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On or off the record? Detecting patterns of silence about death in Guatemala’s National Police Archive

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Abstract

This paper investigates how the production of police records was linked to the policies of repression and violence during Guatemala’s civil war. We provide empirical evidence from the Historical Archive of the Guatemalan National Police that the police used language, terminology and codes to record deaths in ways that produced silences about the level of violence during the height of repressive military rule. Using a dataset derived from a statistically valid sample of police records together with qualitative archival analysis, we find evidence of profound changes in the terminology used to record and report on deaths—changes that follow a pattern consistent with the policies of information control and concealment of the three different military regimes that ruled Guatemala between 1978 and 1985. We argue that researchers will need to consider the silences created through the selective use of terminology in documents when using archives to produce historical knowledge. Detecting and intercepting silence will be especially important as state records are increasingly sought in service of ongoing pursuits for truth and justice about past atrocities.

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Notes

  1. “I prefer to maintain the silence” January 26, 2012 (translation by the corresponding author).

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the hard work by the leadership and staff at the AHPN over the past decade. They also wish to recognize the Human Rights Data Analysis Group for their leadership in the archival sampling project and their efforts in preparing the AHPN quantitative dataset. A special thanks to David Wallace, Tanya Harmer, Daniel Guzmán, Patrick Ball, Kirsten Weld, Ciaran Trace, John Ciorciari, Claudia Carolina López and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

National Science Foundation (US), Open Data IGERT (Grant No. 0903629).

Authors' contribution

TG conducted the research and the analysis in this paper. With colleagues at HRDAG, she co-led the design, collection and preparation of the probabilistically sampled data from the AHPN. MH provided the comparative framework on sampling in archives and assisted with writing in this version of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information, University of Michigan, 3433 North Quad, 105 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Tamy Guberek & Margaret Hedstrom

Authors
  1. Tamy Guberek
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  2. Margaret Hedstrom
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Correspondence to Tamy Guberek.

Additional information

Tamy Guberek wrote an earlier version of this paper as her M.A./M.Sc. thesis: “Off the Record: Concealing State Violence in Guatemala’s National Police, 1978–1985” (Columbia University and London School of Economics and Political Science, 2012).

Appendix

Appendix

Tables 2 and 3.

Table 2 The estimated proportion each term was used to describe deaths in the AHPN documents, with standard errors
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Table 3 Estimates of the total number of AHPN documents created using each death term, with standard errors
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Guberek, T., Hedstrom, M. On or off the record? Detecting patterns of silence about death in Guatemala’s National Police Archive. Arch Sci 17, 27–54 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-017-9274-3

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