The Archive that Never Was: State Terror and Historical Memory in Guatemala^*

* My first visit to the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional (ahpn), in August 2010, came about through the good offices of Catherine Nolin and Marc Drouin. The latter's doctoral investigations, like those of Kirsten Weld, will deepen our understanding of the mechanisms of state terror in Guatemala. For receiving us on that first visit, and showing us around, I thank Alberto Flores and Gustavo Meoño. A conversation I had with Edilberto Cifuentes about his discovery of the ahpn will stay with me always. I profit likewise from what my colleague, good friend, and traveling companion, Eduardo Velásquez, has to say. Thelma Porres, head of the Archivo Histórico of the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica in Antigua, Guatemala, furnished me with a hard copy of Operación Sofía before the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C., made it available online. After delivering oral presentations of the piece, which Victoria L. Henderson resourcefully illustrated, I benefited from the moral support of Laura Cameron, Felix Driver, David Lyon, Joan Schwartz, and Matthew Taylor. I thank Sarah de Leeuw and Sallie Marston for inviting me to contribute to this special issue of the Geographical Review, and its editorial staff and reviewers for their thorough critique of my submission. The insights and copyediting skills of Maureen McCallum Garvie are again appreciated, as is the research funding of the Killam Program of the Canada Council.

Abstract

Between 1961 and 1996, more than 200,000 people in Guatemala lost their lives as a result of state‐orchestrated acts of terror denied still by the national security forces who committed them. A U.N. Truth Commission was repeatedly obstructed by army and police personnel from gaining access to official records, being told that no documentation of the type sought existed. Bureaucracies do not work that way, even ones with good reason to destroy or conceal evidence of an incriminating nature. It was nonetheless of startling import when an attorney working for Guatemala's Human Rights Office stumbled upon an archive recording the deeds of the National Police. Known now to contain an estimated 80 million documents, the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional is a cabinet of atrocities that reveals conspiracy and complicity on the part of police officers engaged in a ghoulish network of surveillance, intimidation, abduction, torture, and murder.

• archives
• Guatemala
• human rights
• police
• terrorism

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Notes on contributors

W. George Lovell

Dr. Lovell is a professor of geography at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario K7L 3N6, and a visiting professor at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville, Spain.