Social Science Research Council

“Of Terror, Power, and the Archive: The Implications of Discovering Guatemala's National Police Records”

My dissertation uses the recent unearthing of Guatemala’s long-hidden National Police archives – at 75 million pages, the largest secret state document discovery in Latin American history – as an entry point into an examination of the country's postwar politics.  I explore how Guatemala, a weak state barely able to provide even basic survival necessities for much of its population, struggles to manage this unprecedented amount of evidence pertaining to its past abuses, and how popular narratives of the war years are adapted and reconstructed based on this windfall of new information.  Concepts like “truth,” “memory,” “democratization,” and “reconciliation” are highly contested in post-bellum Guatemala.  As a result, the National Police archives have the potential to destabilize the country's uneasy postwar status quo, wherein war survivors continue to protest the state's amnesiac attitude toward its brutal counterinsurgency efforts and its utter failure to prosecute war criminals.  Moreover, existing scholarly attempts to grapple with the legacies of the 36-year armed conflict have predominantly focused on the military and the countryside – not insignificantly because of the previous lack of police records – leaving the urban theatre of the war and the police’s surgical, political repression understudied. 

I combine historical research on the police with participant observation and ethnographic analysis of the government's archival recovery project, a controversial effort to build publicly accessible archives from the heaps of moldy and disordered papers that currently fill the discovery site.  Using these historical and anthropological methods, my dissertation attempts two main interventions: it takes some early steps toward writing the police and the capital city back into the history of Guatemala’s civil war, and it also tracks how Guatemalans themselves – particularly those directly engaged in the archival recovery process – fold this new knowledge afforded by the archives into their local and national understandings of wartime, memory politics, and post-conflict transitions.