| Abstract | Between 1961 and 1996, more than 200,000 people in Guatemala lost their lives as a result of state-orchestrated acts of terror denied still by the national security forces who committed them. A U.N. Truth Commission was repeatedly obstructed by army and police personnel from gaining access to official records, being told that no documentation of the type sought existed. Bureaucracies do not work that way, even ones with good reason to destroy or conceal evidence of an incriminating nature. It was nonetheless of startling import when an attorney working for Guatemala's Human Rights Office stumbled upon an archive recording the deeds of the National Police. Known now to contain an estimated 80 million documents, the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional is a cabinet of atrocities that reveals conspiracy and complicity on the part of police officers engaged in a ghoulish network of surveillance, intimidation, abduction, torture, and murder.
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