Invisible, Silenced, and All but Abandoned:
The Guatemalan Historical Archive of the National Police on Its 20th Anniversary

Washington, D.C., August 20, 2025 - Twenty years ago, a group of human rights investigators in Guatemala stumbled upon an enormous archive containing millions of historical records belonging to the country’s brutal former national police force. With support from the government’s Human Rights Prosecutor, financing from foundations and foreign embassies, and assistance from international advisors including the National Security Archive, the group managed to rescue the moldering files from a long-abandoned warehouse and turn them into the largest public repository of police records in Latin America. Since then, the Historical Archive of the National Police (AHPN) has been the source of astonishing revelations about the role of Guatemalan security forces in some of the worst human rights abuses documented during the country’s 36-year internal conflict (1960-96), including political assassinations, kidnappings, torture, and forced disappearances. Along the way, it emerged as a model for historical memory sites worldwide through the determined efforts of Guatemalans to establish ownership over their history and bring perpetrators to justice.

But fast forward to today, and Guatemala’s celebrated police archive is a shadow of its former self – a hollowed-out institution operating at drastically reduced levels that has little contact with the public it is supposed to serve. The surge in authoritarianism that engulfed the country over the last decade permitted corrupt right-wing ideologues to weaponize the judicial system against judges, prosecutors, human rights defenders, journalists, and environmental activists, among others. The AHPN, long associated with the struggle for transitional justice and historical memory, became a casualty of intense government hostility.

This National Security Archive report is based on a pair of site visits conducted in 2023 and 2025, two decades after the discovery of AHPN, and draws on years of experience and involvement with the police archive and historical memory efforts in Guatemala. The authors find that deteriorating conditions at the archive reflect a broader trend toward the erasure and neglect of historical memory across the region and call on the international community to protect and support institutions like the AHPN that are working to preserve it.

Twenty Years Ago

When the Historical Archive of the National Police was discovered in July 2005, Guatemala was almost a decade past the 1996 peace accords that ended more than 30 years of armed insurgency and violent state repression. In 1999, the Historical Clarification Commission concluded that 93 percent of documented human rights abuses were committed by Guatemalan military, police or paramilitary forces, and that some 200,000 unarmed civilians were killed or disappeared during a sustained government counterinsurgency campaign that spiraled into genocide.[1] But though the war had ended, there was a tremendous amount of work still to be done to spark national acknowledgement and reconciliation, hold perpetrators accountable, and create a new post-conflict consensus about what happened.

The country’s security forces had refused to participate in the truth commission process and denied investigators access to government archives. So the discovery – on the grounds of a working police base in downtown Guatemala City – of a massive, abandoned warehouse holding a century’s worth of police records was a significant and unexpected opportunity to penetrate one of the country’s most opaque institutions and contribute to justice for its many victims. Under the leadership of Gustavo Meoño Brenner, a former guerrilla leader, a team of dozens of people labored to clean, organize, and scan the documents, turning dark and neglected spaces on the base into a humming beehive of activity and promise. The project processed and digitized millions of records and opened its doors to researchers once a critical mass of them was available for viewing several years later.

The discovery of the police archive in 2005. Credit: Prensa Comunitaria

Over the years, the AHPN grew and thrived. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) distributed millions of dollars of donations made by other countries and international organizations in support of the project, which operated without government funding. Thousands of Guatemalan and international visitors cycled through its buildings, including government officials and foreign dignitaries. The archive issued deeply researched reports on its holdings, received students, professors, and journalists, and organized conferences. It also became an important site of memory and reconciliation, hosting cultural events and interreligious ceremonies, inviting community members to paint murals on the walls surrounding it, and offering space for a monumental sculpture called the Angel of Peace and Harmony.

Rising Threats

The archive entered a new phase when Guatemalan prosecutors embarked on an extraordinary series of human rights criminal trials and, for the first time, were able to draw on the official police records as criminal evidence. In 2009, the AHPN identified documents pointing to police and military involvement in the forced disappearance of labor activist Edgar Fernando García in 1984, leading to the arrest and later conviction of two former policemen. Many more trials followed that also relied on AHPN files for evidence, including proceedings against senior police and military officers for their command roles in Edgar Fernando’s disappearance, the 1980 burning of the Spanish Embassy, the 1981 kidnapping and torture of student Edgar Enrique Sáenz Calito, and the murder of Belgian priests in the late 1970s and early 80s. Guatemala’s willingness to bring perpetrators to account – and the role that the police archive played in assisting the criminal investigations – was an inspiration to countries across Latin America and around the world.

Former police official Héctor Roderico Ramírez Ríos is taken into custody on charges of illegal detention and forced disappearance in 2009. Credit: Prensa Libre

But the archive’s outsized public profile, as well as its contributions to the human rights trials, infuriated Guatemala’s powerful ultra-conservative sectors, among them retired military officers and wealthy business elites. After the political right’s favored candidate, Jimmy Morales, won the presidency in 2016, the government actively sought to put an end to advances in judicial reform, anti-corruption efforts, and human rights accountability. Morales’ primary accomplice was his attorney general, María Consuelo Porras, who he appointed in May 2018.[2] Since taking office, Porras has harassed, surveilled, indicted, and jailed dozens of human rights defenders, anti-corruption investigators, indigenous activists, lawyers, prosecutors, judges, and journalists. Her role earned her a designation by the U.S. Department of State as a “corrupt and undemocratic actor” in 2021 and sanctions imposed by the United States and by Great Britain in 2025.

Guatemala is not the only country where human rights archives and documentation efforts are under direct attack or are suffering from deliberate acts of neglect. Throughout the Americas, as democracies weaken and authoritarian leaders rise to power, a new antagonism has emerged toward the individuals and organizations constructing narratives of past repression and state violence. The denialism of uncomfortable histories has led to an abandonment of historical memory initiatives across the board: through the closing of archives, the destruction of documents, new limits on the right to information, and the censorship of diverse histories. Examples include President Javier Milei’s move to defund memory sites containing records of Argentina’s dirty war (1976-83); threats to Peruvian human rights archives by right-wing politicians seeking to rewrite the country’s history; Mexico’s decision to change its freedom of information law to expand the government’s ability to deny public access to its records; and the removal of information from public displays about civil rights struggles at the National Archives of the United States.

As Guatemala’s government escalated its assault on justice and human rights, the police archive soon became a target. In 2018, AHPN director Gustavo Meoño was severed from his position. He immediately went into exile; for years, he had been the subject of baseless legal complaints filed by right-wing figures and feared for his freedom.[3] Dozens of staff members – from archivists to investigators to IT experts to public access staff – were laid off, their contracts not renewed. UNDP was told to withdraw from its administrative role, which terminated the archive’s semi-autonomous status and turned it into an entity dependent on the federal government.[4] In 2019, Morales’ Interior Minister, Enrique Degenhart, threatened to confiscate the AHPN from the Ministry of Culture and Sports (MICUDE) and return its holdings to the reconstituted National Civil Police.

That did not happen, largely thanks to pressure from Guatemalan human rights groups, civil society, and international allies. Responding to a legal petition from Human Rights Prosecutor Jordán Rodas Andrade to protect the AHPN, the Guatemalan Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that the archive belonged to the nation’s cultural patrimony and should be overseen by MICUDE, not the Interior Ministry. Equally important, the Court ordered MICUDE to ensure that the institution had the financial, administrative, and human resources necessary to continue the work of processing the archives, preserving and protecting them, and making them publicly accessible.

In one sense, the ruling affirmed the government’s attempt to “institutionalize” the police archive by incorporating it into the country’s national archives system under the Ministry of Culture. And it was not unreasonable to consider the transition a natural one since it should have offered a more sustainable model for the future.[5] But in reality, the loss of the AHPN’s special independent status left it vulnerable to political and bureaucratic machinations that very quickly undermined its ability to function at the remarkable level it had achieved for 13 years.

The processing of the police archive records in 2007. Credit: Harpers Magazine

The Decline of the AHPN

By the time the Supreme Court issued its decision, a second conservative government had taken power in Guatemala under President Alejandro Giammattei. Although the Interior Ministry abandoned efforts to reclaim the police archive, his administration practiced a form of extreme neglect, allowing the AHPN to wither on the vine. Following in his predecessor’s footsteps, Giammattei’s government continued to slash the archive’s budget, radically reduce its number of full-time employees, and shrink the AHPN’s public profile. Outside scholars reported difficulties in arranging research visits; as a result, the number of annual users plummeted. In 2023, a group of AHPN supporters conducted a systematic and detailed report of the impact of the government’s actions on the archive’s functions. Made up of members of the Association in Guatemala of Friends of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), this group used the 2020 Supreme Court ruling to compare the AHPN prior to 2018 – the year that director Meoño was fired and staff laid off – to the archive of 2023, when the report was issued.[6]

Almost across the board, the authors found a lack of compliance with the orders of the Court. Their study – in English, “Historical Archive and Memory Site: Monitoring compliance with sentence 1281-2019 of the Supreme Court of Justice concerning the protection and functioning of the AHPN” – concluded that the AHPN was struggling to fulfill its obligations to process records and guarantee public access to the collection. Among the report’s most striking findings:

• The AHPN’s budget went from an average of $1 million/year in 2016-18, when international donors were still permitted to contribute, to an average of $124,000/year in 2019-22 after the Guatemalan government took over (pp. 13-14)
• The government has laid off AHPN employees at a steady pace, leaving fewer and fewer people to carry out the many tasks required to run the institution. In 2017, there were 63 people working in areas that included coordination and administration, archival processing, research and investigations, IT and digitization, maintenance, and security. In 2020 there were 30 employees, and by 2023 there were 21. The investigations team – responsible for researching human rights cases, among other critical issues – was eliminated altogether. And the staff dedicated to responding to public requests for information fell from 11 people to two, between 2020 and 2022. (pp. 15-17)
• According to the report, every metric related to the AHPN’s core archival functions has declined over a five-year period. Comparing the rates of document classification and description, for example, the report’s authors found that in 2022 the staff managed to complete 10 percent of what it achieved in 2017. (p. 24) Digitization (scanning the original, fragile records) in 2022 was less than 30 percent of what it was in 2017. (p. 25) Finally, regarding the public’s use of the AHPN, 5,794 researchers consulted the archive’s databases for information in 2017; in 2022, the number of users was down to 574. (p. 25)

The Historical Archive of the National Police in 2025

The entrance to the AHPN in 2019, 2023, and 2025 (left to right). Credit: Antonio González Quintana/The National Security Archive

In the final section of this posting, senior analyst Kate Doyle, who served for years as an international advisor to the Historical Archive of the National Police, and fellow analyst Claire Dorfman report on the conditions inside the AHPN based on a pair of on-site visits in 2023 and 2025.

On both trips we were given a tour of the facilities, consulted documents in the public research room, and conducted extensive interviews with current and past employees, government officials, and human rights investigators. For the purpose of this account, we describe our visit in March of 2025, in order to provide the most updated conditions.

Our first challenge was figuring out how to schedule a visit. The AHPN no longer has a website to consult and no phone number to call. After locating a Facebook page for the Archivo General de Centro América (AGCA—Guatemala’s national archives), we wrote an email to the main office (agcasecretaria@yahoo.com) and were directed to the AHPN’s current coordinator, Ulda Castillo. Ulda kindly agreed to give us a tour of the archive and allow us to speak to the staff about their work.

Our second challenge was to find the building.

Kate has been to the AHPN countless times since its discovery in 2005. But recently, the entrance was changed from its former location on Avenida Pedrera in Zone 6 of Guatemala City. The new entrance is still on Pedrera, but there is no formal address, no number, and no sign on the avenue indicating where to go.

Aerial view of the entrance in 2025, sent to the analysts by AHPN coordinator Ulda Castillo.

There is – as we discovered after wandering the avenue for 10 or 15 minutes – a blue gate that opens onto a dirt parking lot full of police buses. We walked past the buses, past a scruffy dog asleep in the sun, until we reached a long low building that belongs to the “Department of Investigations and Deactivation of Weapons and Explosives” (DIDAE), which now has the old AHPN sign bolted to its roof. The path that leads to the archive’s front door runs the length of the building, alongside a colorful mural that was painted years ago by community artists, now grimy and broken.

The walk through the National Civil Police base to the AHPN in 2025. Credit: The National Security Archive

We showed our IDs to a pair of police outside, then walked into the old AHPN entrance, now emptied of people. It is hard to reconcile the space with the police archive of the past: there is no more bustle of staff members, busy attending to visitors or working at their desks. Ulda met us and accompanied us through the door marked “Authorized Personnel Only” to visit with archive employees. Where once there were dozens of people laboring over the documents, we walked down empty corridors, passing empty offices. Only 17 people work here now, including the four security guards, a courier, and a cleaning woman – leaving 11 people to do the real labor of the police archive.

Empty halls inside the police archive in 2025. Credit: The National Security Archive

Two people work on document cleaning and conservation. Ulda told us that they had recently finished preparing police records from the department of Huehuetenango, and that they were ready to be scanned. They were now sifting through piles of documents from Baja Verapaz.[7]

Walking further down the hall past doors marked “Restricted,” we entered the workspace dedicated to investigations, where there is only one person assigned to search the records system in response to requests for information. She is the last employee remaining from Gustavo Meoño’s days and the only person competent to help visiting researchers navigate the AHPN’s antiquated database to look for documents. On her desk was a thick file of letters from the government’s justice division (MP), each one representing multiple requests for information. She told us they get 10-12 letters requesting information from the MP every day and are obligated to respond within ten days.[8] She said, “It’s a lot of responsibility, I have to answer every request.” Although she is the only person in the archive fully qualified to conduct investigations, sometimes other employees have to stop what they are doing and help her because of the severe personnel shortage.

Ulda told us, “We get so overwhelmed that even Paty, the cleaning woman, has pitched in to help us search and investigate so we can respond to these requests!”

We moved on to the scanning area, where four people were bent over four machines. The man in charge of digitization gave us a brief demonstration of their work; the documents he was scanning were deteriorated cables from the 1960s, many eaten by insects. He told us that normally there are five people scanning all day, every day, but the fifth employee had been temporarily assigned the role of photographer for our tour and was accompanying us from room to room, snapping photos that would presumably be sent on to higher-ups as proof of the AHPN’s continued activity and visitors.

Another employee manages “custodia documental,” that is, keeping track of the original paper archives and monitoring when they leave the secure area where they are stored. He led us into the stacks, where thousands of boxes fill the metal shelves. The floor at the entrance to the stacks had been ripped up, exposing a deep hole in the dirt and the pipes underneath. Rickety wooden boards were placed over parts of the hole to allow people to pass. “They’re fixing the plumbing,” explained Ulda. As we stepped over the jagged gap in the floor, the custodian described the biometric system and security cameras they had installed in order to protect the archives from damage.

Our last stop was the public reading room, where there are a dozen computer terminals set up on long tables for visiting researchers. Two investigators from the Human Rights Prosecutor’s office were parked in front of screens, browsing the database for records. Juan Bautista was the attendant. He is a courteous man, in effect, the public face of the AHPN, welcoming outsiders and explaining how to file requests or consult the old “Total Image” database that the police archive still depends on. The platform is so complicated and unintuitive that Bautista often needs the help of the one staff member remaining from before 2018 to guide researchers in navigating it. Of course, when she comes to the reading room to assist researchers, she has to pause her efforts to answer the mounting MP information requests, which puts her further behind.[9]

Bautista told us that very few people come to the AHPN anymore to do research. He recalled seeing a couple of international scholars over the previous few years – one Mexican, the other a Guatemalan from the United States. But no local researchers come unless they are from the government. “Sometimes former policemen or their families come to look for personal information about pensions, that kind of thing.” Since there’s so little to do in the research room, he often helps the investigations section answer the MP requests.

The public reading room in 2025. Credit: The National Security Archive

Years ago, the police archive had a robust online presence through their content-rich website (now removed), their steady stream of news on Twitter and Facebook, and their occasional YouTube videos. As we prepared to leave the archive, we asked Ulda whether there was a plan to create a web page or social media account for the AHPN. The institution’s invisibility today – its lack of a public presence online and the trouble it takes even to find the actual building – is clearly an enormous obstacle for visitors. How does the AHPN update researchers or share news of the archive’s progress? For example, how would they broadcast the recent digitization of the Huehuetenango record group, a real achievement?

Ulda said the AHPN is not permitted to build its own web page or unilaterally communicate with the public. Those decisions have to be made by the Ministry of Culture and Sports or by the leadership at the national archives. Nor is there an accepted procedure to share updates about advances made by the archive; outsiders learn about them through word of mouth, from visitors who post on their own social media sites, or by way of the occasional news article.

Despite her position as the Coordinator of the AHPN, Ulda – along with the rest of her colleagues in the police archive – is what’s known in Guatemala as an “029,” that is, an employee working on a temporary contract, rather than occupying a permanent staff position. The archive’s contracts run for only three months and must be renewed four times every year. That lack of stability for even the most senior staff – that impermanence and uncertainty about their future – helps explain why the person who runs the daily functions of the archive does not have the authority to decide whether to launch a website, reach out to universities, or broadcast the archive’s achievements.

When we told Ulda that we were going to speak with an official at MICUDE, she made prayer hands, as though to say: “Please get help.”

The Fight for the Archives, Again

Disappointingly, help is not on the way. Although the election of moderate, pro-democracy candidate Bernardo Arévalo as president in 2023 promised a renewed focus on human rights, Arévalo and his administration have had to govern while under constant attack by conservative members of Congress and the attorney general, Consuelo Porras. Between them, they have tried to impeach the president 13 times, and have tried ten times to have his immunity stripped from him. The ongoing political struggle has left transitional justice and memory initiatives orphaned, the police archive among them.

We expressed our concerns about the AHPN during a meeting with the Ministry of Culture’s Vice Minister for Cultural Heritage, Laura Cotí Lux, one of the key officials overseeing government archives in Guatemala, including the AHPN. She readily agreed that the police archive needed more resources to operate effectively. But MICUDE does not own outright the buildings that house the police archive or the land they sit on, she added, despite the Supreme Court ruling of 2020. Those still belong to the Interior Ministry.

“Conditions in the building are not ideal, as you saw. But we don’t want to invest a lot of resources into improving the installation while we are still not guaranteed that we will keep it. Every year, there are more limitations on the amount of space we can have; the AHPN is getting squeezed [by the National Civil Police—PNC] into smaller and smaller areas. Every year, the PNC territory expands and surrounds us more.”

Given the scarcity of resources available to the archive in the federal budget, Cotí Lux said, international donors are once again welcome to make donations directly to the AHPN; but we saw no evidence of an active campaign to solicit funding, nor is there anyone to spearhead such an effort.[10] The vice minister pointed to the lack of professional archivists in Guatemala as one reason for the small staff of contract workers, despite the fact that the Meoño era left a legacy of experienced, trained archive employees who were the ones to rescue the abandoned repository and turn it into the institution it became. Under Presidents Morales and Giammattei, all but one of them were dismissed. When we asked why the AHPN still has no website or outreach program, Cotí Lux told us that it was Haroldo Zamora, director of the national archives (AGCA), who makes the decisions about the police archive’s communications strategy, not MICUDE.[11]

The Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Culture and Sports have expressed willingness to invest new resources into the AHPN in order to improve the archive’s conditions, but to date those words have not translated into concrete actions. The government’s lackluster commitment to improving the police archive means that the conclusions made by the Association in Guatemala of Friends of UNESCO in their report – written at the tail end of the Giammattei administration in February 2023 – continue to be relevant today, 18 months into Arévalo’s presidency. The AHPN needs adequate space, funding, staff, technology, security, and infrastructure improvements to function properly. It needs permanent staff positions for stability and continuity. And it needs to be assured of its right to the land it stands on and the buildings it occupies. (pp. 32-34)

From our own experience visiting the archive, we can add that the institution urgently needs a physical address, phone number, and email, so that outside researchers have a way to contact the AHPN directly. It should have its own separate and protected entrance, parking spaces for staff and visitors, and a dedicated area for community events. And the Guatemalan national archives (AGCA) should immediately facilitate the creation of a new website and reopen the archive’s social media accounts, thereby restoring public access to the archive’s past publications, photographs, videos, and historical account of its activities.

The fact that the police archive has survived years of hostility directed at it by previous governments and continues to survive the sluggish pace of assistance by the present administration is testament to the sustained activism of Guatemalan civil society and international supporters. The solidarity that the coalition of friends of the AHPN showed over the years in pushing Guatemala to preserve the archive helped guarantee its continued existence. But perhaps the most important action that AHPN supporters can do today is the simplest: schedule a visit. Conduct research within its vast holdings, request copies of documents, speak to the staff, broadcast your experience on social media, and demand that the government increase the police archive’s resources.[12]

The AHPN is a treasure trove of Guatemalan history. While its circumstances are unique, it fits into a larger movement of transitional justice, one that relies on an active and vocal civil society to sustain it. Guatemala was once a symbol of this effort for countries across the globe; it can be again.

* * * * * *

Before we left Guatemala, we sat down to talk with a group of former AHPN workers. They were among the first wave of people to be hired by Gustavo Meoño after 2005 to help rescue the enormous, deteriorating archives of the National Police: cleaning them, classifying them, scanning them, opening them to the public. None of them work there now. We agreed not to name them so they could speak freely. But most of their stories were tinged with nostalgia, not bitterness.

They spoke about the role the archive has played in their lives and careers as archivists and investigators. They also recognized the singular experience of contributing to the successes of the human rights trials through their work at the AHPN. "Working there was a privilege. When the documents begin to speak..." She teared up as she spoke. Everyone nodded.