Page by dusty page, Guatemala's violent past is uncovered

Published: 2007-08-16

GUATEMALA CITY (CNS) -- Church leaders say 80 million pages of secret police records being reviewed by the government promise Guatemalans a rare chance to rewrite the history of their violent land. The moldy records were found by accident in 2005 in an abandoned section of a police compound in Guatemala City. Some of the records date back more than a century, their faded pages describing the daily bureaucracy of repression employed for decades by Guatemala's government. Of most interest to investigators are records from 1975 to 1985, the most violent period of Guatemala's civil war, during which 160,000 people were killed and 40,000 disappeared. Although workers from the government's human rights prosecutor have so far examined only about 5 million pages of the records, many are confident that what they are finding will shake up this traumatized land. "During the conflict there was a sense of fear, for you never knew who was behind things," said Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini Imeri of San Marcos, president of the Guatemalan bishops' conference. "The uncovering of the archives marks that we're entering a different era. There is an opportunity to know who was involved in this, to rewrite the history of violence in our country and identify who the killers were."

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