Abstract
Political pressure has closed the library housing vital information about Guatemala’s horrific civil war, report
Fifteen years after it was first brought to light, the archive is being obscured again by a combination of political pressure and, critics say, a desire to rewrite history in the troubled nation.
Paulo Estrada in his early childhood with his father, Otto, and mother, Beatriz Velasquez. Otto Estrada disappeared in 1984
CREDIT: Estrada family
Rafael Gonzales and Paulo Estrada, two relatives of the tens of thousands of desaparecidos, can no longer access the archive to search for their relatives’ fate: not because of Covid-19 or social distancing but because the archive of the disappeared is itself being disappeared.
In the past two years, the governments of former president Jimmy Morales and current incumbent Alejandro Giammattei have restricted access to the AHPN, curtailed its funding and dismissed most of the staff. The archive, long treated as an independent institution with autonomous finances, has been placed under the control of the ministry of culture and is strictly regulated.
“What happened is that the archive opened up a discussion, and that caused fear,” said Gonzales. Fear still runs through the spine of Guatemalan society 24 years after the peace agreements.
For years, the military establishment and the Guatemalan government had claimed that there were no archives from the civil war era. It had been impossible even to track down what happened to Gonzales’s brother, Orlando, and Estrada’s father, Otto, let alone find justice.
The discovery of the AHPN crushed those claims and shocked the nation.
Suddenly, millions of records and files compiled for decades were brought to light. There was finally proof that the police had been involved in the disappearance of tens of thousands of Guatemalans – from leftist activists to ordinary citizens.
“Everyone knew that the police did the dirty work for the military during the civil war, and there was the proof,” Gonzales told Index.
Thanks to the United Nations Development Programme and foreign funding, the AHPN was run as an independent institution, employing up to 150 workers. Many were former leftist activists who had fought in the civil war and became archivists to find out what had happened to their brothers-in-arms.
Gonzales’s own family was also political. In the late ‘70s, his sister was often at odds with the military dictatorship which ran Guatemala during the civil war and she was threatened. Orlando, the brother, was not involved in politics but one night he was stopped at a checkpoint while he was travelling northwards towards the Atlantic to receive a shipment.
An indigenous man in Nebaj, Quiché, Guatemala, participates in a commemorative act on the anniversary of Guatemala’s Trial for Genocide on 10 May, 2015
CREDIT: Morena Pérez Joachin
He disappeared, and to this day his family doesn’t know what happened to him.
Their story is far from unique. Amnesty International estimates that up to 45,000 people were disappeared in Guatemala during the civil war — which went on from 1960 to 1996 – close to the astonishing rate of one out of every 200 of the population at that time.
As he was spending a lot of time in the AHPN, Rafael decided to film what he saw inside.
The documentary he produced with fellow filmmaker Anaïs Taracena is a deep dive among the kilometres of eerie shelves and dusted folders that compose the archive.
In the film, a woman comes looking for answers about her brother’s fate and is brought to a daunting room where every wall is covered with mugshots of desaparecidos: men and women, young and old, gay people, priests – the whole range of Guatemalan society of those years.
The woman and the viewer drown into this well of pain, surrounded by the eyes of the victims looking into the void.
Her search is successful. In front of her brother’s photo hanging on the wall she whispers to the camera: “This is what we, the relatives of the victims, have always known: that there are records, documents…”
For many Guatemalans, the AHPN represented a new beginning.
“It gave me much hope, because it’s a source that one can consult when he wants,” said Estrada, whose father went missing in the ‘80s, never to reappear.
“You need to understand, not all the relatives are in the same step of the process. There are people who only now are beginning to accept that maybe their folk are desaparecidos, so having a physical reference there to consult changed everything.”
That reference puts the recent troubles of the AHPN under even further scrutiny. The removal of the archive from public eyes is only the latest episode of a series of attacks on historical memory that relatives of the civil war victims say started just as the conflict reached an end.
When the Commission for Historical Clarification published a report in 1997, blaming state security forces for 93% of war atrocities, little happened apart from a formal apology on behalf of the state for the actions committed during the war. “Memory is just something that is not talked about, not on television, nor in schools,” Taracena, the filmmaker who worked with Rafael on the archive documentary, told Index.
“The state wants to turn the page, be done with what happened in the war, and forget about it.”
Taracena thinks the limits imposed on the archive represent a missed opportunity for the country to confront its past.
But this is not an issue limited to Guatemala. Many other countries in Latin America have experienced the trauma of having their own citizens disappeared by the state: Argentina, Brazil and Chile as a result of ruthless rightwing dictatorships; Colombia, because of brutal paramilitary warfare; and, most recently, Venezuela.
As in Guatemala, thousands of families in those countries will probably never know what has happened to their relatives, but truth commissions have been established in recent decades to preserve the historical memory.
In Europe, Spain had to wait three decades after the restoration of democracy to pass a Historical Memory Law and to have a debate about its past.
“In Guatemala we were moving faster: Spain took too long, 30 years. Here we were already having trials, investigations,” said Taracena.
“The AHPN, the action of the Association of Forensic Anthropology in digging mass graves, those were a chance to have that debate [but] it was halted. The years from 2010 to 2016 were very good, lots of actions from NGOs in finding the truth, and all of a sudden it stopped.”
Gonzales thinks he will probably never find out what happened to his brother.
Their mother, who spent the last years of her life fighting dementia while trying to preserve his memory, died at the beginning of this year.
“After she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and started losing her memory, she took refuge in the memories of my brother and that was it until her death,” he said.
One of her last acts before she died was to donate her DNA to the Association of Forensic Anthropology, with the hope it could one day identify her son. Gonzales did the same, and now he waits for another government to reopen the archives.