LET T E R FRO M GUATEMALA

THE ATROCITY FILESDeciphering the archives of Guatemala's dirty war

By Kate Doyle

~n Guatemala's thirty-six-yearcivil war ended, in 1996, the countrywas a vast unmarked grave. More than200,000 people had died or disappearedin the conflict, most of them unarmedcivilians. A truth commission estab-lished by the peace accords, the His-torical Clarification Commission,opened its doors in 1997 and begandigging up corpses around the country.Teams of interviewers fanned out, vis-iting remote villages to collect first-hand accounts of massacres, rape, tor-ture, and abductions. Victims talkedand talked; the state remained silent.The commission sent letters to the de-fense and interior ministries seekinginformation about the operations ofsecurity forces during the war. Theywanted documents: policy papers,plans, orders, intelligence, operationalreports, after-action memos. They re-ceived almost nothing. The militaryand the police stonewalled the inves-tigations, and the government backedthem. Guatemalan officials, the com-mission was told, did not documenttheir daily business as did officials inother, more developed countries. Itbecame an article of faith that any pa-

Kate Doyle is a senior analyst and directorof the Guatemala Documentation Project ofthe National Security Archive.

52 HARPER'S MAGAZINEj DECEMBER 2007

per generated by the regime did notsurvive the war.And why, after all, would there be

records? In the cities, security forceshad sought to dismember guerrillanetworks with maximum deniability.Death squads operated out of uniform,in unmarked vehicles, and the news-papers played along, reporting eachfresh corpse as the work of "uniden-tified men in civilian clothing."Anonymous killers did their best tostrip their victims' identities, crushingfaces and hacking off hands. Or theykidnapped them and threw the bod-ies into the oblivion of gullies, lakes,and mass graves.In 2005, however, the government's

silence was shattered. That May, resi-dents of a crowded working-class neigh-borhood in Guatemala City sent a com-plaint to the country's human-rightsprosecutor, Sergio Morales Alvarado,about the improper storage of explo-sives on a local police base. The pros-ecutor's first request to authorities forremoval of the grenades, ammunition,homemade bombs, mortar shells, andsacks of potassium chlorate seized overyears of police raids was ignored. But af-ter a freak explosion on a nearby mil-itary base made headlines a few weekslater, the National Civil Police agreedto transfer the weapons off-site. On

July 5, Morales sent a team of inspec-tors to verify the removal, and it wasduring that visit that they stumbledupon an archive of the GuatemalanNational Police. The former NationalPolice, that is-an institution so en-tirely complicit in the atrocities of thecivil war that it was considered irre-deemable and disbanded in 1997.Morales immediately obtained a judge'sorder granting him unrestricted accessto the records to search for evidence ofhuman-rights abuses."The day we went to the archive af-

ter getting the judge's order," said Car-la Villagran, a senior staff member inthe prosecutor's office, "we opened upone of the file cabinets in the first roomwe entered. And there were dozens offolders marked with the names of someof the most famous cases of politicalassassination in Guatemala." Amongthem were files on Mario Lopez Lar-rave (a labor attorney and a popularlaw professor at the national universi-ty, killed by machine-gun fire as he lefthis office on June 8, 1977); ManuelColom Argueta (one of Guatemala'smost promising opposition politicians,murdered on March 22, 1979, a weekafter registering his new political par-ty); and Myrna Mack (a young an-thropologist who worked with Mayanmassacre survivors and was stabbed to

Photographs gathered from the floor of the National Police Archive shortlyafter it was discovered in 2005. Photograph by Daniel Hernandez-Salazar LEITER FROM GUATEMALA 53

death in downtown Guatemala Cityon September 11, 1990). "And whenwe opened the folders, we found notonly routine police reports, but allkinds of things," Carla said. "Detailsabout surveillance operations targetingthem before they were killed, for ex-ample." L6pez Larrave's file included atyped page listing twelve names; hiswas crossed out in ink. Of the twelve,nine were people assassinated or ab-ducted during the late 1970s for sus-pected subversion.

The appearance of the archive wasa huge story in Guatemala, though thegovernment attempted to play downthe discovery. "Of course we haverecords," said Interior Minister CarlosVielmann. "We are the police!"

Two and a half years later, thehuman-rights prosecutor's office isjust completing its report on thearchive. The report's publication, set

54 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2007

for early 2008, will come just as thenew president takes office, after aparticularly tense runoff campaign.Both candidates conjure up memo-ries of the civil war: one is thenephew of the murdered ManuelColom Argueta, Alvaro Colom Ca-balleros, a businessman whose cen-trist party has been tainted by cor-ruption scandals; the other is OttoPerez Molina, a retired general andformer chief of military intelligence,

whose campaign slogan is

E mana dura, "hard hand."

ew Guatemalans were untouchedby the war. Carla Villagran grew upin Guatemala City, the fourth of fivechildren in a comfortable middle-class household; her father, a promi-nent economist and onetime mem-ber of the Guatemalan equivalent ofthe Federal Reserve Board, was an

associate of Manuel Colom Argueta.Carla, who is forty-three and mar-ried with three children, was nine-teen years old when her first hus-band was kidnapped, in 1984. Hisdisappearance was part of a wave ofabductions set into motion by themilitary regime of General OscarHumberto Mejfa Vfctores in theearly 1980s, after the scorched-earthstrategy of his predecessor, GeneralJose Efrafn Rfos Montt, had run itscourse. Army massacres across thecountry had destroyed hundreds ofpredominantly Mayan villages andwere followed by an urban campaignaimed at capturing and killing theinsurgent leadership. Carla's hus-band was among those targeted; hiskidnapping is described in declassi-fied U.S. documents that I obtainedin the course of my work for the Na-tional Security Archive.

Carla Villagran, outside the archive in Guatemala City. Photograph by Misty Keasler

In a cable sent by the U.S. Em-bassy in Guatemala to Washington,then-Ambassador Frederic Chapinrecounted what happened: "On Feb-ruary 1, 1984, Hector VillagranSalazar came to the Embassy to re-port the January 27 abduction ofson-in-law Jorge Mauricio GaticaPaz. According to Mr. Villagran, hisdaughter and son-in-law went to alarge shopping center to do somegrocery shopping on January 27. Mr.Gatica remained in the car with thedog while his wife went into the su-permarket. When she came out ofthe store, car, husband and dog haddisappeared. A witness told her thatheavily armed men in a white paneltruck pulled up behind her car,forced her husband into the truck,and departed rapidly in both vehi-cles. Although there were severalpolicemen in the parking lot-the

shopping center is one of the largestin Guatemala City-they did not

intervene and would not

I tell the wife anything."

arrived in Guatemala five weeksafter the archive was discovered.Traffic being what it is in GuatemalaCity, it was midmorning by the timewe pulled up to the gates of the po-lice base. The van from the prosecu-tor's office had inched its way acrosstown, from the city's historic centerto the teeming residential zone,through outdoor markets, past herdsof goats, and around diesel-belchingbuses, to make a journey of threekilometers in about forty minutes.Now we idled before the walls of avast local outpost of the NationalCivil Police until a guard waved usthrough with an indifferent flap ofhis hand.

Bundles of police records that have not yet been scanned or catalogued. Photograph by Misty Keasler

Carla weaved expertly around therusted shells of abandoned vehiclesstacked two stories high, with one handon the wheel and her cell phone againsther ear in the other. Our car heavedover the broken ground until wereached the entrance to a cluster oflow buildings at the edge of the com-pound. As we unsnapped seat belts andgathered our bags we could hear theagitated barking of police dogs cagednearby. We opened the doors and tum-bled out into a cool, gray morning, star-ing up at the narrow windows facingthe courtyard. We could already seethe paper through the cracked glass.Carla grinned as she handed me a pairof rubber gloves. "Are you ready?"

I entered a warren of pitch-blackrabbit holes, corridors that led no-where, dripping ceilings, broken lightshanging from frayed wires, and omi-nous stains underfoot. Women em-

LElTER FROM GUATEMALA 55

ployees of the police who worked asrecords administrators greeted us in asmall antechamber and then led usinto the first room. On every availablecentimeter of the cement floor therewere towers of mildewed paper and filefolders, tied in twine and entombed ingrit. The paper was decomposing beforeour eyes-wet paper and rotting pa-per, charred paper, paper brown withmold, paper becoming compost withsmall seedlings growing through it. Westumbled from one damp cavern to thenext, skirting rusted file cabinets andthe sharp edges of old license plateslittering the floors. The stench of decaywas overpowering; all around us were

lJ

]•

insect carcasses and bat droppings,feathers, bird shit, and the nibbling ofrats. We breathed the dead air throughour flimsy paper masks.

There were five buildings in all.Each building harbored its peculiar se-crets. In one, metal file cabinets linedthe walls with improvised labelsscrawled in black marker across thedrawers: "assassinations," "homicides,""kidnappings." In another, we steppedgingerly over haphazard trash heaps,which on closer inspection includedthousands of black-and-white photo1.D.'s. The staff was sweeping theminto piles and transferring them intoclear plastic bags.

I chose a record off the floor at ran-dom. It was a 1979 report on threeunidentified cadavers found in the gul-

56 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2007

lies at the edge of Guatemala City.Finding bodies and failing to identifythem was evidently a central preoccu-pation for the National Police; therewere scores of photographed corpses,men and women memorialized as bat-tered faces black with blood or swarm-ing with maggots, each labeled withthe same name: "desconocido," "un-known." There was a picture of an am-putated left hand, "owner unknown,"a bloated corpse stuffed in the trunkof a car. Then there were the snap-shots of a few soon-to-be-unknownbodies, such as the young man seatedwith his back to a rough concretewall in button-down shirt and jeans,

looking at the photographer hopeless-ly through dark eyes.

As we moved from room to room,the policewomen accompanied us,obligingly yanking open drawers whenrequested or slipping pages out ofbound folders to show us. They balkedonly once, when we came upon a pileof records from the old DetectiveCorps, a greatly feared special-operations squad that existed in the1970s and early '80s, notorious for itsrole in the kidnapping, torture, andexecution of suspected subversives.We asked the woman in charge tohand us some file folders, but she be-gan shaking her head no and then herfinger, shaking it at us, no, no, "No sepuede, no se puede," "that can't bedone." It took us a few minutes to un-

derstand: we weren't prohibited fromlooking at them, but she still had strictorders, almost ten years after the

abolition of the National

C Police, not to touch.

arla and I tiptoed up some con-crete steps to the second floor of onebuilding. A rooftop terrace looked overthe junkyard that inhabited this comerof the base, weeds twisting throughwhat was left of the pavement below.The air was revivifying, though it hungas densely as ever over the city, Backinside, we found a series of tiny win-dowless spaces, most no wider than apigpen, with heavy wire netting

wedged over the tops to create a kindof cage. There were old, torn mat-tresses, some with brownish stains driedhard into the fabric.

Along one wall was a shelf of books,including selected works of Lenin anda biography of Stalin, seized from theirowners for their dangerous content, In-ternal police-employee files, jammedinto drawers rusted shut by time, in-cluded 1.0. cards for thousands of ore-jas-"ears," the civilians who worked forthe police as informants, ratting outtheir neighbors. Years of personnel lists,or n6minas, lay scattered on tabletops,identifying individual police agents andtheir superiors, where they served andin what capacity. There were hundredsof rolls of undeveloped film, huge out-dated computer floppy disks; enormous

A police logbook (left), and the identity record of Vtctor Manuel Gutierrez, who was disappeared in 1966.Photographs by Daniel Hernandez-Salazar (left) and Archive Hist6rico de la Pol ida Nacional (right)

Photograph by Misty Keasler LEITER FROMGUATEMALA 57

leather-bound ledgers listed "capturedcommunists" in the faded spidery ink oflong ago.

For human-rights investigators thearchive was the discovery of a lifetime,the long-abandoned scene of a terri-ble crime. The effort required to salvagethe records and recover the evidenceburied in them, however, seemed be-yond human power. Even more chal-lenging, how could the countless pagesbe rendered meaningful to the rest of so-ciety ?Would their opening lead to an-other symbolic acknowledgment of thebrutal past or to a transformation of thecountry's history? Even Guatemala's of-ficial human-rights office wonderedwhat to do with the archive.

The government treated the ques-tion with studied indifference and didnothing. Meanwhile, relatives of thedisappeared clamored for informationabout their loved ones, though the

58 HARPER'S MAGAZINE I DECEMBER 2007

files remained in chaotic disarray. Indesperation, Carla began calling forhelp among Guatemalan and inter-national allies. I contacted TrudyPeterson, a former chief archivist forthe U.S. government, and asked if shewould write an assessment of thearchive, and she agreed.

By the time the report was finished,it was clear to Carla that they wouldneed Trudy's assistance over the longterm, in addition to all their otherneeds: equipment, materials, more staff,and a secure space. In the absence ofgovernment support, others steppedinto the breach. Most of the normallyfractious community of local human-rights groups offered volunteers. And af-ter the United Nations DevelopmentProgramme agreed to serve as the pro-ject's fiscal manager, international do-nations began to pour in, jump-startedby a pledge from the Swedish govern-

rnent for $2 million. Germany, Hol-land, Switzerland, and the Spanish stateof Catalonia followed suit with severalmore millions of dollars. (The UnitedStates, after the American ambassadorand a political officer toured the archive,donated 106 metal shelves.) Eventual-ly, the prosecutor's office was able tohire dozens of staff members. Trudy be-gan flying regularly to Guatemala in2006, thanks to the Swiss.

I tagged along recently as Trudy metwith the team laboring over the De-tective Corps records. There were twolong tables in the room, with eighteenpeople busy at work: earnest twenty-sornethings, fresh out of university;young rads with iPods, nose rings, andChe T-shirts; and a few older, moreserious ex-militants. Some used soft, fatbrushes to sweep each page clean ofgrit, then removed ancient staples,reattached loose photos, and bundled

Photograph by Misty Keasler

linked files together with cotton rib-bon. Others examined the records forcontent, flagging incriminating textfor investigators.

Watching Trudy study the docu-ments was like seeing someone deci-pher ancient runes. Over time, Trudyhas slowly uncovered the secret lan-guage of the bureaucracy, and now sheteaches the staff how to interpret in-ternal file numbers, what ink stampsbelong to which departments, and thereasons behind differently coloredcopies. With the bureaucratic codebroken, an investigator can tug at thethread of a human-rights crime andfollow it to its source-the unit of thepolice that committed it, the namesof the individual officers involved.

The head of the team, a youngwoman named Monica, who was wear-ing a lab coat and pink glasses, read outtheir achievements to date: 389 box-

Photograph by Misty Keasler

es of documents covering the ten-yearperiod being examined by investigators(1975-85, the most violent years ofthe war and the focus of the project)."And we've found a lot of political in-formation in the documents-like no-tations written by hand on the backsof identity cards that say 'comunista'or 'subversivo.' There are lists of filenumbers and dates on them too."

Trudy seized the opportunity to teachan archiving lesson. "If you are trying tofigure out what happened to a disap-peared person, you would start with hisname and locate his ficM [the identityrecord], and one of the numbers on theback of it will refer to a libra [the over-sized ledger that indicates whencharges-or denuncias-were filedagainst suspects], and the libra will giveyou the file number of the denuncias, soyou go to them and examine the natureof the charges, and so forth. That's why

we want to keep the document types to-gether: with all the fichas in one groupand the denuncias in another, and theradiograms and reports and correspon-dence in their own sets-all within theDetective Corps. That's how the po-lice filed the documents themselves."

When the prosecutor's staff first se-cured the archive in 2005, they wereeager to search for evidence of human-rights abuses right away, concernedthat the site could be shut down bygovernment fiat or broken into anddamaged. Although they understoodTrudy's directive to keep together doc-uments produced by each section ofthe police, they didn't immediatelygrasp her further instruction to pre-serve record groups as they found them.Until Trudy began her regular visits,the staff would pull the documentsapart and reorder them chronologi-cally. It took months, but she finally

LETTER FROM GUATEMALA 59

convinced them to do it her way, "be-cause that's the only way to trace whatthese agents were doing," she ex-plained. It's also the only way to ensurewhat archivists call "continuous cus-tody"-a legal guarantee that docu-ments have not been tampered with ortaken out of their original context. Byprotecting a record's chain of custody,the human-rights prosecutor guaran-tees that it can be introduced as evi-dence in a criminal case.

As she and her Guatemalan col-leagues reviewed the documents to-gether, Trudy came to understand some-thing crucial about the National Police:they weren't very interested in fightingcrime, and the files were not organizedto support prosecutions. What was im-portant was the hunt for subversives.The National Police were consumedby the chase, the kill, and the need tocover their tracks. Take the novedades,

60 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2007

for instance. Each unit of the policeproduced these regular reports on itsactivities for a given period and sentthem to the unit's commanders, creat-ing a steady flow of information fromsquads to section chiefs, from sectionchiefs to police headquarters, and fromheadquarters to the head of state. To-gether, the reports give a dramatic senseof the grip the security forces had on dai-ly life in Guatemala City. Police unitsraided businesses and private houses,searched school buildings, set up road-blocks, conducted sweeps of markets,bus stations, the public zoo. They en-tered printing companies to hunt forsubversive literature, and auto-repairshops in search of suspect cars. Theymonitored cemeteries and investigat-ed pirate radio transmissions. One ofthe activities police described in thenovedades was the discovery and fin-gerprinting of unidentified corpses

(known in Guatemala as cadaveres xx):when they could, they would matchthe dead person's prints with finger-prints already on record, and write thename of the now identified corpse acrossthe file. Investigators are now reviewingthe xx files and comparing them withmorgue, cemetery, and exhumation re-ports in an attempt to identify some ofthe thousands of still-nameless bodies.

One of the key documents in thearchive is the ficha, the personal filecard. At age eighteen, every adult inGuatemala is issued a small J.D. (knownas a c€dula) with his or her photographand identifying particulars; the NationalPolice would in tum create a larger in-dex card that contained the same in-formation as well as a complete set offingerprints. The cards served the dualpurpose of controlling the populationand providing the state with a conve-nient means to track dissidents-the

Photograph by Misty Keasler

police used them to scribble notes abouta person's suspected political tendencies.For example, the ficha found in thearchive for Vfctor Manuel Gutierrez-a schoolteacher and prominent leaderin the Guatemalan Workers' Party af-ter the CIA-sponsored coup that oust-ed President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954-was marked "#1 Communist ofGuatemala" by the National Police.In 1966, Gutierrez was disappeared ina joint military and police operation,designed with the aid of U.S. intelli-gence officers, and was tortured todeath. His body was buried secretly inthe countryside.In addition to finding clues about

the fate of some of the disappeared,archivists are beginning-to understandthe mechanisms of cover-up-s-how thestate was able to maintain deniability forso long about so many crimes. Some-times the process was as simple as cen-soring from the books information thatreflected badly on government institu-tions. In one of the large bound reg-istries, for example (this one recordingcitizen complaints to the National Po-lice), a "verbal order" made on April 2,1982, by the chief of the Joint Opera-tions Center-a unit that coordinateddeath-squad operations--directs that"all complaints from the public shouldbe recorded as described, except whenthey are made against elements of thesecurity forces, in which case theyshould not be mentioned in any docu-ment." Other methods of concealmentwere more subtle. Anyone perusing thepolice documents quickly perceives ahabit of writing that sounds strange tothe ear-the persistent use of the pas-sive voice to describe everything. Policedo not kidnap suspects; a suspect "iskidnapped" (sesecuestr6). Security forcesdo not assassinate; the victim "is shotand killed" (se dispar6 y se muri6). Apolice report from November 1983 re-veals that this grammatical tic was amatter not of dialect but of deliberatechoice when one agent, describing hissurveillance outside the home of a sus-pect, slips uncharacteristically into thefirst person. "Approaching the house, Iwas able to observe a young woman," hewrites, "who, when she noticed my pres-ence, jumped up and looked at me sus-piciously, so I decided to retreat." Thissection of the report is cordoned off inred ink and a note iswritten in the mar-

gin: "Never personify-the third personmust always be used."Investigators also have come across

records documenting United States in-volvement with the police. Through-out the civil conflict, the U.S. govern-ment offered Guatemala support andofficialcover through security-assistanceprograms that provided training, equip-ment, and financial aid in an ostensibleeffort to "professionalize" military andpolice forces. For the National Police,that aid was channeled mainly throughthe Office of Public Safety, a worldwidepolice-training program established bythe International Cooperation Admin-istration (the precursor to the Agency forInternational Development, or AID).Guatemala became the program's firstLatin American beneficiary in 1956, af-ter a detective with the Los AngelesCounty Sheriff's Department namedFred Fimbres wrote an assessment ofthe National Police for the U.S. StateDepartment. His study showed that theGuatemalan police considered tradi-tional police functions-such as keep-ing the peace-secondary to their mis-sion. "Operations, top level planning,[and] intelligence gathering activitiesare singularly directed toward alertnessand preparedness against the 'threat ofthe communists,'" wrote Fimbres-afocus, he added, bordering on the "ob-sessive." The report concluded that theUnited States should provide the Na-tional Police with technical and mate-rial assistance.U.S. police advisers launched the

program a few months later and spentthe next eighteen years working side byside with their Guatemalan counter-parts. The National Police sent hun-dreds of agents to be trained by theU.S.-administered international po-lice academies at Fort Davis, Panama,and in Washington, D.C., as well as tolocal police laboratories in cities acrossthe continental United States. Thou-sands more were schooled by Americanadvisers inside Guatemala in criminalinvestigations and crime-lab skills,riot control, firearms, fingerprinting,interrogation, surveillance, and coun-terinsurgency techniques.Washington's concerns about

Guatemala intensified dramatically in1968 when members of the RebelArmed Forces killed U.S. AmbassadorJohn Gordon Mein in a botched kid-

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napping. AID police experts were as-sisted by CIA officers acting undercov-er in order to establish intelligence li-aison with security forces and helpdesign their counterinsurgency strategy.U.S. advisers built a new training acad-emy for the National Police and creat-ed a special radio network to help seniorpolice and military officials coordinateoperations on "high-level security mat-ters." As a result of all these activities,letters flew between Washington andGuatemala City, many preserved in thepolice archive: The chief of the Iden-

tihcation Cabinet, Sergio Lima Morales,seeks a set of cameras with telephotolenses in order to photograph the facesof people at demonstrations. Herbert O.Hardin, of the Office for Public Safetyin Washington, receives a request fortraining of two officers in the handlingof weapons. Five Guatemalans take afour-month course at the Internation-

al Police Academy in fin-

E gerprint records.

.ngerprinting became a special focusof the program after U.S. advisers con-

62 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2007

verted the Guatemalans to the "Hen-ry Classification System" (named afterSir Edward Henry, a British police in-spector who developed his method forcriminal investigations in colonial In-dia). The Henry system improved theability to identify an individual by hisfingerprints, file the prints, and searchthem systematically. Once the changewas made, police stations in every ad-ministrative department of Guatemalaadopted the new method, authenti-cating their work with an ink stampmarked "Henry fingerprint office."As I looked through the records of

the Gabinete de Identificacion, I sawthe characteristic stamp on one afterthe other of them; the fingerprintsthemselves were laid out on a carddivided into ten small boxes, five oneach side for each hand, each boxdesignated by the finger that shouldgo there, from the pulgar ("thumb")to the meiiique ("pinky"). Adriana, ayoung woman working with the to.records, pulled out a card they hadfound weeks before. The fiCM was in-side an envelope and attached was aletter sent by an agent working inthe field to the chief of the "Henrysection" of the Coatepeque policestation, dated December 7, 1974.The letter described the discovery ofa rotting corpse floating in the Suchi-ate River in San Marcos department,hands and feet tied, beaten, andtossed into the water to drown "byunknown individuals." Due to theputrefied state of the body, the agentexplained, he was unable to take theprints properly: "I was left with no al-ternative but to cut the fingers offand send them in place of the im-pressions." I opened up the enve-lope. On the Henry card, the police-man had somehow glued ten sliced,shriveled fingertips, now gray with

age, into their correspond-

L ing boxes.

upita oversees the team analyz-ing records of the police department'sSecond Corps. (Like many of thoseworking in the archive, she asked thatI omit her last name.) When I visited,she was looking at the files of the unit'shospital, where political prisoners werehidden in a clandestine section calledthe cuartito or the cuarto especial (the"little room" or the "special room").

A researcher at the archive (top) and three identity records. Photographs by Misty Keasler

The internal records of the hospitallist the names and ages of detaineesheld secretly; Lupita was matchingthem against lists of the disappeareddistributed by activist organizationsduring the same period. For example,the Association of University Studentspublished a list that included Dr. Car-los Padilla Galvez, a surgeon who at-tended the needs of the poor and whowas kidnapped on August 26, 1982,from his hospital in Solola by uniden-tified armed men. In one of the policehospital's internal records, Dr. Padil-la appears as a prisoner scheduled to betransferred to the "special room" onSeptember 12. (Padilla was one of thelucky ones. Two months after his ab-duction, the government ordered hisrelease from the Second Corps hos-pital after members of the Inter-Amer-ican Human Rights Commission madea personal visit to Guatemala toinvestigate his and other cases offorced disappearance.)

Like many of the older investiga-tors at the archive, Lupita-whosehusband was disappeared in 1983-has spotted the names of people sheknew as she sifts through the policerecords for the prosecutor's office. Inone of the registries listing "subver-sives" seized in anti-communist sweepsin the days after the 1954 coup, sheeven found her grandfather, "which isso strange, because he always said,'Screw the communists!'" she told mewith a smile. Lupita considers her workamong the police documents "un regalode vida": "the chance of a lifetime." Iheard that phrase a lot from former-militants-turned-archivists. They arepeople whose fates were turned com-pletely upside down by the conflict-men and women, now middle-aged,who gave up every semblance of nor-mal life to join the movement.

Gustavo Meofio, the archive's di-rector, was seventeen when he left hisfamily in 1966 to join a radical groupof American Maryknollers helpingpeasants settle an uninhabited jungleregion in central Guatemala. He threwhis lot in with the guerrillas after themissionaries were recalled from thecountry by their order in 1967. As a re-sult, Gustavo never attended universi-ty; he operated underground as an or-ganizer, "talking to labor leaders, tostudents, to Christians," slipping into

and out of Guatemala secretly until hereturned for good in the mid-1990s. "Icame from a poor family," he tells me,"and it was a shock for them, whoworked so hard to get us into school."Gustavo is a tall, mournful-lookingman whose heartfelt style inspires manyof the younger archive employees-just as he inspired a generation of youngGuatemalans to join the movementduring the 1970s and '80s. He is the firstto admit that the clandestine liferobbed him of any hope for a voca-tion-"I have no training except forwhat life has taught me"-but sees thearchive work as a natural extension ofthe fight for justice that he says con-sumed him during the armed conflict.Gustavo's background is by no meansunique within the project; many of thesenior personnel overseeing the effortto rescue the files come directly out ofthe militancia-former leaders, guerril-la combatants, fund-raisers or organiz-ers, now enjoying the chance of a life-time to make sense of their strugglethrough documents that explain,

in part, why it was doomed

I from the start.

first came to know Claudina fromher passport photo, a small black-and-white picture glued into a bound log-book that the Guatemalan military cre-ated in the 1980s. The document wasstolen from the secret files of an armyintelligence unit and made public eightyears ago in this magazine. It lists thenames of 183 people kidnapped orkilled by the security forces, their alias-es, their ties to guerrilla groups, anddetails about their abductions and theirfates. Each entry includes a small pho-to of the victim next to the text, pic-tures that were separated from univer-sity I.D.'s, drivers' licenses, passports, ornational identification cards and stuckinto the book. Claudina is number 31.From her picture, she looks fearlessand a little haughty, her chin heldhigh, hair unruly, with a broad faceand arching eyebrows. She looks likea survivor. Her entry says she was cap-tured on December 23, 1983, and freedtwo weeks later.

We met face-to-face last March atmy hotel in Guatemala City. She wasmuch smaller than I had imagined andnot at all haughty-intelligent and in-tense instead, with little granny glass-

LETTER FROM GUATEMALA 63

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es and still-unruly hair, but soft-spokentoo, with a kind of deep clarity about thepast that comes from years of reflec-tion, and a voice soaked in sadness. Sheslipped out of her office shoes and curledup on my bed to talk. Before she waskidnapped, Claudina told me, she andher companion, Victor, were workingfor the PGT-PC (a division of the Par-tido Guaternalteco del Trabajo, theGuatemalan Workers' Party). He wasan official in the group's directorate,and she was helping to produce the par-ty broadsheet, Claridad. The couplelived together with their two smalldaughters, juggling job and family withtheir clandestine activities. Victor isalso in the logbook, a dark-eyed andstrikingly handsome man, with a tense,wary expression. Claudina was thirty-nine and pregnant with their third childwhen he was murdered by governmentforces. According to records found inthe police archive (which Claudinahasn't yet seen), he was shot on No-vember 1, 1983, by six "unidentifiedindividuals" driving a Ford Bronco with-out license plates, who chased his bluepickup truck until he crashed into theside of another car. Victor was draggedfrom the truck by the attackers and tak-en away in their van. "On the follow-ing day at 1:30 in the morning, on oneside of the crafts market in Zone 13,the cadaver was located ... presentingvarious bullet wounds in different partsof the body."

What impressed me most aboutClaudina during our interview was herrejection of victimhood. "All of thiswas a consequence of a choice that wernade-s-consciouslv, maturely," she said."It was a consequence of our struggle,during which we knew life could bevery short." Claudina was kidnappedseven weeks after Victor was killed.She was taken to a room somewherewith a hood over her head. She spentthe next twelve days on a mattress un-der a naked lightbulb, She passed thetime by writing down all the Englishwords she could remember and count-ing the bricks in the walls sur-round-ing her. She was not physically tor-tured, but her captors would taunt herabout Victor and threaten to hurt herchildren. While she was being held,the army emptied her house-"theygrabbed the telephone, the curtains,everything, including all our papers"-

64 HARPER'S MAGAZINE / DECEMBER 2007

even her photo albums. As a result,she was left with no contemporary pic-tures of Victor. Eventually, they de-cided she was insignificant to them andfreed her, warning that she would haveto tell them about other subversives ifshe wanted to live. She fled to Mexicoinstead, and that is where she saw thelogbook for the first time, in 1999.

"It was so unsettling," she recalls."When VIctor died, his face slowly be-came hazy to me. I couldn't rememberexactly what he looked like. It alwaysbothered me. I would try to picturehim, but I just couldn't imagine hisfeatures clearly anymore. Then I turnedto the page and saw his photograph. Iwas shocked. It was like suddenly hav-ing him there in the room with me."She found others in the logbook aswell-other friends, other colleagues,whom she hadn't thought of for years.To see them, "to read those pages re-vived my terror, it revived my rage, itrevived my feeling of impotence ...To read in the logbook the details ofwhat had happened, like what daysomeone was captured, for example-to read that, laid out as though it weretotally normal or logical, brought meright back to that time. It was asthough a memory that was hiddenaway in some little comer returned tothe present, as though it were hap-pening again. And that woke a kind ofrestlessness in me, and a wish to dosomething. I think that it was also inthat moment I felt a nagging feelingthat I should act-because I hadn'thad the ability to do anything or talkto anyone about it."

Claudina returned to Guatemala in2000 and began working for a human-rights organization. Her son-who was,as he pointed out to me, kidnapped too,since he was the baby inside Claudinawhen she was abducted-is twenty-three years old now and works as oneof the investigators in the policearchive. He looks just like Victor. Itwas he who found the documents

about the murder of therJ"" father he never met.

.1he survival of the National Policearchive may seem difficult to compre-hend. But its destruction would havecontradicted the force that drives bu-reaucracy itself. "I record, therefore Iam": the files are the proof of a gov-

ernment's power. They shelter the his-tory of its officers, of their importance,achievements, and investigations. Dur-ing times of state terror, even the mostincriminating documents may not bediscarded, because the agents respon-sible for them believe that their insti-tutions will survive forever. And af-terward, it is often too late. Enduringregimes like Guatemala's produce amassive paper trail, which cannot bedisappeared overnight.

But the citizen also needs the files.The archive does more than simplyconfirm his status as victim; it pre-serves and restores his history. Con-tained within the records of repressionin countries around the world is evi-dence not only of brutal abuse butalso of defiance and social protest-arejection, even during the most in-tense periods of state violence, of aregime's economic and political pro-ject, and a re-imagining of what thecountry might become.

Today, the Guatemalan policearchive hums with purpose. The ru-ined cars that cluttered its entrancehave been pushed aside. The littlepatio in front has been swept, and afence has gone up around the build-ings. Inside, more than 200 peoplelabor over the records: some clean-ing them, some boxing, others read-ing or typing on computers boughtwith the help of the European donors.There are eight state-of-the-art scan-ners that operate sixteen hours a day;more than three million pages havebeen digitized so far.

"We've made a complete inventoryof everything we have now, and weupdate it every day," Gustavo told me."I want an archive that is ordered, or-ganized, and accessible. That is mydream. I think about it all the time-with the shelves lined up and every-thing in its place. I want the researchto continue indefinitely, so nothingcan happen to destroy it or interruptthe work." He pauses. He is lost in hisreverie. The years of struggle, the lostyouth, the scattered hopes, the deadcompanions have come to this. "I wantto create a museum, a memory center.It's another dream. This place shouldbe cleaned of all the garbage so we canbuild a park and plant trees with thenames of the disappeared. It will be aforest of memory." _