humanitarian.info

The discovery, digitisation and forthcoming publication of Guatemala’s Police Archives from during the 36 year conflict is one of the most inspiring, remarkable achievements in human rights work. As a strategic information resource for those seeking redress, the archive’s mind-boggling scale, level of detail, relevance, and the deep skills needed to make it accessible, really show the need for informatics, archiving and social science professionals in human rights work. I  feel very lightweight just looking at the work that’s been done there.

This month, the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman released “The Right to Know” (Spanish, PDF, ~10mb), its first  analytical paper drawing on the contents of the 11 million documents which have been already scanned and indexed. The Ombudsman also intends to make some 7 million scans from the archives freely available to the public, a Google-scale undertaking in access to information. Some of the analytical work done on the archives recently led to the arrest of Héctor Roderico Ramírez Ríos, an official accused of engineering the disappearance of a prominent student leader in the 1980s.

Sadly, these initiatives have been accompanied by attacks on the Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman officials (and their families) responsible for this work. That won’t change a thing once the information is public. It’s certain that the thousands of paper trails inside that archive will lead to more such indictments, particularly as citizens start putting the pieces together. I don’t know yet whether the archives will ever get on online, or under what terms. If they are released in a reusable form, I wonder whether the tools of social media will have a meaningful role in the historical reconstruction, or whether their advocates will really have any interest in so doing.

(Hat tip: Witness Media Archive blog)