The police archive sits in a cemetery of confiscated cars at the edge of Zone 6 in Guatemala City. Behind the high wall of the police-headquarters complex, the cars are piled three, four, even five high, their rusted bodies giving the area around them the feel of a junkyard. For years, in fact, the archive and the buildings near it were referred to by the Guatemalan police as el basurero—the garbage dump—so it is no surprise that the place became a repository for everything the police no longer wanted but couldn’t entirely part with. El basurero accumulated the volatile and cumbersome kind of trash that cannot be made to disappear. Decaying vehicles, unused explosives, and millions of pieces of paper detailing the last century of police activity were all dumped there, placed under the care of employees who were themselves unwanted—policewomen who by some misstep had derailed their careers and found themselves caretakers of a mountain of police refuse.

Most people in Guatemala didn’t even know that el basurero existed. I read about it in the US in 2005, in a newspaper article that mentioned the name of a family member in relation to the discovered archive, and most of Guatemala learned of the archive that same year. For years the archive had, officially speaking, not really existed. In 1996, with the signing of the peace accords and the formal end to Guatemala’s thirty-six-year armed conflict, both police officials and government authorities declared that no police archive survived. Without exactly concealing it, the police had done their best to neglect the archive into oblivion. It contained, after all, more than one hundred years of paper-work, including identity cards, arrest warrants, secret correspondence, and any number of other records documenting the police force’s participation in the estimated 200,000 deaths and disappearances that occurred during the civil war. The archive was stashed in the ruins of an unfinished hospital that consisted of partial cement walls and dirt floors. As the documents were dumped, they were mixed with food and other trash. Rats built their nests in the piles of paper. Cockroaches, moths, and silverfish infested the building and began slowly eating through the documents. Bats took shelter wherever there was ceiling space, and where there was no ceiling the rain poured in, making the documents into hard, papier-mâché shells. The archive progressed steadily toward decomposition.

And then, in July 2005, there was an explosion. A fire in one of the storerooms of the unfinished hospital drew the attention of residents nearby, and the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office, concerned about the abandoned explosives, sent a team of people to inspect the building. The team found that the unfinished hospital was being used as a police warehouse, and that explosives were not its only contents. It was a member of this team who, passing by a wing of the hospital that did not contain explosives, spotted a stack of papers through the window. When he asked the policewoman near the entrance what that wing of the hospital was, she answered without hesitation: “This is the police archive.”

When I visited the building in August 2007, it had been in the ombudsman’s care for two years, and the process of putting the archive in order was well underway. I arrived in a cab and had to call Alberto Fuentes, the on-site director of the archive, so that he could guide us along the seemingly interminable wall of the police enclosure to the dirt path leading to the building. Alberto walked up to the cab to meet us, waving his arms in greeting. All around us, behind the police enclosure, stood other enclosures: chain-link fences with coils of barbed wire and fragmentary continuations of the cinder-block wall that framed the main entrance.

Despite our surroundings, Alberto steered me enthusiastically down the dirt path on foot as if welcoming me to his home. Smiling, his gray head nodding, he was already like a friend I’d known for ages. He was singing along to his phone’s ringtone, an old-fashioned song of decidedly local fame which, as it turned out, had been composed by his father. I explained in a rush why I was there, anxious to establish the sincerity of my interest: I was a historian; I worked in Guatemalan archives; in fact, I studied the history of archives in the colonial period, obscure as that no doubt seemed; and apart from my scholarly interest I had the hope that perhaps, possibly—an article in the Prensa Libre had tipped me off—there might be records in the archive about my uncle. I knew the archive wasn’t open to the public for consultation, I said quickly, but could we check, by any chance? My uncle’s name, I told him, was Mario Silva Jonama.

Alberto stopped in his tracks and turned, taking my elbow and looking me in the eye. “Mario Silva Jonama?” he asked, stunned. “You are Mario’s niece?” I nodded. Alberto stared at me in disbelief, seemingly torn between the desire to laugh and the desire to cry. “But I knew him,” he said quietly. “Of course I knew him.”

As for so many others with Guatemalan family, I couldn’t think about the police archive without thinking of a name. For me, it was Mario’s. I’d been hearing his name for as long as I could remember. He was my mother’s eldest brother; he’d been a member of the democratic government ousted by a CIA-led coup in 1954; and he’d been one of the Guatemalan Party of Labor (PGT) leaders “disappeared” by plainclothes police in Guatemala in 1972. In our family, his name had taken on the unavoidable weight that comes with holding a place for something so long absent.

I’d grown up idealizing the man who, according to family stories, carried a lethal draft of cyanide in his back molar rather than carry a gun. Even when many of his cohort radicalized, joining what would eventually become the guerrilla armies of Guatemala, Mario remained a pacifist, convinced that the greatest weapon against political repression was education. He devoted his professional life to promoting early schooling in rural areas. After the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, he lived as a refugee in Mexico, visiting his family when he could and staying in safe-houses. Then in the 1970s he regrouped with his Communist-party friends, determined to respond somehow to the increasingly repressive military regimes that ran the country. In September 1972 he left the house for a party meeting and never returned. His family heard from a family friend—a doctor—that he was detained for several months. Then he was most likely thrown from a helicopter into the Pacific.

As I grew older I learned things about him that cast a certain shadow on my idealized image of Mario. He had created families with no fewer than three women and more or less left them all. He had become something of a zealot before his death, dispensing Communist propaganda to his family and promoting the party’s ties to Moscow and Cuba. Still, these tended to make him a more interesting—more flawed—figure. I continued to find him a mysterious, if somewhat troubling, source of inspiration.

Perhaps part of Mario’s allure lay in how elusive and untraceable he was. Disappeared years before I was born, he existed primarily in the memories of others. I had never seen any of his letters, though I once saw a notebook filled with his careful, beautifully handwritten copies of Carlos Gardel lyrics. The photographs I’d seen of him tended to obscure rather than illuminate his personality. Always self-consciously posing for the camera, he gave the impression of an actor in a wide range of roles. In one he leans jauntily on the bumper of an overheated Jeep, wearing a beret and a neck scarf and dangling a cigarette in his fingers. In another he stands in a business suit next to his father, on his face an expression of self-mocking seriousness. And in other photographs—passport photos taken to disguise his appearance—he appears in the role of university professor with dark glasses, or earnest young professional with a thin mustache, or discontented youth with severe eyes. These images did little to help me understand who Mario had been.

The images and secondhand stories were not enough, but they encouraged me to look further. In graduate school I began studying the recent armed conflict in Guatemala, first reading as much as I could of published histories and then researching on my own by visiting archives and conducting oral histories. These pursuits were, of course, also motivated by intellectual curiosity, but their original impetus had come from the desire to understand not only that vanished individual—Mario—but also the vanished world to which he belonged. I had the belief, as I continued my studies, that this is what history and the archival materials that formed its foundation did: they recuperated lost people, lost worlds. I finished my masters and moved on to a doctorate; I began searching even further back, into the colonial period of Guatemalan history. I was becoming comfortable, even contented, with the idea that historical study could be interminable. Then in December 2005 I read a brief Prensa Libre article reporting that a police archive had been uncovered in Guatemala. It mentioned only four people whose records had been found in the archive: “Among the records are those of Mario Silva Jonama, leader of the Guatemalan Party of Labor (PGT), captured and assassinated in 1972.” I had the impression that the article seemed to come at just the right time: now I was a historian and well practiced in negotiating archives. I would bring all my training to bear, and perhaps I would finally come closer to the understanding of Mario that had long eluded me. I started making plans to go to Guatemala.

The archive, Alberto Fuentes told me, as we sat under a wide tent just outside the entrance, was a treasure: a gold mine disguised as a garbage dump. It contained approximately eighty million pages of documentation, or eight kilometers of stacked paper. The oldest document was a register from 1882. The archive contained more than one hundred years of police history following the establishment of the police force in 1871. Manuel Estrada Cabrera, the liberal president made famous by Miguel Angel Asturias’s novel El señor presidente, had relied on the police force and its vast network of informers to create the first Guatemalan police state in the late-nineteenth century. The archive also contained documentation from the period of Jorge Ubico, the early-twentieth-century “mano fuerte” president whose legacy of dictatorship finally ended with the democratic election of Juan José Arévalo in 1944. And, of most interest to Alberto and the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office, the archive also contained documentation on the period after the fall of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954: the decades of growing repression that finally ended with the 1996 peace accords.

In the months following Arbenz’s overthrow, the military dictator installed by the US went about systematically dismantling the land and labor reforms enacted during Arbenz’s presidency. After an initial purge of union organizers and Communist party leaders, it took some time for the opposition to regroup. The first challenge to military rule came not from unions or Communists but from a group of young army officers who remained loyal to Arbenz. Exiled in Mexico after their unsuccessful revolt in 1961, they began establishing ties with the PGT. The PGT had enjoyed close ties to Arbenz during his presidency, and many of its members had left the country in 1954. But in the 1960s and 1970s those members who had returned to Guatemala began redoubling their efforts, remaining committed to their reform-minded principles but simultaneously strengthening their connection with the younger, more radical groups.

It was during the 1970s that the Guatemalan police force assumed the role that would put it at the center of the armed conflict. Working closely with the Guatemalan armed forces, police in Guatemala City began targeting organizers and student leaders, either disappearing them or leaving their bodies—more often than not showing evidence of torture—scattered around the city. In the late 1970s and early 1980s these attacks grew less selective and more frequent, maximizing on their potential to spread terror. Most of the disappeared were never traced, and those who were found murdered yielded little explanatory evidence. With the uncovering of the archive came the hope that some context for those deaths and disappearances might be found.

“There is no spectacular document in any archive,” Alberto Fuentes said to me. He compared the situation to Germany’s. “You’re not going to find a document penned by Hitler that says, ‘Pipe gas into the chambers to kill the Jews.’” What one could find, he said, were small fragments that would fit together like a jigsaw puzzle and form a whole. By piecing together the fragments, some of the disappeared were already coming to the surface. Using identity cards—cédulas de vecindad—from the police archive, forensic anthropologists had identified more than forty corpses buried anonymously in a nearby cemetery. And slowly more of the fragments would become accessible.

Archive staff clean a batch of cards labelled “Detective Forces.” (Xeni Jardin / CC)

With the help of the Swiss government, the Human Rights Ombudsman’s Office had hired more than two hundred people to protect, restore, and gradually organize the archive. The first massive task that faced the staff was to ensure the safety of the documents by eliminating vermin, repairing leaks, and providing security. The next step was to clear enough space in the archive for the archivists to begin wading through the documents. Lighting and flooring were installed, rooms were cleared of vermin and trash, and the documents—some of them, anyway—were stored in cardboard boxes. With every task still only partially complete, the archive staff acquired six scanners and began scanning the documents as quickly as possible, working in two shifts from seven in the morning to two in the afternoon and from two to eight thirty. Their urgent pace testified to the project’s uncertain future: the documents were decaying before their eyes. And they worked with the constant knowledge that many in Guatemala would have preferred the archive to remain undiscovered. What if certain documents disappeared or, worse, the tentative government protection for the project vanished? By August 2007 the archive staff had already scanned more than 3.5 million documents. A data-collection project directed by an American nonprofit, Benetech, was simultaneously underway. Gathering about one hundred and fifty samples a week, Benetech planned to create a “map” of the archive’s content. Eventually, the hope was that the archive would be completely organized and accessible to the public.

“But we’re still a long way away from that,” Alberto warned me, as we walked toward the archive. He told me that I would see for myself the poor state of the archive and the mountains—literally—of work that stood in the way. “I can’t promise you we’ll find anything,” Alberto said, pulling out his phone. “But let me just make a call.” The person he was calling answered. “Listen, it’s me,” he said. “Do you happen to know where those papers went—the ones on Mario Silva Jonama?”