Director's Message of Support for Guatemala Police Archive (AHPN)
Mon, August 13, 2018
Documents at the AHPN. Photo: AHPN.
According to an August 13 report on the National Security Archive website, "Guatemala’s renowned Historical Archive of the National Police (AHPN) is in crisis after its director, Gustavo Meoño Brenner, was abruptly removed in one of a series of recent actions orchestrated by the Guatemalan government and a United Nations office." This news comes on the heels of a successful joint seminar on archives and human rights, held at the AHPN in Guatemala City and co-hosted by LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections and the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.
On July 27, 2018, LLILAS Benson joined the Rapoport Center to host “Archives and Human Rights: A History of Collaboration between the University of Texas and the Historic Archive of the National Police.” The one-day seminar was an opportunity to reflect on seven years of partnership between the University of Texas and the Archivo Histórico de la Policía Nacional, which preserves more than 80 million records documenting over one hundred years of police activity in Guatemala.
Through its partnership with AHPN, the University of Texas has become a repository for the digital copies of almost 20 million documents to date, with around 2 million additional documents added every year. A growing subset of those documents, around 11 million, are already on UT’s servers, at https://ahpn.lib.utexas.edu/, available to researchers around the world. The partnership has also served as the catalyst for four graduate seminars and three public conferences, leaving an indelible mark on the LLILAS Benson community.
With the recent “Archives and Human Rights” seminar, and in light of the alarming news of Gustavo Meoño's removal as director of AHPN, LLILAS Benson affirms its support for the mission and personnel of the archive, and its commitment to supporting the preservation of this historic collection, which is so fundamental to the pursuit of justice, the recovery of historical memory in Guatemala, and to the preservation of Guatemala’s national history dating back all the way to the nineteenth century.
Virginia Garrard, Director
LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections
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