Guatemala's Secret Police Files

The New York Times has just published an excellent article about the unbelievable discovery earlier this year of the "hidden" records of the Guatemalan National Police. These documents, photos, recordings and videos prove how the Police served as a violent, counterinsurgent instrument of the Guatemalan state.

The report also raises the all-important question: Now that this information has been uncovered... what happens next?

I've included an edited version below, but I encourage you to read the entire article!

Guatemala's Secret Police Files May Hold Clues to Atrocities

By Ginger Thompson, NY Times

Guatemala City, Nov. 20 - The reams and reams of mildewed police documents, tied in messy bundles and stacked from floor to ceiling, look on first sight like a giant trash heap. But human rights investigators are calling it a treasure hidden in plain sight.

In Guatemala, a nation still groping for the whole truth about decades of state-sponsored kidnapping and killing, the documents promise a trove of new evidence for the victims, and perhaps the last best hope for some degree of justice.

Last summer, authorities from the Guatemalan human rights ombudsman's office, searching a munitions depot here, discovered what appear to be all the files of the National Police, an agency so inextricably linked to human rights abuses during this country's 36-year civil conflict that it was disbanded as part of the peace accords signed in 1996.

Are these documents a step towards obtaining justice for the victims?

Following repeated requests, the ombudsman's office agreed to allow The New York Times to visit the files last week, after a rudimentary security system had been installed and archivists had begun taking samples of documents from the files.

Everything seems to be there: from traffic tickets, driver's license applications and personnel files, to spy logs and interrogation records. There are hundreds of rolls of film and videos, along with snapshots of unidentified bodies, detainees and informants. Some of the files seem to have gotten slightly more careful treatment and were tossed into file cabinets marked "disappeared," "assassins" and "special cases."

Sergio Morales, the head of the ombudsman's office, has previously told Guatemalan reporters that the archive contains lists of children kidnapped from suspected guerrillas along with the names of the families who agreed to take them in.

What remains unclear, investigators said, was why officials in Guatemala's prior governments - particularly the police - did not destroy the files, even though they appear to hold evidence of egregious abuses. Now that the archive has been found, almost 10 years after the end of the fighting that left at least 200,000 people dead, a new government, struggling to consolidate a fledgling peace, is still grappling with how to proceed.

"This presents a serious challenge for the government because there are going to be a lot of powerful names coming out of the files, and the justice system is very weak," Frank LaRue, director of the Presidential Commission on Human Rights, said in an interview. "But the government remains committed to opening the archive, and prosecuting people responsible for crimes."

Later he toned down his statement, saying, "I am not sure everyone in the government would agree with that."

The New York Times is allowed to investigate... kinda.

As a precondition for opening the files to viewing by The Times last week, the lead investigator for the ombudsman's office, Gustavo Meoño, asked that specific details from documents describing extrajudicial kidnappings and killings, including names of victims and police officers, not be published.

"We have to act very carefully with this archive," Mr. Meoño said. "We do not want to unduly raise the expectations of the victims. And, for our safety, and for the safety of the files, we don't want to unduly frighten the people who are identified as perpetrators."

Mr. Meoño said there were files that referred to well known cases, including the 1990 assassination of Myrna Mack, an anthropologist. He said a team of Belgian lawyers investigating the 1980 assassination of Walter Voordeckers, a Belgian priest, and the 1982 disappearance of Serge Berten, another Belgian citizen, found files on those cases during a visit to Guatemala in September, and had the government subpoena the former chief of the national police, Germán Chupina, for the first time since the end of the war.

"I show you these," Mr. Meoño said, referring to documents from the archives, "to make clear to you that we have great hopes that this archive is going to clear up mysteries that have tormented this country for decades."

And why weren't these "dangerous" documents destroyed?

Heriberto Cifuentes, a Guatemalan historian who was among the first outsiders to lay eyes on the files, said the fact that the government did not destroy them reflected a simple fact of Guatemalan life.

"Impunity reigns in Guatemala," he said. "So whether there are documents or not, people responsible for crimes do not expect to pay for them. They have always enjoyed blanket immunity."

Tags: Guatemala, Police, Human Rights, Disappeared, Justice