I began to frequent the Archive as a kind of entertainment, and as I usually do when I have nothing to write, nothing really to say, during those days I filled a series of notebooks, sketchbooks, and loose sheets with simple impressions and observations. Every morning for almost three months I traveled from the southernmost to the northernmost end of Guatemala City to visit the Archive. I suppose those who were employed there—both the humanities majors and the former rebels-turned-archivists involved in the cleaning and cataloging of the documents, as well as the police officers who watched over them—saw me as a tourist or an inconvenient and opportunistic latecomer. For my part, beyond the information I had hoped to obtain in that maze of millions of police records accumulated for more than a century and preserved by chance, the circumstances and the atmosphere at the Archive in La Isla, after that initial visit, had started to seem like something out of a novel, or perhaps something that could even be turned into a novel, a kind of micro-chaos, the telling of which could serve as a coda for the singular danse macabre of our last century.

First Notebook: Modo & Modo

First Notebook: Modo & Modo

Thursday, December 14, 9 a.m. At the Archive.

I decide to make a list of the most striking or grotesque records. I suppose that this task, as Ariadna suggested, would have a kind of Kafkaesque quality to it, and could provide a glimpse into a man, clerk Benedicto Tun, with no college degree, whose long and peculiar criminological trajectory in a country with a political history as turbulent as Guatemala is something of a feat.

The record cards originally used by Tun employed the Vucetich system, which could include, in addition to the name and fingerprints of the persons involved, the reason for initiating a record on them, their place of residence, marital status, profession and background, and any special observations. This system underwent some modifications in 1931 (such as the introduction of cards to replace strips of paper), and in 1969 the Henry system was imposed by the US Embassy—so that American investigators could interpret the records without difficulty. In that system only a person’s name, age, and fingerprints are recorded. In addition, beginning in 1971, all men in Guatemala, upon reaching adulthood and requesting their national identity card, became a part of a database housed at the Identification Bureau, which the government of Guatemala shared with the US government, according to a document preserved in the Identification Bureau. Both systems designate a place for the photograph of the accused, and more than a few of these photos have been preserved.

The records are on yellowed 4" × 6" cards, which have now been nibbled away by humidity and the passage of time. At the bottom of almost all the ones that I have reviewed is the seal and signature of Benedicto Tun.

Second Notebook: Black Binding

Second Notebook: Black Binding