National Police Archive Contributes Evidence:  The Historical Archive of the former National Police has begun to shed light on human rights violations committed during the armed conflict and the structures that allowed them.

There is not a single document that contains an order for execution or forced disappearance in the Historical Archive of the National Police (PN) in Guatemala City.  The authors of the reports took good care not to be so specific, but left traces that, when scrupulously examined by experts at the Human Rights Ombudsman's office (PDH), could help to reveal the perpetrators of abuses committed during the period of repression in Guatemala.

To piece together hundreds of the as yet unresolved human rights violations committed by the Police from 1975 to 1985, it has taken a large dose of patience and many critical eyes.  The PDH investigators have had to scour each name and fact, as insignificant as they seem, in order to prove the counterinsurgency role played by the PN.  The evidence found implicates the recently deceased ex-director of the PN, German Chupina Barahona, and the fugitive ex-director of the Department of the Interior, Donaldo Alvarez.

One Hundred Sixty PDH investigators have been piecing together this puzzle, rescuing and analyzing the PN Archives over the last two years.  The accumulated data could serve as documentary proof in court cases of some of the 45,000 people forcibly disappeared; this is the primary objective of the PDH in investigating the Archives discovered by an Investigative Commission directed by historian Edilberto Cifuentes in July of 2005

Of the 80 million documents in the Archive, 5 million have been examined and digitized.  The examination of these documents has uncovered PN operations such as the chain of command, operative policies of repression, and methods used to aid the Army counterinsurgency plan.

Spies Everywhere

The most substantial documents are those sent by informers and those classified as "confidential."  According to the data found, the PN placed spies in factories, churches, universities, unions, and even public offices.  One of the most interesting reports discovered by the investigators was one sent daily by an informer in the Institute of Seismology, Volcanology, Meteorology, and Hydrology (Insivumeh) whose only function was to closely monitor his co-workers.

"These documents demonstrate that the Police had infiltrated absolutely every sector.  Who would have imagined that they would even infiltrate Insivumeh?" says a surprised Gustavo Meoño, director of the Archive.  Informers reported to the PN on the conversations and relationships had, as well as books read by co-workers.  In fact, some informers' actual names are identified in the reports.

The reports considered relevant were: type-written in a standard format in which the person neither sending nor receiving was identified; sealed "confidential"; and always sent to the PN director.  On many of the rescued documents, Chupina Barahona's handwriting appears in the left margin directing, "To the 6th Command.  Investigate and Proceed."  Due to a prohibition on the reproduction of these reports, a sample document cannot be published here

The 6th Command

The feared 6th Command, directed by Pedro Garcia Arredondo, and the old Division of Criminal Investigation (DIC) were in charge of verifying the information contained in the reports and deciding what should be done with a "suspicious" person.  The work of the PDH investigators is precisely to verify what happened with these people.  In some cases, they have found documentation of the registration and admittance into prison of individuals.  They have also found reports of disappearances filed by family members.

The PN documentation ends here, but if the individual later appeared dead with signs of torture, it is not hard to deduce what the order "Investigate and Proceed" meant, even if no document explicitly states it.  Investigators have also found lists of people who were detained during searches, on special operations, or on routine raids; these apparently legal apprehensions result in forced disappearances since it is still unknown what happened to these people.

The archive has revealed information about various security strategies elaborated by the Guatemalan State between 1954 and 1985.  The PN, founded in September of 1881, did not take on a repressive role until the overthrow of the Arbenz government in 1954.  It reached its most brutal period from 1975-85 during the governments of Romeo Lucas García, Efraín Ríos Montt and Humberto Mejía Víctores.

Between 1954 and 1964, the strategy of the Guatemalan State was anti-communist, aimed at impeding communist political movements.  This policy sought to strike all sectors of society, generating terror in the citizenry.  The Police were designated to create black-lists and jail people denounced by anti-communist committees.

An order found among the documents solicited the location, arrest and "preventative detention" of a list of people to avert a possible protest during the 1955 visit of the then Vice-President of the United States, Richard Nixon

The Bodies

In the 1960s the number of dead bodies with signs of torture that appeared around Guatemala City was relatively low, and the cause of death listed in police reports was quite specific.  In the 1970s, however, things began to change; assassinations increased and the cause of death for hundreds of young people was now registered simply as "cardiac arrest".

After the rise of the guerrilla movement, the Guatemalan State assigned the PN a counterinsurgency role subordinate to the army command.  The police acted only in urban areas, creating webs of informants that allowed it to quash intellectual, trade-union, or political movements that could support the guerrilla insurgency, directly or indirectly.

The Internal Investigations Section of the DIC was in charge of processing the majority of intelligence gathered through informants.  Although the DIC changed names several times in its history, its basic structure remained the same.  In fact, according to documental evidence there was a strategy to keep key figures directing the repression in charge of the institution.

Various public faces were assigned to head the PN during the 20 years coinciding with the height of its repressive role.  "Each time that there was a scandal involving the institution these public faces were put on the chopping block as scapegoats while the people with real power within the institution remained hidden and unaffected," affirms Meoño.  These were not clandestine positions but figures within the official organizational makeup of the PN—yet they were always behind the scenes.  From 1975-85 the PN was composed of a General Director, a Sub-Director, an Inspector General, and six Operating Bodies, in addition to the Departmental Delegations.

Method of Investigation

In order to make the investigation of the Archive more efficient the PDH selected the units of the PN considered to have committed the worst excesses.  These units would also serve as a model to analyze the remaining PN units.  Likewise, based on the police units the PDH investigators divided into working groups to study the documents. The units of the PN included: General Direction, Internal Inspections, Segundo Cuerpo, Quetzaltenango Headquarters, Criminal Investigation Division, Identification Cabinet, and Committee of Joint Operations.

Clearly, the investigators placed special attention on the 6th Command, the operational arm of the Segundo Cuerpo, which generally received orders from the director of the PN.  The 6th Command operated during the government of Lucas Garcia and continued throughout that of Rios Montt, though operating under the new name of the 6th Cuerpo

Key Words

The PDH working groups are searching for key words among the documents such as disappearance, kidnapping, torture, cadaver XX or names of people whose family members have reported their disappearance or execution to the PDH.  They have already identified 30,000 key documents that have been scanned and systematized into a digital data base to be used as evidence in court.

The documents serve as valuable proof in establishing the chain of command and the degree of control the directors had over subordinate officers.  Nothing happened within the PN without the knowledge of superior authorities.  To keep the director informed, each PN unit filed frequent reports that were reviewed by Internal Inspections.  The General Inspector also assumed internal control of agents, imposing harsh punishments on those who did not follow the rules.  PDH investigators have found cases in which officers were put in 30-day confinement for speaking about personal matters on the patrol radio.

The Committee of Joint Operations, a task group composed of both police and army officials, generated operating plans.  This group also received a great deal of confidential correspondence from informers.  The army would ultimately take charge of and interrogate most of those detained by the police in order to extract information or to send them to military prisons.  This Committee illustrates the subordination of the PN to the military.

At this point, the PDH has only been able to analyze 6% of the documents contained in the Archive.  A statistical analysis that takes a random sample from all the documents has established that at least 15% contain evidence of human rights violations.  If this is true, as it seems, why hasn't the Archive ever been destroyed?  According to Alberto Fuentes, one of the heads of the project, the Archive was conserved because, "It is the proof of their (the Guatemalan State's) triumph." What they didn't know is that it could also be used as the evidence for their condemnation.

Gustavo Meoño, director of the PN Historical Archives, believes that the facts about how the structures operated in the past can help the CICIG (International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala) to investigate present operations of organized crime.

Gustavo Meoño evaluates the results of the recovery and investigation of the PN Historical Archive documents.

Q. Have your expectations with respect to the recuperation of the Archives been met?

A. We have reached the basic objectives of the first phase, keeping in mind that this was a huge deposit of deteriorating paperwork.  From an archivist point of view, we stopped the deterioration process. What's more, we've concluded the process of preservation, organization and description of close to six million documents.  At the same time, we have investigated the key years from 1975 to 1985.

Q. There are those that thought the Archives were going to be nothing but a compilation of historic documents, and would not be investigated for human rights violations.

A.  We cannot forget that the mission of the Human Rights Ombudsman's Office (PDH) is not just to save and preserve Archives; its objective, in this case, is to find documents that prove human rights violations.

Q.  Can you assert that you have found proof that could serve as evidence to take cases to trial?

A.  Definitely, yes.  But it's important to understand the reality of an administrative archive; we're not going to find a smoking gun.  The documents won't contain explicit orders to kidnap, torture, or assassinate...In administrative documentation, things appear expressed in a different way, but they appear

Q.  The Cicig is interested in understanding how organized crime operates today.  But to understand today, it is necessary to know how it operated in the past.  The information of the Archives could be very valuable to them.  Would you be willing to share the information with the Cicig?

A.  To me, this is one of the most important and urgent contributions that can be made by the PDH Archive project because the strategies, structures, operative policies, patterns of action, chains of command, and the flow of information do not differ much from what occurs today.