Guatemala Human Rights Commission/USA

Secret files open window on Guatemala's violent past

National Catholic Reporter: August 3, 2007

By PAUL JEFFREY

Hilda Morales can’t count how many people she knows who were disappeared during the brutal 36-year-long civil war in Guatemala, which ended in 1996.

“There are so many people I know who lost their sister or husband or child, and they don’t know to this day what happened to them,” said Morales, a lawyer and activist who teaches human rights law at the University of San Carlos in Guatemala City. “For a long time we had the slogan that since they took them away alive, we want them back alive. But it’s been a long time. Now people just want to know what happened, and they want to know where to find the bones of their loved ones.”

Soon, they might have some answers.

In a maze of dark rooms filled with moldy files, investigators in Guatemala are beginning to comb through secret records kept by the country’s national police. The 80 million pages of records date back more than a century, and their dusty and faded pages promise unique insight into the mechanisms of repression employed for decades by Guatemala’s U.S.-backed governments.

The files were discovered by accident two years ago when investigators searched for abandoned munitions in five decrepit buildings surrounded by junked cars inside a police compound on the capital’s north side. Secret archives have been discovered in other countries emerging from dictatorships and wars, and experts from Cambodia, Serbia and other countries have come to Guatemala to share their knowledge.

The archives project is focusing its initial scrutiny on the period from 1975-85, when the violence was at its worst. Researchers have examined about 5 million pages so far. Right now, the content of what was found remains largely unknown outside the offices of the government’s special human rights prosecutor, who is coordinating the project. But 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 who were never heard from again, though the police had always denied having detained them. Fingerprint records and photographs of tortured bodies interred in urban cemeteries are being matched to lists of disappeared prepared by organizations of family members.

More than 200 people, working two shifts, are dusting off and scanning the files. At least 150 of these people are young adults, according to Velia Muralles, who heads a section assigned with interpreting what’s found in the old files.

“One of the contributions of this project is that there’s a transmission of experiences from old to young,” she said. “We can share the experience we lived through, but our ability to see things clearly is obviously affected by the pounding of our hearts as we read these documents. The young bring to the project the objective perspective that comes from not having lived through that. We have a population of youth in this country that is asking to forget the past, that doesn’t want to think about the past, but every day these young people show up here to work at uncovering the secrets that are hidden in these stacks of old papers.”

Catalog of control

Much of the paperwork being recovered is the daily minutiae of bureaucracy: a register of when vehicles were checked in and out from the car pool, photos of bodies cataloged before burial, lists of payments to informers.

“To see our loved ones, to see friends from the university, their bodies disfigured by torture, with 15 or 20 bullet holes in them, to read lists of children who were captured and sent to live with military families or adopted to foreign couples, it’s all painful,” Muralles said. “And it’s amazing to see the comprehensive control the police exercised. They have photos of demonstrations. Details of killings. Lists of who came to the funeral, and what they said to each other. Who showed up at the Mass of Eight Days.

“There was a complete control before, during, and after each political killing,” she said.

The trove of records includes no files from the military, whose scorched-earth campaigns in the countryside produced the majority of the 160,000 dead and 40,000 disappeared 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.

Since the archives project got underway, there have been protests from an association of retired military officials, some of whom have been indicted in Spain for crimes against humanity. In a tense meeting with the human rights prosecutor, the vets demanded that the head of the archives project, Gustavo Meoño, be removed and replaced with someone more to their liking.

Bureaucratic inertia

“Anywhere they’ve found these kind of archives, they seldom include evidence of a high official directly ordering on paper that someone be kidnapped, tortured, raped and chopped up in pieces,” Meoño said. “They use euphemisms, codes and linguistic subterfuges. So more important for us than finding any spectacular revelation is to document the bureaucracy of the state’s responsibility, and the responsibility of particular persons who exercised the power of the state.”

Anyone walking through room after musty room in the archives, bats roosting overhead, asks the obvious question: Why weren’t these files destroyed?

“Everywhere they’ve found archives like this in the world, people ask this same question,” Meoño said. “Why did the Nazis not destroy their records? Why did Pol Pot hang on to documents that demonstrate the magnitude of that genocide? We’ve got to remember that no matter how atrocious the acts were, they were administrative measures. And administrative actions have to be documented.

“The only way a state functionary can prove that they’ve done their job is to compile a written record and file it away. There’s a bureaucratic inertia in all this. But what are for us shameful crimes against humanity, for the perpetrator it’s simply a matter of complying with patriotic duty. There’s a tendency to leave proof of their contribution, even in expectation of material or moral compensation. When these archives were compiled, those who elaborated these documents and filed them away felt all-powerful. They felt that their power was never going to end. And if the people changed, the system would remain. Impunity guaranteed that there would be no negative consequences.”

Guatemala’s future

Meoño said he was particularly moved by finding in the archives the arrest reports of young children, complete with fingerprints, from the 1920s and 1930s.

“I remember one report of a 12-year old boy who was jailed, and the reason stated was ‘disobedience to his mother,’ ” he said. “The authoritarianism of the state served to keep society quiet and acquiescent. All of the human rights violations we’re finding don’t surprise me. I expected to find them here. But I’ve also learned a lot about why we are the way we are.”

Hilda Morales, who sits on an advisory committee to the prosecutor who coordinates the archives project, said that over the decades, the authoritarian attitude of the state began to take root in the soul of individuals and families throughout Guatemala.

“We’re all repressed, we’re all timid,” she said. “We’re afraid to speak, because speaking out means expressing what we think, and that’s been sanctioned for centuries.”

Now, Morales and others hope that information gleaned from the documents in the archives will provide closure to families who never learned the fate of friends or family who were disappeared. And Meoño hopes they can help the Guatemalan people heal some of the scars of their country’s violent past.

“Knowing the truth is the only road to national reconciliation,” Meoño said. “Of course there will be negative reactions. Many of the authors of these crimes against humanity are still alive and still maintain quotas of power. So anything could happen. But our posture has been clear and unequivocal. We’re committed to truth and justice and memory, without concessions to anyone.

“There’s too much at stake for our future, and for the viability of Guatemala as a nation.”

Paul Jeffrey is a frequent contributor to NCR.

Giving war victims burial heals communities Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera was bludgeoned to death just two days after the Catholic church released its groundbreaking 1998 report “Guatemala: Never Again,” which was based on 6,000 interviews with survivors and family members of those who were disappeared or killed during the 36-year civil war. Gerardi was the principal architect of the report, better known by its Spanish acronym, REMHI. Gerardi also founded the Guatemala City archdiocese’s human rights office, which is now hoping to use the country’s newly revealed police archives to help find the remains of people who were killed. “REMHI and the archives are two complementary and essential elements of Guatemala’s historic memory. One is the voice of the victims. The other is the official, bureaucratic counterpart that provides a background and confirmation of what the victims reported,” said Rodrigo Salvadó, director of the forensic anthropology team for the human rights office. “Monseñor Gerardi talked about how unjust it was that a family didn’t have the right to go and lay a flower on the grave of a loved one, and that one of the ministries of the church was to restore to them that opportunity,” Salvadó said. “Otherwise the family, the community and the society as a whole would remain traumatized.” There are thousands of villages where mass graves are still to be exhumed, and as time goes by, villagers are losing their fear of recovering their loved ones, according to Fredy Peccerelli, director of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation, the country’s largest mass grave diggers. So far, the foundation has exhumed 5,000 bodies. Many in positions of power in Guatemala would prefer that the past remain buried. Peccerelli received new death threats in May, including a threat to rape and kill his sister if he didn’t stop the foundation’s work. Yet he refuses to stop, and in June the foundation began working on 165 new gravesites that will take it several months to exhume. “People who feel threatened by the truth are pushing back. They’re making it clear that the process should not continue, that trials should not take place, or else they’re going to kill us,” Peccerelli said. “What they don’t understand is that this is not a process of just the foundation or Fredy, it’s a process of the people, of literally thousands of communities waiting to recover the bodies of their loved ones. They’ve been waiting for 25 years, and they’ve been intimidated during those 25 years, and they’re simply not willing to be intimidated any longer, nor to wait any longer. “We are the least political people around,” he added. “We’re scientists who try to solve crimes, and thus dignify the victims, providing evidence to the police and to the public prosecutor. We’re rewriting the history of Guatemala through science.” Slowly, these efforts are building toward Gerardi’s original vision -- to bring closure to grieving communities and help Guatemala’s people recover from the war. “Digging up these bodies and returning them to their families doesn’t make for immediate change, but it’s important in the long run in helping the communities understand their history and work for reconciliation,” Salvadó said.

 

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