News: Guatemala's violent past uncovered

Here's an in-depth update on the secret police archives that were discovered two years ago, and are being slowly and studiously examined by a team of human rights experts.

Page by dusty page, Guatemala's violent past is uncovered

By Paul Jeffrey
8/16/2007
Catholic News Service (www.catholicnews.com)

GUATEMALA CITY (CNS) - Church leaders say 80 million pages of secret police records being reviewed by the government promise Guatemalans a rare chance to rewrite the history of their violent land.

The moldy records were found by accident in 2005 in an abandoned section of a police compound in Guatemala City. Some of the records date back more than a century, their faded pages describing the daily bureaucracy of repression employed for decades by Guatemala's government.

Of most interest to investigators are records from 1975 to 1985, the most violent period of Guatemala's civil war, during which 160,000 people were killed and 40,000 disappeared.

Although workers from the government's human rights prosecutor have so far examined only about 5 million pages of the records, many are confident that what they are finding will shake up this traumatized land.

"During the conflict there was a sense of fear, for you never knew who was behind things," said Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini Imeri of San Marcos, president of the Guatemalan bishops' conference. "The uncovering of the archives marks that we're entering a different era. There is an opportunity to know who was involved in this, to rewrite the history of violence in our country and identify who the killers were."

Guatemala's civil war ended in 1996, and the final report of a U.N.-supervised truth commission includes 165 pages of letters that the commission wrote to the president and other government officials demanding access to police and military records. The commission always received the reply that such records did not exist.

After the secret records in Guatemala City were discovered, investigators from the human rights prosecutor's office seized 34 other sets of records in provincial and neighborhood police offices.

No files were uncovered from the military, perhaps the most brutal armed force in the hemisphere during the years of the civil war. Human rights activists had long hoped to discover the army's archives, which would shed light on the government's "scorched-earth" campaigns during the civil war.

Yet the police archives do include records from the Joint Operations Center, an office that coordinated the activities of all the country's security services. An initial analysis of 3,000 pages selected at random showed that 15 percent of the documents shed light on human rights abuses.

A preliminary report on the project, due out late this year, will include concrete examples of police records that show when and where certain individuals were arrested and never heard from again, although the police always denied having detained them. Fingerprint records and photographs of tortured bodies interred in urban cemeteries are being matched to lists of the disappeared prepared by organizations of their family members.

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Tags: Guatemala, Police, Archives, Human Rights, abuses