I come across a curious coincidence: in the old and rustic filing cabinet of the library at the General Archives, the Yearly Reports are missing for the years that interest me: 1937, 1939, 1940, 1941, and 1943, the ones where the chapters for the Identification Bureau were missing.

I requested to see Yearly Reports for other years, and the woman in charge served me with two whole boxes containing the decades 1930–1950. And that is where I found the volumes I had been seeking, which did not appear in the card catalog, and whose pages for the Identification Bureau had not been mutilated. I asked them to make me photocopies of the pages that were missing from the Police Archive, even before reading their contents.

Second visit. Monday.

While I wait for the librarian to deliver more volumes to me, I leaf through an issue from the Gazette of the Police dated October 15, 1944 (five days after the Guatemalan Revolution). I am struck by the picture of a French reporter.

A slain soldier, his hands tied to a post, has been shot by a firing squad for treason. Another soldier, his arm outstretched, revolver in hand, is leaning next to him. (“Coup-de-grace in Grenoble, France,” reads the caption.)

Upon turning the page: “Louis Renault, car manufacturer, arrested in Fresnes prison, accused of collaborating with the Nazis.”

Tuesday.

I visit the Library of Congress. On the street, on the sidewalk, congressmen come and go. Physically, they look like Guatemalan peasants, but they are dressed in three-piece formal suits, wearing designer sunglasses, and accompanied by men who look like them, bodyguards who have something of a cowboy air about them. Here and there, interspersed with the diesel smell of pickup trucks, you sense the strong smell of expensive perfume, or perhaps of a knockoff.

The Library of Congress is a nice place, cool and quiet. They tell me they do not have Yearly Reports from the police, that the library was destroyed by fire about twenty years ago and that few volumes survived the flames. They let me consult the card catalogs. I ask for several books.

From Justo Rufino Barrios Face-to-Face with Posterity (A. Díaz):

Names of criminals and known gangs in the New City of Guatemala at the end of the nineteenth century, when the National Police was founded (1881):

The Chicharrones

The Contingencies

The Gentle One

The Marimberos

The Roldans

El Tucurú (Ricardo Rodríguez), “the first prisoner executed by firing squad in the New City of Guatemala.”

Other “causes célèbres”:

The unresolved mystery of the Chinese man, Mariano Ching, who had his throat cut and was emasculated in his bed (1935).

The case of the beheaded woman (1945).