Guatemala
Police Archive under Threat
Published: Aug 13, 2018
Edited by Kate Doyle
For more information, contact:
202-994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu
Repository
of historic human rights evidence faces government crackdown
SIGN THE PETITION
LİNK
: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/dc.html?doc=4755258-Document-Pro-AHPN-English
Petition from organizations and
individuals supporting the Historical Archive of the National Police
The National Security Archive is
collecting institutional and individual signatures and will HELP coordinate the
international response. To sign, send your name (individual or
institutional) to kadoyle@gwu.edu with the subject
line “AHPN signature.”
El Archivo de Seguridad Nacional
está recopilando firmas institucionales e individuales y ayudará a coordinar la
respuesta internacional. Para firmar, envíe su nombre (individual o
institucional) a kadoyle@gwu.edu con el subject line
“Firma AHPN”.
Washington, D.C., August 13,
2018—Guatemala’s renowned Historical
Archive of the National Police (AHPN) is in crisis after its director Gustavo
Meoño Brenner was abruptly removed in one of a series of recent actions
orchestrated by the Guatemalan government and a United Nations office. The
actions also placed the AHPN’s remaining staff of more than fifty people on
temporary contract, and transferred oversight for the repository from the
country’s national archives, where it had functioned since 2009, to the Ministry
of Culture and Sports.
Meoño learned of his removal on Friday, August 3, when a convoy of
government vehicles pulled up in front of the Police Archive, and officials
from the Culture Ministry and the Guatemalan office of the United Nations
Development Program (UNDP) entered, demanding that he leave. “The operation was
executed with all the characteristics of a commando strike,” one press account reported.
The unexpected move threatens to
jeopardize the stability of the AHPN’s enormous collection of fragile National
Police documents. Since their discovery in an abandoned and deteriorating state
on a Guatemala City police base in 2005, hundreds of volunteers and paid
employees have cycled through the AHPN under Meoño’s leadership to clean,
organize, scan, and make public over twenty million pages of the estimated 8
linear kilometers of paper records. A UNDP employee with no experience in
archival management has been named to replace Meoño as director.
Historically, the UNDP played an
important role in the creation of the Police Archive. Its Guatemala office
administered millions of dollars in donations granted to the AHPN by foreign
governments and the United Nations. The office provided technical assistance,
political advice, and administrative support. It was also a frequent ally to
the AHPN during several difficult periods in the course of the archive’s growth
and development.
Yet in a press release issued on the Sunday after Meoño’s
ouster, the UNDP failed to explain its decision to push the
long-time director out, beyond stating that his contract had ended and would
not be renewed. The release is written in bland, bureaucratic language that
provides no detailed plans for the future management of the Police Archive
beyond ensuring that it is “strengthened in its institutionality and
sustainability.”
For the National Security
Archive, Meoño’s abrupt removal, the decision to shift oversight of the AHPN
out from under the careful stewardship of Ana Carla Ericastillo – director of
the national archives of Guatemala – to the untested Ministry of Culture and
Sports, and the UNDP’s refusal to provide dozens of long-time staff members
with reasonable working contracts are deeply troubling developments.
The National Security Archive has an association with the
Historical Archive of the National Police that goes back to the AHPN’s
beginning. The Archive’s
Kate Doyle and Carlos Osorio had the privilege of visiting the site of the
massive Police Archive just weeks after it was discovered in
July 2005. They witnessed firsthand the awesome task that faced Meoño and his
colleagues to rescue a treasure trove of historic documentation that was
rotting with mold after years of neglect. Doyle went on to advise the AHPN
project, bringing professional archivist Dr. Trudy Peterson conduct an initial
assessment of the collection, and then worked with the AHPN to develop
investigative skills to identify evidence of human rights abuses. Today, Doyle
serves on the AHPN’s International Advisory Board.
In 2010, Doyle participated as an expert witness in
the first criminal human rights proceeding in Guatemala to draw on Police
Archive records as legal evidence for the prosecution. The trial of two former
police agents for the forced disappearance of labor leader Edgar Fernando
García, and a second trial in 2013 of their superiors –
including the former chief of the Guatemalan National Police, Col. Héctor Bol
de la Cruz – represented a breakthrough in human rights justice in Guatemala.
Led by Meoño, the extraordinary work of the Historical Archive of the
National Police made those prosecutions – and the many others
that followed – possible.
Indeed, it may be the Police Archive’s crucial contributions to
human rights trials that caused the government of President Jimmy Morales to
seek to control the repository and fire its director. Besides the Fernando
García case, AHPN records played a central role in trials of former army and
police officers for the 1980 deadly burning of the Spanish Embassy, and the
1981 abduction, torture and rape of Emma Molina Theissen and forced
disappearance of her 14-year-old brother Marco Antonio, among others. AHPN
documents also form the heart of evidence in the as-yet-untried “Death
Squad Dossier” investigation, concerning the mass forced
disappearance of almost 200 citizens over the course of 18 months at the height
of the country’s internal conflict.
Those cases, along with the 2013 genocide trial of ex-dictator
Efraín Ríos Montt, enraged powerful military intelligence and operational
officers who were behind the scorched earth counterinsurgency campaigns of the
1980s. They have sought to harass, intimidate, and shut down the human rights
and justice organizations contributing to the prosecutions ever since.
President Morales himself has also attacked the international investigative
body that helped strengthen human rights prosecutions and fight corruption,
known as CICIG. Since taking power, Morales’ government and the Congress his
party controls have tried to shut down CICIG and kick out its
commissioner, Iván Velásquez, without success.
So it is possible that the
government crackdown on the Historical Archive of the National Police is
another effort to halt the process of human rights justice in Guatemala and
punish its defenders. What is still utterly unclear is why an agency of the
United Nations is joining in that effort.
Since Gustavo Meoño’s dismissal,
friends of the Police Archive – among them, civil society groups, human rights
defenders, academics, lawyers, religious organizations, and international
supporters – have come together to demand an explanation for the hasty and
still unjustified actions taken by the UNDP and the Guatemalan government. Last
week, they issued a statement calling for answers from those two entities and
demanding that the AHPN’s documents be safeguarded, its investigative work
continue, and its Advisory Boards be reactivated to help guide the Police
Archive in the coming period.
The National Security Archive
joins our colleagues in Guatemala and internationally in calling for
clarification of these latest developments on the part of the government and
the UNDP. The precious holdings of the Historical Archive of the National
Police must be protected and continue to serve the causes of human rights,
accountability and justice in Guatemala.
