Paper Cadavers

The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala
In 2005, human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of Guatemala’s National Police. In Paper Cadavers, Kirsten Weld tells the story of the astonishing discovery and rescue of 75 million pages of evidence of state-sponsored crimes, and analyzes the repercussions for both the people and the state of 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 (19601996), 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