The story of how the archives came to be has been told but perhaps you haven't read it, so I'll summarize. Almost a decade after the war ended with the 1996 peace accords, in 2005, there was an important discovery. In an abandoned hospital building, decrepit and rat-infested (gotta include the "rat infested" part) that had belonged to the now-disbanded National Police (effectively an arm of the Guatemalan military during the war), someone discovered boxes upon boxes of moldering, dusty files. The Peace Accords had ostensibly paved the way for a public reckoning for the actions of the police and military during the war, but both had steadfastly claimed that they had kept no records of their activities. Well, we shouldn't be surprised that they were lying all along. There were approximately 80 million (yes, you read that right: 80,000,000) documents in the abandoned hospital, that turned out to be archives of the National Police dating back to the 1880s, providing ample documentation of massacres, forced disappearances, executions, and much more. Gotcha!
The archives have proven to be an invaluable resource for those dedicating to holding the material and intellectual authors of those war crimes accountable. Researchers, attorneys and others have used the material in the archives to support successful legal cases that have led to convictions of military commanders and others. Information in the National Police Archives was used in the genocide trial against former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt (convicted for genocide but the Constitutional Court overturned the conviction). The U.S. has also used information in the archives to track down war criminals who managed to relocate in the U.S., and in some cases send them back to face justice in Guatemala.
So the archives are kind of a big deal. And they have been under siege almost since their discovery -- by those forces who would prefer that the past remain buried and inaccessible. The U.S. has put money into their preservation. The University of Texas Austin, one of the major centers for Latin American studies in the U.S. and the host of massive physical and online archives in Latin American Studies, started to digitize the files. But recently, under the Morales administration, the attacks have stepped up. The former director of the archives was fired in 2018 by the United Nations program that had supported the archives. And most recently the Guatemalan government --specifically the Minister of the Interior, Enrique Degenhart, the guy who signed the "safe third country" agreement -- has moved to put the archives under the control of the National Civil Police and restrict access to the archives.
There were several buildings spread around a large field. There was a guard near the entrance and I explained where I was going and he escorted me to the archive building, which was around a bend. There were some abandoned police vehicles under a tree on the left-hand side, and there were brightly painted murals on some walls that set off the main archive building -- or at least the part that is open to the public. There were a couple of large modern sculptures on either side of the entrance, and the painted brick building did indeed look like the hospital it once was.
You can't just wander through rooms of file and poke around. In order to actually obtain information about a specific person or incident, you have to fill out a request -- you can do that online or by using a paper form you can get at the archive. The archive staff will then search through the databases they have and other files and let you know if they have found information about the person or the event you requested.
But they do have a small museum-like display in the reception area of the archive that traces some of the history that I've just laid out -- the discovery of the archives, the forensic work of clearing out the dirt, literally excavating the papers, retrieving and sorting and organizing the files. Part of the display recreates how the archives looked when they were discovered-- papers strewn all around, and then phase of archivists wearing gloves and masks sorting through the rubble, much like a rescue crew at a disaster site or a CSI team. There are reproductions of some of the materials found in the files, and some original equipment like an old typewriter and some furniture.
I spoke with a personable young woman who had worked at the archive when it was first discovered, and then had left to do other work, and had only returned two years ago. She explained the procedures to me, and asked if I wanted to put in a request. I explained that I wasn't actually looking for anyone -- although it did occur to me that one of my collaborators in New Bedford, who had lost family members in the conflicto armado, might want to look for information about his siblings who had been killed. I sent him a message and asked if he wanted to search, but he responded that thinking about that time was difficult for him. I took a copy of the request form nonetheless.
Outside, I spent some time looking at the murals that were painted on the walls. One long mural started from the left with a portrait of a benevolent Monseñor Gerardi, the archbishop of Guatemala City who led one of the truth commissions after the war and was assassinated two days after the publication of the report he co-authored. The next part of the mural contains scenes of "before" -- a Mayan pyramid, ears of corn, a woman kneeling before a backstrap loom in front of a forested landscape, a cooking fire burning. And then a small crowd of people holding signs and banners at a protest, asking for "Justicia" (justice). There is an image of a soldier's boot looming over this peaceful landscape.
Unlike some other murals I've seen about the war -- I'll talk in a future post about the murals on the walls of the cloister that forms part of the Parroquia (parish) in Zacualpa, Quiché -- there is no imagery that directly references the destruction and death of the armed conflict. There are scenes that indicate the process of rebuilding and flourishing in the "after" part -- generally, in the several murals I've seen, there is a historical progression from left to right, and the panels farthest to the right indicate the present or a bright and hopeful path for the future. The last panel on this particular mural shows children with their arms outstretched and a large aquatic creature (medusa? octopus?) floating horizontally in the foreground.
The words are "Memoria" (memory) and "Vida" (life). Memory is life, life is memory. Memory is constructed out of bricks, and birds are flying overhead.
There are some other murals on the other side of the entrance but they were partially obscured by the parked police vehicles. One (visible above, on the farthest left hand panel) shows some skulls, and obviously reflects the unearthing of the bodies of massacre victims.
I made my way back out to the street and walked a few blocks to get to the Transmetro stop. I was surprised to pass a small shop selling police gear: guns, hats, vests and other military/police paraphernalia.
There was no proprietor visible, otherwise I would have asked whether this was an official store where officers bought their equipment, and whether they checked to see if the people making purchases were indeed police officers, or whether just anyone off the street - me, for example -could walk in and buy a PNC hat (just like you see people in the U.S. who are not necessarily police or firefighters wearing NYPD or NYFD logos).
I continued on to the Transmetro, and decided to walk through the Plaza de la Constitución, the main plaza in front of the National Cathedral and the Palacio Presidencial -- the presidential palace (the equivalent of the White House although I don't think the president actually resides there so not exactly equivalent). The plaza is a multivalent and multi-use space. On Sundays indigenous vendors from all over who have resettled in the capital set up booths and ply their wares, including clothing, toys, and food -- if you're looking for an inexpensive and "authentic" (whatever that means) bite on a Sunday afternoon or evening, you can get an assortment of Guatemalan street food -- boiled sweet potatoes (camotes), boiled and grilled corn, boiled güisquil (chayote), reheated plain tamales with black beans or chipilín, pupusas, tacos and other delights.
It is also a favored spot for demonstrations, for itinerant vendors hawking medicines, pushcart peddlers with sliced fruit.
One officer was holding forth about how important it was to not throw litter, to protect Mother Nature, and so forth. There was a circle of people watching and sort of listening. A bouncy house for kids seemed to get getting some use, and there were two large inflatable very friendly-looking police officers --one male, and one female. Did I mention that the inflatable police were white - in a country where most people, not just those who identify as indigenous, are some shade of tan or brown? A little incongruous, to say the least. And one wonders why environmental police are so heavily armed. Surely not to protect rural campesinos and subsistence farmers whose lands and lives are threatened by environmentally destructive dams, mining operations and palm oil plantations, who are routinely killed (19 women land defenders so far in 2019) for trying to protect their lands.
So it was a bit jarring to go from the archives, which contain the gory details of how the police collaborated in torture, rape, forced disappearance, assassinations and mass killings, to a public display of the ostensibly benign and friendly face of the police (although the contrast between the smiling and unarmed inflatables and the battle-ready live policemen on the scene was notable). Bad cop/good cop indeed.
But the ironies don't stop there. Right behind the environmental police's "meet and greet", there are two notable markers on the very surface of the plaza itself. Directly in front of the Palacio Nacional, now shrouded in black gauze for some reconstruction and repair work, the group H.I.J.O.S. -- founded by children of victims of the armed conflict -- has painted in immense yellow letters: "45,000. Donde están?" (45,000-- where are they). 45,000 is the statistic usually given for the number of forced disappearances (which as I noted in an earlier post, was the tactic used by the military and police in the cities, and it started long before the "scorched earth" policy of total destruction of communities and mass killings that many view as the characteristic of the armed conflict. H.I.J.O.S. is very active in Zona 1, the historic center of Guatemala City, and as I have noted in previous posts, they continually plaster the walls with blocks of flyers. I'm not sure if the poster on the left is theirs or from another group, but opposition groups make use of the walls of cafes, stores, and other businesses in Zona 1 to get their messages across.
Both the ephemeral and the more permanent tell stories, sometimes the same stories in different registers, and at others different parts of the same story, or complementary or contrasting stories.
These silhouettes, now partially faded, remind me of a public art project I worked on in Atlanta 25 years ago, "Entering Buttermilk Bottom", marking a neighborhood that had been destroyed by urban renewal, an historically Black neighborhood. For one part of the project, we mapped out on the surface of the parking lot of the Atlantic Civic Center, the houses that had been demolished in order to make way for the Civic Center and its parking lot. When we went to talk to one of the directors of the Civic Center, to get permission to paint on the parking lot, we assured him that we had found a non-permanent paint that would adhere to the asphalt surface, but would fade away within several months. It turned out he was a former resident of the neighborhood, and said, "Oh, go ahead and use paint that will stay on as long as possible".
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