Brugge Blog

The good news: the Guatemalan National Police Archive was discovered last year, with records that could give closure and consequences to many of the people affected by the country’s civil war.

The bad news: there are 80 million documents to go through, and creatures and the elements have taken their toll on some of them.

Like a white-elephant gift, this is a find that can’t be ignored, and yet so much makes it difficult to approach. Take you pick of challenges: the sheer size, the politics involved, the emotions it will either salve or inflame, even the simple health risks of working with the documents. But then again, how could they not face it?

The stash was apparently found in July 2005, but it was kept quiet until the fall, when stories like one in the New York Times brought it into the open. And now NPR has an update, so they are at least a year into the hard work.

The first question that comes to mind, “why were these things kept around?” isn’t easily answered, but I liked what the Iraqi Memory Foundation representative said at the end of the NYT story:

“Ultimately these files are the institutional memory of the bureaucracy,” he said. “To expect a bureaucracy to destroy its files is to expect it to commit suicide.”

There is also the thinking that the police thought that nobody would ever prosecute them. I think there is also the simpler explantation: that getting rid of that many documents is just a plain, huge task that you couldn’t do quietly or secretly or quickly. From having visited Guatemala, I can attest to how much paperwork is ingrained into daily life, so it probably didn’t dawn on anybody that they might not want all of this around until it was too late. Kind of like the Shel Silverstein poem about taking out the garbage.

In the end, this is going to occupy a lot of time, but it will probably only affect a miniscule fraction of the families of people whose names and faces are in those files. For them, though, it will be worth it.

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Update: This stories continues to stay alive in the press and in blogs. An Associated Press story on it this month was picked up by a number of news outlets, among them the Minneapolis/St Paul StarTribune, the Arizone Daily Star and the Chronicle Herald, from Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Chronicle Herald link has the most complete copy of the story; both the StarTribune and the Arizone Star cut out early, missing a powerful quote at the end.

“What I find very staggering is that those who are accused of committing acts of genocide aren’t only free but also very powerful,” said Sebastian Elgueta, an Amnesty International investigator.

“Look at Rios Montt. He got 700,000 votes.”

The new story also points out that with the overseer of the project, the Human Rights Ombudsman, being an elected official, that this year’s elections could change the positive momentum that they have.

The Guatemala Solidarity Network blogs an update on the story, mentioning the elections as well, along with notes from a high-tech company, Benetech, that is down there working on the project.