‘Irreversible’: The Role of Digitization to Repurpose State Records of Repression

Since mid-2005, archivist–activists at the Historical Archive of the National Police of Guatemala have been digitizing a century’s worth of previously suppressed police records so as to protect, mobilize and provide access to them – 23 million pages to date. We find that digitization amplified the staff’s repurposing of the archive to serve victims of human rights violations. Digitization enhances shortand long-term safeguards for the archive’s physical integrity, probative value and enduring accessibility, but has required critical human factors and institutional solidarity, most notably partnerships with international donors and allied organizations, and Guatemalan nongovernmental organizations. Finally, technology offers a lens to analyze the persistent challenges to promoting truth and justice in Guatemala. We show how simple, often ad hoc approaches to digitization developed under political urgency can have an irreversible impact when used to amplify a unified mission driven by a committed community of archival workers. K E Y W O R D S : digitization, access to information, technology, archives, Guatemala I N T R O D U C T I O N In July 2005, when the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office fortuitously found the overwhelming cache of records of the former National Police (Policı́a Nacional, or PN) sprawled across seven warehouses in Guatemala City in deplorable condition, one of the first major investments was purchasing computers and a fleet * PhD Candidate, School of Information, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Email: tamyg@umich.edu † Head of Document Analysis and Expert Testimonies, Historical Archive of the National Police, Guatemala. Email: veliamuralles@yahoo.es ** Postdoctoral Fellow, John Carter Brown Library and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Email: halperta@gmail.com 1 The authors are indebted to the many people at the Historical Archive of the National Police (AHPN), the Association for Memory, Dignity and Hope (AMDE) and colleagues at La Casa de la Cultura Profesor Julio César de la Roca (LCC) who shared the experiences and insights we reflect upon in this article. We are also extremely grateful for the dedicated research support received from Alberto Fuentes, Luisa Fernanda Rivas and José Rodolfo Kepfer throughout this project. We extend special thanks to our University of Texas (UT) colleagues, especially everyone on the LLILAS Benson digital initiatives team, as well as all involved in hosting the celebratory event between the AHPN and UT in July 2018. Finally, we are indebted to Kentaro Toyama and Kirsten Weld for valuable input and support during the research and writing process. We also thank the anonymous reviewers for thoughtful feedback. VC The Author(s) (2019). Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email journals.permissions@oup.com 1 International Journal of Transitional Justice, 2019, 0, 1–21 doi: 10.1093/ijtj/ijy035 Article D ow naded rom http/academ ic.p.com /ijtj/advance-articledoi/10.1093/ijtj/ijy035/5301646 by Brow n U niersity user on 05 Feruary 2019 of scanners. Unsure of how long the human rights community would have custody over the records of this former state security agency, which had historically been heavily involved in surveillance and repression, the archivists saw digitization as a way to secure the information contained in the fragile papers and to make access to these documents by civil society ‘irreversible.’ In the 13 years since its discovery, with indispensable support from many international allies and in a postconflict context with powerful interests on the side of impunity, a committed group of people in Guatemala have turned what is now known as the Historical Archive of the National Police (Archivo Histórico de la Policı́a Nacional, or AHPN) ‘from a terror archive into a people’s archive.’ This has involved the conservation, organization and description of 80 million pages of documents ranging from reports, to orders, memos, surveillance logs and summaries of PN activities, written by police agents at all ranks. To date, 23 million of those pages have been restored, archivally organized and digitized. We argue that this digitization has had an as yet underanalyzed role in the AHPN workers’ ability to succeed in some of their most important transitional justice achievements. Archival work at the AHPN, including digitization, has been motivated by three goals: to protect the records, to mobilize them for truth and accountability, and to make them available to Guatemalan citizens. The process of using digital reduplication as a protection mechanism began in 2008, when the archive partnered with the Swiss Federal Archives (SFA) to send digital copies abroad for preservation. Since then, the AHPN has extended this practice by sharing large subcollections of the archive with international and local partners domestically and abroad. The use of metadata to authenticate digital records and the development of auxiliary databases to enhance searches in the archive have enabled AHPN staff to mobilize digital records to serve public prosecutors and community members. As of August 2018, certified digital copies of documents from the AHPN had been analyzed, submitted and accepted as probative evidence in 13 criminal trials that resulted in groundbreaking convictions – a watershed for justice in Guatemala. Finally, in order to provide ‘unrestricted’ information to visitors, the AHPN established an Information Access Unit (Unidad de Acceso a Información, or UAI) in 2009. Individuals who inquire about what the police recorded about victims, or even about themselves, can take digital copies home with them to contemplate and preserve. Having the documents in digital form has expanded the ways the records have and can be used to search, triangulate, analyze and submit PN documents for legal proceedings and historical research. 1 Gustavo Meo~no Brenner, AHPN coordinator from 2005 through August 2018. He believed from the start of the project that digitization was ‘the only aspect of this that is irreversible.’ See, Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 78. The belief that gains achieved with digitization were ‘irreversible’ was echoed across almost all interviews conducted with AHPN workers. 2 Weld, supra n 1 at 237. 3 These include convictions of officers involved in the burning of the Spanish Embassy in 1980, the violent abduction of Emma Molina Theissen and the forced disappearance of her brother Marco Antonio, and the pending ‘Death Squad Dossier’ trial into the forced disappearance of almost 200 citizens. 4 AHPN, Del Silencio a La Memoria: Revelaciones Del Archivo Histórico de La Policı́a Nacional (2011). 2 T. Guberek et al. D ow naded rom http/academ ic.p.com /ijtj/advance-articledoi/10.1093/ijtj/ijy035/5301646 by Brow n U niersity user on 05 Feruary 2019 The AHPN staff who have led these efforts – a team which has fluctuated in size from 100 to over 200 people – have acquired highly specialized knowledge of archival best practices, Guatemalan history, PN administrative structures and operation, and the needs of diverse user groups seeking answers about the past in the police files. In this article, we describe how the AHPN team, along with international partners, has used digital technology to preserve and expand access to archival records and to facilitate truth-seeking. We draw on Kentaro Toyama’s theory of the amplifying power of technology, which allows us to center the people – archivist– activists motivated to preserve archival records, facilitate truth-seeking and expand access to archival records – as the crucial drivers of the AHPN’s impact. While digitization has amplified the work of the AHPN team and provided a safeguard against damage, we also find that it has only had a limited role in enabling meaningful access beyond the walls of the archive. The AHPN is an unusually complex digital collection because of the material conditions of the archive, the size and administrative nature of the collection, and the political conditions of its creation and preservation. The AHPN has responded to this complexity by developing a digitization model centered on human expertise, institutional alliances and personal empathy. By analyzing the AHPN’s efforts to scale access at the University of Texas (UT) and through a ‘regionalization’ initiative, we can also appreciate the challenges of scaling up that model – so dependent on the capacities of the people driving it. In addition, by considering the AHPN’s plan to bring copies to more locations throughout Guatemala – thus expanding the possibility of access – we also glean evidence of some resistance to facing what these records may reveal about the difficult past. Given the contentious nature of their transitional justice work, the AHPN leadership, staff and partners have operated under a constant sense of threat. By far the most serious one came on 3 August 2018: in a series of abrupt actions, the Ministry of Culture and Sport and the UN Development Program – the agency that has administered the AHPN’s international aid since the start of the project – removed Gustavo Meo~no, coordinator of the AHPN since 2005, and Ana Carla Ericastilla, director of the Archivo General de Centro América (the Guatemalan public institution that has held direct custody over the AHPN holding since 2009), from their leadership positions. Some observers and AHPN staff members believe these actions are a backlash against the AHPN for its role in securing successful convictions of former high-ranking Guatemalan officials. While writing this article, we saw further attacks on truth and justice efforts in Guatemala. For example, in September, President Jimmy Morales’ government took steps to block the operation of the International Commission against Imp