Weld, Kirsten - Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in 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 (1960–1996), 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. Read more...

Kirsten Weld Assistant Professor of History   Kirsten Weld is an historian of modern Latin America, focusing primarily on 20th-century Central America, Mexico, and the Southern Cone. Her research centers on the political and cultural history of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements in the Americas, with special attention to the region's long Cold War and its aftermath, as well as on the politics of historical and archival knowledge production.  Her first book, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, was published by Duke University Press in 2014.  It is a historical and ethnographic study of the archives generated by Guatemala's National Police, which were used as tools of state repression during the country's 36-year civil war, kept hidden from the United Nations-sponsored truth commission charged with investigating crimes against humanity at the conflict's conclusion, stumbled upon and rescued by justice activists in 2005, and repurposed in the service of historical accounting and postwar reconstruction. Paper Cadavers is a broad meditation on how history is produced as social knowledge, on the labour behind transformative social change, and on the stakes of the stories we tell ourselves about the past.    Read more...