
took shape in Guatemala
after 1871, the army and
the National Police were
the two instruments of
repression of political
opponents," Fuentes
noted.
He said the National
Police archives show how
the various regimes
controlled all activity
in the country,
including the most
politically innocuous,
"from what films could
be shown in the movie
theatres to the
slaughterhouses,
wrestling matches and
religious ceremonies." |
