GUATEMALA: The recently discovered secret police archive could provide leads to identify those killed in Guatemala's 36-year war. Deputies of Guatemala's human rights ombudsman stumbled upon it accidentally in July, 2005, when they were investigating complaints that explosives were being unsafely stored in the area.
The documents number more than 80 million pages and date as far back as the 1880s.
Stacked from floor to ceiling in room after room, they have been badly damaged by water, rats and insects, and do not include records from precincts in several regions where the worst atrocities occurred.
However, buried in the mountains of paper are priceless finds like death certificates for unidentified bodies found by police. By comparing the fingerprints on the certificates with those on the national identity cards of missing victims "you can find if there's a match and then search for the body at a specific cemetery", said Fredy Peccerelli, head of the Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation.
Alberto Fuentes, who is overseeing the preservation and analysis of the archives, said investigators have also come across a few arrest warrants for people detained for "political crimes" who later turned up dead - including grandmothers and babies.
But he cautioned that it would take time to find enough documents in the archives to mount a legal case against their killers. "This is a project of 20 years," he said.