- Human Rights Archives: Report from SAA, Part 1 Last week, I attended the annual conference of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) in Washington, DC. There were a number of sessions relevant to human rights archives and archivists this year, most notably the inaugural meeting of the new Human Rights Archives Roundtable, and the panel it organized with the Latin American and Caribbean Cultural Heritage Archives Roundtable, entitled "Silence No More! Archives Threatened by Political Instability."
- The past is not past On March 26, a day after Guatemala’s Human Rights Ombudsman Sergio Morales released the first report on the contents of the National Police Archives, his wife was abducted and tortured. If anyone doubts the relevance of records and archives to the present, not only in redressing the past but as factors in ongoing terror and […]
- Archives lead to arrests in Guatemalan disappearance case In a stunning development springing from the discovery of the Guatemalan Secret Police Archives, The National Security Archive the National Security Archive has posted declassified U.S. documents in a 25-year old disappearance case. Edgar Fernando García, a student leader and trade union activist, was captured by Guatemalan security forces in 1984 during the height of the state-sponsored terrorism of the Guatemalan civil war. The documents show that García’s capture was an organized political abduction orchestrated at the highest levels of the Guatemalan government.
- U Conn Symposium I returned last night from a brief but really productive symposium at the University of Connecticut, organized and hosted by the Dodd Center, home to the University’s human rights collections. The symposium was designed in part as a follow-up to last October’s conference at Columbia, and an effort to foster collaboration and resource-sharing among organizations […]
