skygiants

Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala is probably the best book I've read on archiving in as long as I can remember.

(Except -- very unfortunately -- in the area of digital archiving, but we'll get to that.)

In 2005, the National Police Archives of Guatemala were rediscovered, moldering in a basement of the police headquarters. 'Rediscovered' is not quite the right word, it wasn't as if the archives had ever really been lost -- the police always knew where they were! -- but in this case they were also found by the Human Rights Ombudsman's office, who had been hoping to get their hands on some, any state evidence about decades of political assassinations, state-sponsored human rights abuses, and forced disappearances of people whose fates are mostly still unknown.

Normally getting money for archives is like pulling teeth -- there's nothing 'sexy' or exciting about old records -- and the Guatemalan National Archives have apparently not even been able to take in anything since like the 1960s due to being so underfunded, but secret state archives with potential evidence of human rights abuse? That, you can fund. So international money came rolling in, and a team of former activists went to work, frantically trying to make sense of as much of the archive as they could in as short a time as possible in case someone in the government changed their mind and pulled the plug on the whole project. Or, you know, someone decided to set fire to the archives before they could tell anybody anything. After all -- as one of the activists said to the author -- "Even ten years ago, they would have killed all the people working in a project like that.”

The book is about human rights, and state terror, and archiving. It's about activists learning about archiving, and why, even though it is HELLA FRUSTRATING AND FINICKY, it actually is really important to follow proper rules about original order and chain of custody tracking and proper metadata and all of that, because sometimes those rules are all you have to use as evidence. It's about the things you always hope to be able to find in an archive and the things you so rarely can -- all the things that aren't stated, that you have to infer. The police archives existed because state terror doesn't happen without a bureaucracy, but of course they never came out and said "here are the abuses we have committed and where and how," because documents created by people in structures of power reinforce those structures of power. (I saw an archivist on my pro Twitter feed today making really good points about this interview, and the 'obvious' need to question the veracity of slave narratives when they come into conflict with state records -- because of course black people's narratives can't be trusted, but STATE RECORDS would never lie!)

Archives are not neutral. Archives can be a weapon. The fact that the archives existed at all is partly due to U.S. support and training of the Guatemalan police force, in the stellar U.S. tradition of "well torture and dictatorship is obviously better for our (economic) interests than than COMMUNISM!!!" And so U.S. state advisors came, and said, 'yes, hmmm, OK, what a police force really needs to be effective is more weapons, and training, and funding, and also better records management!" Hence the archives. The task force that this book focuses on had the goal of turning the records back into the weapon that went the other way, and with some success; the book talks as well about other purposes that archives can serve, healing and community-building and forging identity.

So as an archivist, of course, I'm going through and highlighting like every other sentence in this book, except for the moments I have to stop short because the author is talking about the need to get the records digitized and once they're digitized, they will be safe forever! The state can never destroy them again!

And oh, man, I wish it worked that way, but that's not how it works. If anything, digital records are easier to vanish than physical records. Digital records can vanish in an instant.

It sounds like the project does have a digital archivist on call, because they talked about doing digital forensics on some old floppy drives, so ... maybe just no one called it out in the manuscript? Because, like, on a theoretical level the author of this book clearly understands that you can't archive until stuff is done and then put away, stuff is never done and safe to put away, but the thing is that's not just theoretical, it is also VERY TRUE ON A PRACTICAL LEVEL. Preservation is an ongoing process and, unfortunately, it never actually ends.

...but that aside this is a really! really! good book about archives! And history, and activism, and human rights. Highly, highly recommended.