Texto in Español

Guatemalan National Police Archive Project

An Astonishing Discovery

In July 2005, an explosion at a military munitions dump near Guatemala City raised concerns about the storage of explosives in nearby residential areas. People who lived in the neighborhood asked investigators to inspect a building at the Guatemala City compound of the National Civil Police. A team from the government-backed Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman (PDH) entered the decaying structure and discovered an enormous cache of documents.

The records were stored in a series of dark rooms overrun by rats, bats and cockroaches. Many of the papers were soaked by rainwater from leaks and broken windows.

The documents, which numbered in the tens of millions, were revealed to be the historic archive of Guatemala's National Police. The National Police were disbanded after country's 1996 Peace Accords and were replaced by the National Civil Police.

The archive included papers, books, photographs and floppy disks. During the peace process, Guatemalan police officials denied that any records existed.

The records in the archive contain critical information about police procedures during Guatemala's 36 years of internal armed conflict that resulted in 200,000 deaths and disappearances. Many families of the estimated 40,000 people who disappeared never found out what happened to their loved ones.

Fulfilling their constitutional mandate to investigate human rights violations, the PDH took legal steps to guarantee the public's right to know what information was stored in the archive, and preserve the documents as part of the country's historical record. The PDH appealed to Guatemala's Civil Court to support a human rights investigation in connection with the archive.

On July 12, 2005, the court issued a historic ruling authorizing the PDH to inspect the files and documents. The judges placed the information under the jurisdiction of the PDH and the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman, Dr. Sergio Fernando Morales Alvarado. This was the first time in Guatemalan history that human rights investigators had received judicial support from the courts.

With a mandate from the judges, PDH investigators widened their search and discovered thirty more former National Police archives in other regions of the country.

Officers from the National Civil Police and the Guatemalan Department of the Interior helped the PDH truck an additional six million documents into the main archive in Guatemala City. As investigators began to sift through this mountain of documents, they determined that the archive contained tens of millions of records.

The Guatemalan National Police Archive is the largest single cache of documents that has been made available to human rights investigators in history. While assessing the scope of the data, investigators measured 8,000 linear meters of paper bundles.

Archive workers collected hundreds of thousands of identification cards discarded outside the archive building in huge mounds of paper.

"The dimension of the archive is truly gigantic," Alberto Fuentes, assistant project director, told National Public Radio in the U.S. "They say there are 80 million pages of documents here. So in every possible space, in every alcove, there are just stacks and stacks and stacks of these police records."

The Guatemalan human rights community realized that the jumbled documents in the archive could help fill critical gaps in the testimony collected by the Guatemalan Commission for Historical Clarification during the country's Peace Accords in the 1990s. In particular, these records could potentially help the families of the disappeared find their fathers, mothers, sons and daughters who vanished during the violence.

While the documents were clearly important, the investigators faced a huge task. How could a small group of archivists efficiently preserve, catalog and analyze so much information?

Looking back at the data collection strategies pursued during the Peace Accords, the PDH and a group of Guatemalan human rights NGOs created a partnership to study the problem. As in the 1990's, they reached out to the international community for financial support and the scientific expertise to conduct state-of-the-art human rights data analysis.

Building an Archive

Among the first tasks tackled by archive investigators was halting the further decay of precious documents. Entire stacks of paper found in the archive were decayed by moisture and damaged beyond recognition by years of neglect. The governments of Switzerland and Sweden donated more than $2 million dollars to hire a group of Guatemalan archive workers to clean, stabilize and organize the documents.

Many of the archive workers originally came from civil society groups in Guatemala. Some people who support the archive project had members of their families killed or disappeared during the years of conflict. Wearing lab coats and dust masks, the archive workers arrayed themselves at long tables and began to meticulously clean the fragile papers, some of which date back to 1882.

They treat each document and photograph with reverence, knowing that each scrap of information could be a precious gift to a family searching for answers.

Each day, workers at the archive enter the large National Civil Police compound in the center of Guatemala City to continue their work in the archive building. They pass through barbed wire gates, past groups of armed police officers, stacks of crushed cars and barking police dogs from the police K9 unit.

As recovery of the archive progressed, the archive workers set to work cleaning and fumigating the grimy archive building. Metal doors were installed and security cameras were mounted outside the doors. Glass and metal bars were placed over broken windows. Security teams from the PDH began to stand watch over the archive twenty-four hours a day.

Archivists from the Guatemalan National Archives provided support for the police archive project. Archive experts from Argentina and a U.S.-based NGO called the National Security Archive also offered their expertise for the project, now known officially as the Project for the Recuperation of the National Police Historic Archives.

In March 2006, the archive team invited Dr. Ball, director of Benetech's® Human Rights Program, to evaluate the documents.

After inspecting the archive, Dr. Ball developed a plan to collect a multi-stage random sample of the documents and secure the sample data with Benetech's Martus information management tool for later analysis. Martus is specifically structured to make it easy for an international team to share information bulletins. The archive project is the largest application of Martus to date.

According to Dr. Ball's plan, the data would then be analyzed with statistical methods to create a clearer picture of the archive contents and generate quantitative results that can answer questions about command responsibility and human rights abuses.

In May 2006, Tamy Guberek, HRDAG's Latin America Field Coordinator, together with HRDAG statisticians Daniel Guzmán, and Romesh Silva, arrived in Guatemala City to create the sample design, data model and coding frame for the study.

Members of the American Statistical Association began to advise HRDAG on the sample design of the project. The HRDAG team also trained a team of coders who would select the sample documents and look for specific information relevant to the quantitative research questions.

In preparation for the study, workers at the archive created a topological map of the documents in the building to represent the universe from which the sample would be drawn.

In June 2006, the coders began a month-long pilot study to test the feasibility of the plan. Pleased with the results, the team launched the main phase of the data analysis project in October 2006. The map of the archive is now updated continuously and every three weeks, a sample of the contents in the archive is drawn based on this map. To date, the archive has selected eight samples of data with each sample including 300 random points of collection from the mapped, three dimensional space of the archive.

Each collection point encompasses three information units, such as a case file or document. Staff members in adjacent computer rooms enter the data from the sample into encrypted bulletins using Benetech's Martus software. More than 30,000 bulletins have now been created and backed up over the Internet to a series of secure servers outside the country. The archive team also uses Martus as a customizable database that allows the data to be structured in multiple ways. A special piece of the Martus software 'flattens' the data collected in the bulletins into spreadsheets that can then be entered into statistical programs.

Meanwhile, the archive's information technology manager, Jorge Villagrán, and his team implemented the next stage of the archiving process by launching an extensive effort to scan the documents that had been cleaned. The team equipped itself with copiers, cameras, Konica-Minolta Planetarium digital book scanners and Kodak flatbed document scanners. More than a half million dollars worth of equipment was set up to scan the documents. Because of the uncertain future of the project, the project leaders wanted to capture images of as many of the documents as possible.

In early 2007, funds donated by a German organization expanded the 141-person archive staff to 206 workers. The scanning team now works sixteen hours a day in two eight-hour shifts from 7:00 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. five days a week. The formerly crumbling archive building has been transformed into a hive of activity where workers scan half a million documents each month. By April 2007, Villagrán's team had scanned more than 2.5 million archived documents and 2,000 books. The warren of once dark and damp rooms is now a series of brightly lit, immaculate storerooms of crated and shelved records.

The Project Continues

Analysis of the study data began in March 2007. The HRDAG team is using statistical software called Stata, as well as tools created in the Python programming language to analyze the data. Analysts are also using a software modeling tool called GraphViz. The analysis will begin to answer two basic questions. The first question seeks to determine the communication flow within the police structure and between the police and other institutions. The second question attempts to answer what kind of policies and practices the police employed in relation to human rights abuses. The archive data is also being analyzed for inter-rater reliability or the degree of agreement among those coding the data. This analysis allows for consistent coding practices that support the data, reduces error and strengthens subsequent reports.

In March 2007, the Guatemalan National Police Archive project formed an International Consultative Commission. This commission, which includes Dr. Patrick Ball, is made up of archivists and researchers from Europe, Asia, North and Latin America. The HRDAG team will present their first round of data analysis of the archive to the office of the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman by May 31, 2007.

In April 2007, the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman Dr. Sergio Fernando Morales Alvarado was reelected, increasing the possibility that the archive project can continue with its current team for another five years. The Guatemalan Congress voted 121 to 13 to reelect Dr. Alvarado, suggesting that different political factions regard him as an objective steward of the archive data.

International donors also continue to support the archive. The Dutch government announced that it will donate one million euros to support the archive project from 2007-2009. The Generalitat de Catalunya and Vasco governmental entities in Spain became the latest international donors to step forward with significant financial donations to the archive project.

The pending archive report will present quantitative results which may reveal patterns of police activity and estimates about the contents of the archive. It will also examine qualitative, case specific information gathered by researchers regarding police policies and the evolution of police structures. The qualitative analysis will focus on the period from 1975-1985, whereas the quantitative analysis will span the entire scope of the conflict from 1960-1996.

The data may also shed light on the disappearances that were a largely urban phenomenon in the Guatemalan conflict. The report could find that specific documents, such as police memos, contain especially interesting data about disappearances or other acts. This information could impact the structure of future data sampling strategies.

Why Does This Data Matter?

The Guatemalan National Police Archive project will take years to complete and the expectations of this first report are modest. Nevertheless, the report could be a starting point for further research into the role of the National Police in the urban counterinsurgency and the institutional links between the police and military that carried out most of its killings in the rural areas.

Gustavo Meoño, director of the archive project, believes that the archive investigation could also help forensics teams identify victims of political killings. For families of the killed and disappeared, the archive project represents the possibility that they may one day learn what happened to their loved ones.

A woman named Juanita, who supports the archive project, is one of the many people who who hope to find answers in the archive. In 1971, when Juanita was three years old, two plainclothes men burst through the door of her house in the Guatemalan state of Retalhuleu and took away her father, who was a schoolteacher. Juanita's family never found out what happened to him. Like so many others, he simply vanished. "It is a hard thing to think about," said Juanita as she watched the archive workers play soccer during their lunch break. "It took place years ago, but it still hurts."

Juanita says she hopes that the archive might contain clues about her father's disappearance. "For the family of the person who is lost, it is very important that his relatives know something," explains Juanita. "Personally, it would be extremely joyful if there is some finding about my father. It is a little too late for the people who have relatives missing, but it is a little bit of justice."

Searching for the historical truth still carries risk for those involved. Juanita chose not to give us her real name because she believes that it might put her in danger. Protecting sensitive historical data - and those who provide it - is an essential step in pursuing social justice in Guatemala and around the world. Human rights investigators view the Guatemalan National Police Archive as a potential treasure trove of data that could help them investigate the social, psychological and historical underpinning of police institutions and their impact on the life of the nation. The archive is also producing information that could support the prosecution of human rights violators. The Guatemalan Supreme Court has asked the Human Rights Ombudsman to provide information from the archive to support special prosecution cases. These cases have led to criminal investigations.

The archive could also provide evidence for court cases in other countries. The Guatemalan National Police stormed the Spanish embassy in 1980, burning 39 protesters alive. In October 2005, the Spanish Constitutional Court granted a request by Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú for Spain to probe human rights abuses in Guatemala that took place during the 1970's and 1980s. Many members of Menchú's Mayan family were killed during the conflict.

In July of 2006, the Spanish National Court issued an international arrest warrant for torture, murder and illegal detention against the former director of the National Police, General German Chupina Barahona, and seven other former Guatemalan security officials. These officials include former military leader Efraín Ríos Montt who was elected president of the Guatemalan Congress. While the charges are considered more symbolic than enforceable, the archive may contain records that could implicate police involvement in murder and disappearances during this period.

The historical information in the archive could help investigators analyze the evolution of Guatemala's police institutions and determine how civil authorities drift into extra-judicial acts of violence. Data in the archive could also help explain political patterns that continue to support a culture of impunity and may someday help heal ongoing distrust of police authorities.

Guatemala continues to suffer from a high rate of homicide, despite its relatively small population that now totals about 14 million. In 2006, the Guatemalan government established a national commission on "femicide" after coming under pressure from the U.S. Congress and human rights groups to address a series of especially horrific murders of women. According to the PDH, 2,318 women were murdered in this small country from 2002-2006, a figure that could be confirmed or challenged by further rigorous data analysis. According to press reports, only 2% of the more than 5,000 murders in Guatemala each year are solved.

Guatemalan police blame many of the murders on gang activity. According to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, Guatemala has become a transit route for 75% of the cocaine moving from Colombia to the U.S. Just before U.S. President George Bush's visit to Guatemala in March 2007, eight additional murders raised questions about the involvement of Guatemalan police in the narco trade.

Three Salvadoran congressmen who belonged to El Salvador's ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance Party, and were representatives to the Central American Parliament, were found dead on an abandoned dirt road in Guatemala. Their driver was also killed. Days later, four Guatemalan policemen, including the head of the country’s organized crime investigation unit, were accused of the murders. Before they could be tried for the crimes, the four were assassinated by masked gunmen inside their maximum security prison cells.

Both government authorities and opposition politicians in Guatemala claim that the policemen were part of a group operating within Guatemala's security forces that is responsible for drug trafficking and death-squad style killings. El Salvador's chief of police, Rodrigo Avila, was quoted in the press asserting that the four were murdered to cover up their allegedly illegal activities. The incident led to the resignation of the Director of Guatemala’s National Civil Police and the Minister of the Interior.

The Guatemalan government is now calling for the creation of an International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG), a UN-backed independent body that would be allowed to investigate high-level government corruption. It is unclear how the upcoming Guatemalan presidential elections in September 2007 will impact the police forces or the archive project.

Meanwhile, workers at the National Police Archive continue the process of carefully sifting through hundreds of thousands of police documents. The data generated from these records may help investigators better understand the evolution of police institutions in Guatemala and support the creation of new police structures that could end the ongoing culture of impunity.

Text: Ann Harrison
Photos: Tamy Guberek and Ann Harrison

Consulting Services | About HRDAG | Resources | RSS | Home

© Copyright © 2002-2010 Beneficent Technology, Inc. (The Benetech® Initiative)
Benetech is a California nonprofit organization.

The Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) applies information technology solutions and statistical techniques to help human rights advocates build evidence-based arguments.