Program for Human Rights Studies and Archival Research, Guatemala, Flacso-PNUD, 2014, Luis Raúl Salvadó (ed.)

Abstract

The discovery of the archive of the extinct national police in July 2005 is a fundamental fact for the contemporary history of Guatemala, since it launched a reliable route to safeguard the right to the truth that all its citizens have, especially those who suffered the aftermath of the civil War. Those 80 million pages that went through a long process of organization, classification, preservation and disclosure are not only a long-term guarantee for the development of research history in the country, but, above all, they provide Guatemalan society with an invaluable resource for make it more democratic and with greater social equity, in which its citizens can get to know each other and recognize themselves in their own history as a fundamental basis for national conciliation. To meet these objectives, it is necessary to increase the capacities of the staff that provides access to this resource, now widely used by historians and other social scientists, in addition to lawyers who work in the criminal or human rights field.