When I first interviewed the head of the Archive Recovery Project, my intent was to find out about cases of intellectuals and artists who were the subject of police investigation—or who had collaborated with the police as informers or accusers—in the twentieth century. But in view of the chaotic state of the material (“It will take about fifteen years to classify the documents,” the chief told me), that idea had to be discarded as impracticable. However, he himself invited me to visit the Archive and mentioned a department that might be of special interest, the Identification Bureau, which had been preserved, almost miraculously—if not in its entirety, at least in good part, and all in one place. In addition, the documents it contained covered a wide span of time and had already been cataloged in their entirety.

For several weeks after the Archive was found, no one had noticed the existence of the cards and files that had belonged to this Bureau. Between two buildings of the former hospital complex, there was a mound of earth marked by the trail made by the wheelbarrows that would come and go, loaded with documents that were being relocated for cleaning, cataloging, and digitizing. Shortly after the rainy season, with the onset of the drought, the surface of the mound, where the grass had already been growing, cracked slightly, and someone saw that underneath the soil there were papers, cards, photographs. The traffic of wheelbarrows was immediately stopped, and the papers were examined. They turned out to be the police identity files and other documents that make up the vestiges of the Bureau. If I was interested in seeing this—the chief told me—he would authorize me to enter the Archive, and perhaps, he added, after seeing the Bureau I could visit other sections. For my own safety, and because some of the cases opened after 1970 could still be active or pending in court, he asked me not to consult any documents dated after that year.

On the day of my first visit to the Archive I met Ariadna Sandoval, a twenty-three-year-old archivist. Her job was to clean and catalog the documents belonging to the Identification Bureau.

“At the foot of the records originating from the different police bodies and received at the Bureau, there is a name that will appear constantly: Benedicto Tun. He founded the Bureau himself, in 1922, and worked there classifying and analyzing files until 1970, when he retired. He was the only Bureau chief all those years. Maybe this could serve as a connecting thread for your . . . research?” Ariadna said to me as she showed me the boxes where she had been storing the recovered files for almost a year.