GUATEMALA: Police archives could prompt civil war charges as official human rights ombudsman discloses files from 1960-1996 conflict

Record ID: 402288

  • Title: GUATEMALA: Police archives could prompt civil war charges as official human rights ombudsman discloses files from 1960-1996 conflict
  • Date: 27th March 2009
  • Summary: GUATEMALA CITY, GUATEMALA (MARCH 24, 2009) (REUTERS) GENERAL VIEW OF GUATEMALAN GOVERNMENT'S HUMAN RIGHTS OMBUDSMAN, RELEASING FIRST REPORT ATTENDEES DURING PRESENTATION (SOUNDBITE) (Spanish) GUATEMALAN GOVERNMENT'S HUMAN RIGHTS OMBUDSMAN, SERGIO MORALES, SAYING: "The files shows that our police, during 1975 - 1985, committed grave human rights violations." ATTENDEES LIS
  • Embargoed: 11th April 2009 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Guatemala
  • Country: Guatemala
  • Topics: Domestic Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVAAWO8ELA0RLMTC8EFYJV3HMH5R
  • Story Text: Information long hidden in police archives covered with mold and bat droppings could implicate hundreds of former officers accused of killing students and leftists during Guatemala's 36-year civil war, human rights activists said on Tuesday (March 24).
    Sergio Morales, the Guatemalan government's human rights ombudsman, released the first report on Tuesday on the contents of 80 million documents unearthed four years ago that dated from the 1960-1996 conflict.
    "The files shows that our police, during 1975 - 1985, committed grave human rights violations," said Morales.
    Activists hope information from the archives will lead authorities to arrest hundreds of former police officers who may be implicated in crimes committed during a civil war in which around 250,000 people were killed or disappeared.
    Two former members of a police unit linked to death squads that operated during the civil war were detained this month based on evidence from the archive.
    "Evidence also shows the national police, cleared areas to make it easier for other security forces, parallel groups for elimination, covered up murders, favoured extortions and took part in illegal detentions, forced disappearances, torture and executed citizens for political reasons,"
    added Morales.
    Human rights workers discovered the dusty floor-to-ceiling stacks of papers in 2005 when they went into a rat-infested munitions depot in Guatemala City to investigate complaints by nearby residents about old explosives stored there.
    The government gave the human rights ombudsman permission to investigate the archives from a civil war-era police force so linked to repression and disappearances that it was dissolved in 1997 after leftist guerrillas and security forces signed a peace agreement.
    Archivists have cleaned, scanned and filed some 11 million documents, scouring them for information from the conflict.
    Scanned images of 7 million documents from the archive will be available to the public free of charge from Wednesday so that the relatives of victims can try to find out what happened to their loved ones.
    Bitterness runs deep among Guatemalan families who have never found out what happened to relatives who disappeared. Few former officers have been convicted for civil war crimes.
    The arrest of the two former officers this month was linked to the case of student Fernando Garcia, who was shot on his way to work in 1984, taken to a police hospital and never seen again.
    Using archives to prosecute human rights abuses is still difficult in a country where former dictator Efrain Rios Montt serves as a member of Congress while being tried for genocide in both Guatemala and Spain.
    The rights ombudsman has complained that several investigators in the Garcia case have been threatened and one was assaulted after the arrests of the two former officers.
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