Dignifying the Guerillero, Not the Assassin

Dignifying the Guerillero, Not the Assassin, by Kristen Weld (2012)

This article told the story of the archival work done to uncover the disappearances of thousands of Latin Americans who disagreed with their governments, specifically in Guatemala. For decades, government officials, army generals, and police kidnapped, tortured, and killed people who didn’t support the government. This group included, priests, nuns, teachers, students, communists, union members, and more. The government denied any wrongdoing, saying that these “subversive” people were probably “lounging ‘in some Communist country with some scholarship or in Havana, Cuba.” Even after 1996, the government continued to deny disappearances due to lack of sufficient proof.

Then, millions of state files were discovered that provided evidence of the disappearances. The Project for the Recovery of the National Police Historical Archives took on the job of cleaning, organizing, digitizing, and analyzing the records. This project was funded by aid from foreign countries. These records of deaths and kidnappings “indicated, as many had known but nobody had ever been able to definitively prove, that the police had used record keeping as a means of ideological control, or what Ann Stoler terms a ‘technology of rule.'” (pg 38) The archives provided Guatemalan citizens the ability to say that they were a victim of vicious state oppression, that they weren’t imagining it all.

Weld makes the point that archives do not neutrally store documents, they transform information into knowledge and power. And that is what the Project for the Recovery of the National Police Historical Archives is doing. The information found in the archives has been used in criminal prosecution, and it’s making some people very unhappy. The Association of Military Veterans of Guatemala who support hard right politics are staunchly opposed to this “misinterpretation of government documents” taking place. The threaten that “peaceful coexistence will be impossible if society continues to be confronted in this way.”

This project is also being used to enact a policy of Reivindicacion, which entails “reassigning specificity, subjectivity, and identity to those targeted by the counterinsurgency, dead or living. It is the retrospective conferral of dignity and agency upon historical actors tarred as traitors engaged in subversive activity.” It’s about focusing on the future rather than the past, and building a generation of Guatemalans who are not afraid to stand up and defend their principals.

This was an incredibly powerful and upsetting article to read, and it forcibly reminded me of what occurred in South Africa just 20 years ago. When I visited South Africa two years ago, I learned about the Apartheid an how it divided South African citizens into groups based on their race. Horrifying atrocities and political injustices were forced upon the black and mixed race citizens of South Africa during Apartheid, and the country is still feeling its effects today, although it ended in 1991. Today, a movement geared toward restorative justice, like reivindicacion, is taking place. The history and crimes of the apartheid have been brought to lihgt, and social and governmental policies are attempting to put to rights the imbalance of power and wealth created by Apartheid.