Our AI writing assistant, WriteUp, can assist you in easily writing any text. Click here to experience its capabilities.

Q & A with Kirsten Weld

View Original View Raw

Summary

Kirsten Weld is an Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala. In the book, Weld details the discovery of Guatemala’s secret police archives, amounting to 75 million pages, and the process of rescuing and analyzing them. The archive sheds light on US involvement in the Guatemalan civil war, as well as the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. The archive has helped to reopen a national conversation about the war and its legacies, providing closure to families and aiding in criminal prosecutions. The archive also offers insight into how the present state of affairs came to be and has implications beyond Guatemala. Weld also explains the concept of 'archival thinking', which looks beyond the words on a document's page to examine the conditions of its production.

Q&As

What led to the discovery of the Guatemalan National Police archives?
The discovery of the Guatemalan National Police archives was led by a series of explosions at an urban army base that prompted investigators from the human rights ombudsman’s office to investigate a nearby police base.

What have been the reactions to the discovery of the archives?
The reactions to the discovery of the archives have been varied and complex. Human rights organizations, advocates of postwar justice, and what remained of the old Left were thrilled, while conservative sectors studiously ignored the discovery. The efforts to rescue the archives faced attacks on multiple fronts, ranging from intimidation to arson attempts.

How have the archives been used to uncover new information about US involvement in the Guatemalan civil war?
The discovery of the archives has revealed new information about US involvement in the Guatemalan civil war, such as the emphasis the US placed on record keeping and the collaboration between the US Office of Public Safety and Guatemala’s National Police.

What role have the archives played in Guatemala’s continued transition toward peace and healing?
The archives have played a role in Guatemala’s continued transition toward peace and healing by reopening a national conversation about the war and its legacies, providing answers and the possibility of closure to individual families, and being used by the public prosecutor’s office in a number of criminal prosecutions of ex-police officials.

What is “archival thinking” and how does it impact the study of history?
“Archival thinking” is a mode of analysis that puts archives—their histories, their silences, their distortions, their politics—at the center of the story. It looks past the words on a document’s page to examine the conditions of that document’s production, how it came to exist, what it was used for, what its form reveals, and what sorts of state knowledge and action it both reflected and engendered.

AI Comments

👍 This article provides a fantastic account of the discovery and rescue of Guatemala's secret police archives and the implications it had. It's a great read that provides a lot of insight into the current political climate in Guatemala.

👎 This article is very long and dense, and it may not be accessible to many readers. Some of the information presented is also outdated and may not be relevant to the current state of affairs.

AI Discussion

Me: It's a Q & A with Kirsten Weld, an Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. She wrote a book called Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, which is about the discovery and rescue of Guatemala’s secret police archives. It discusses the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production.

Friend: That sounds really interesting! What are the implications of the article?

Me: Well, the discovery of the archives has reopened a national conversation in Guatemala about the war and its legacies, and the archives have been used as evidence in war crimes trials. The article also raises the wider implications of the archives in terms of post-conflict justice and historical memory. It also highlights the role that US government played in supporting security partnerships throughout the world during the Cold War and the importance of archival thinking in order to gain a better understanding of history.

Action items

Research other archives of state-inflicted violence and explore how they have been used to bring justice and healing.
Read more about the US involvement in Guatemala during the civil war and other countries during the Cold War.
Follow the work of human rights investigators and advocates in Guatemala and other countries to learn more about the politics of memory and the stakes of historical knowledge production.

Technical terms

Cold War: A period of political and military tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies from the mid-1940s to the early 1990s.
Desaparecidos: A term used to refer to people who have disappeared, often due to political violence.
Counterinsurgency: A type of warfare used to combat an insurgency or rebellion against a government or occupying power.
Neoliberal: A political ideology that advocates for economic liberalization, free trade, and privatization.
Molotov Cocktails: A crude incendiary device consisting of a bottle filled with a flammable liquid and a wick.
DNA Evidence: Biological evidence used to identify individuals based on their unique genetic code.
COINTELPRO: A series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the FBI aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting domestic political organizations.