Guatemala Postings

The Spanish Genocide Case
Summaries of the testimony provided by five Mayan Quiché survivors and four expert witnesses

Death Squad Dossier
Military logbook of the disappeared

The Guatemalan National Police Archives

Drugs and The Guatemalan Military
A Report from the Texas Observer

The Guatemalan Military: What the U.S. Files Reveal

Colonel Byron Disrael Lima Estrada

U.S. Policy in Guatemala, 1963-1993

The CIA and Assassinations
The Guatemala 1954 Documents

Postings from the Archive's Mexico Project:

Dear Mr. President: Lessons on Justice from Guatemala

Mexico's Southern Front: Guatemala and the Search for Security

Historical Archives Lead to Arrest of Police Officers in Guatemalan Disappearance Declassified documents show U.S. Embassy knew that Guatemalan security forces were behind wave of abductions of students and labor leaders National Security Archive calls for release of military files and investigation into intellectual authors of the 1984 abduction of Fernando García and other disappearances

Washington, DC, March 17, 2009 – Following a stunning breakthrough in a 25-year-old case of political terror in Guatemala, the National Security Archive today is posting declassified U.S. documents about the disappearance of Edgar Fernando García, a student leader and trade union activist captured by Guatemalan security forces in 1984. The documents show that García’s capture was an organized political abduction orchestrated at the highest levels of the Guatemalan government.

The dormant case was brought back to life earlier this month when Guatemalan authorities used evidence found in the massive archives of the former National Police to arrest a two police officers (one active duty, one retired), charging them with kidnapping, illegal detention and abuse of duty. Arrest warrants have also been issued for two more suspects, ex-officers with the infamous Special Operations Brigade (BROE), a police unit linked to death squad activities during the 1980s by human rights groups.

The arrests are a testament to the important work being done by investigators in the police archive. Since the discovery of the vast, deteriorating archive in 2005, the files have proven to contain a treasure trove of evidence in some of Guatemala’s most notorious cases of human rights atrocities stemming from the country’s 36-year brutal civil conflict. According to the Historical Clarification Commission, 200,000 unarmed civilians died in the war, and 40,000 were estimated to have “disappeared.”

The U.S. records published today provide illuminating details on the government campaign of terror designed to destroy Guatemala’s urban and rural social movements during the 1980s that led to abduction of hundreds of labor leaders, including Fernando García. The posting also includes information on one of Guatemala’s first human rights organizations, the Mutual Support Group (GAM), which itself became a target of government violence after its creation in 1984.

The posting also bring attention to the lingering question over Guatemala’s missing military archives, which the President ordered released over a year ago. It also provides links to the National Security Archive’s Guatemala Project homepage, with information on the death squad dossier, the police archives, and the investigative efforts to provide evidence in international and domestic human rights legal prosecution.

Read the full posting in English here or in Spanish here.

 

About the Project - In July 1994, the Guatemalan government and armed rebel groups signed the Human Rights Accord establishing the Historical Clarification Commission.  That same month, the National Security Archive began work on a Guatemala Documentation Project, an effort to obtain the release of secret U.S. files on Guatemala. The project’s first objective was to support the human rights investigations of the UN-sponsored Historical Clarification Commission, charged with analyzing the origins of the country’s brutal 36-year civil conflict. After the commission published its report in 1999, the Archive began working with Guatemalan human rights organizations to mine the U.S. records for use in several pivotal human rights cases. The project also assisted in the dissemination and analysis of the first documents to emerge from Guatemala’s secret archives. In the years that followed, the project also assisted in the dissemination and analysis of the first records to emerge from Guatemala’s secret archives. In partnership with several U.S. human rights groups, project director Kate Doyle made public the Guatemalan “death squad dossier” in 1999, a military logbook chronicling the forced disappearance of dozens of citizens in the 1980s. In 2002, Doyle provided evidence and expert testimony in the Myrna Mack trial, which ended with the conviction of a senior military officer for planning and ordering Mack’s assassination in 1990. Doyle currently serves as an advisor to the massive recovery effort launched by the Guatemalan human rights prosecutor’s office in 2005 to rescue, clean and organize for public access millions of pages of records from the former Guatemalan National Police. She is also involved as an investigator and analyst in ongoing human rights legal action, including the international genocide case in Spain and the case of the “death squad dossier,” currently before the Inter-American Commission.