ABSTRACT
The case of Guatemala’s Historical Archives of the National Police (AHPN), an enormous body of decomposing police files discovered unexpectedly in 2005, has become internationally known in the field of human rights archiving. Yet rather than serving as a simple story of success or failure, the ongoing efforts to rescue the AHPN demonstrate both the enormous potential and the harrowing risks for civil society groups attempting to reclaim state security archives in contexts of extreme political instability and polarization. The example of the AHPN reveals not a linear, teleological “transition to democracy” in the wake of dictatorship and armed conflict, but instead how historical knowledge production and archival access are bound to remain hotly contested domains of struggle.
