Guatamala's Dirty Little Secrets

One would think that it would be pretty easy to cover the paper trail of human rights atrocities if you are a nation state with an awful past. When you are set to leave office, or when the writing is on the walls, you simply set the shredder in motion, hire people with torches, and they shred and burn. But as this story in today'sNew York Times reveals, some states are like serial killers. They want souvenirs of their victims. Last year in a munitions depot in Guatamala representatives of the Guatamalan human rights ombudsman's office discovered what apeared to be the files of the National Police, which like the South African Police under apartheid, were less a force committed to maintaining law and order and more one dedicated to maintaining the dominance of the state. John Brewer has called this model "Colonial Policing" in his seminal but, alas, out of print book Black and Blue.

Guatamala went through something of a charade of a truth commission in the 1990s. Their version went largely unheralded in the face of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which for all of its shortcomings managed to walk a line between Nuremburg trials (which would have been impossible for a host of reasons, not least of which was that the negotiated settlement would never have happaned had the power brokers known they would face retributive justice) and blanket amnesty, which is what happened in other countries, such as Chile.

It remains to be seen whether or not it will be possible to use these files to seek justice for the victims of almost four decades of Guatamalan misrule. But the very existence of these documents speaks where silence reigned. It is slim solace for victims of the National Police, but history now has the fulcrum of evidence to do its work. What we long knew without being able to prove we can now begin to prove based on what we know. One Guatemalan historian, Heriberto Cifuentes, has seen the files. He exlained why the government did not destroy them: "Impunity reigns in Guatamala. So whether there are documents or not, people responsible for crimes do not expect to pay for them. they have always enjoyed blanket immunity." One can insert any of a number of names in place of "Guatamala" and Cifuentes' quotation would ring true. But in the latter half of the twentieth century it seems as if we have begun to challenge such seeming truisms. Let's hope that this discovery is part of that trend.