In 2005, investigators looking into an explosives complaint stumbled into a police compound in Guatemala City and found roughly 80 million pages of documents the National Police had kept and hidden for decades: surveillance files, arrest logs, and internal orders spanning the country’s civil war, when a military government backed by Washington waged a campaign against leftists, indigenous communities, students, and union organizers that left as many as 200,000 people dead or disappeared. The Historical Archive of the National Police marks twenty years of cataloguing that record this year.
An archive like this is not neutral once it exists. It is evidence, and evidence closes off the easy version of history — the one where nobody quite knew, or where the violence was scattered rather than organized from a desk with a filing system. Twenty years in, prosecutions built on these documents remain few and slow. The pages did not disappear. The accountability they were supposed to make possible mostly still hasn’t arrived.