Paper Cadavers

Paper Cadavers

The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

In Paper Cadavers, an inside account of the astonishing discovery and rescue of Guatemala's secret police archives, Kirsten Weld probes the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960–1996), silence and impunity reigned. That is, until 2005, when human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of the country's National Police, which, at 75 million pages, proved to be the largest trove of secret state records ever found in Latin America.

The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemala's struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the country's fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.

  • Contents
  • List of Abbreviations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: The Power of Archival Thinking
  • Part I: Explosions at the Archives
    • Chapter 1: Excavating Babylon
    • Chapter 2: Archival Culture, State Secrets, and the Archive Wars
    • Chapter 3: How the Guerrillero Became an Archivist
  • Part II: Archives and Counterinsurgency in Cold War Guatemala
    • Chapter 4: Building Counterinsurgency Archives
    • Chapter 5: Recycling the National Police in War, Peace, and Post-Peace
  • Part III: Archives and Social Reconstruction in Postwar Guatemala
    • Chapter 6: Revolutionary Lives in the Archives
    • Chapter 7: Archives and the Next Generation(s)
  • Part IV: Pasts Present and the Future Imperfect
    • Chapter 8: Changing the Law of What Can Be Said, and Done
    • Chapter 9: Conclusion: The Possibilities and Limitations of Archival Thinking
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index

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