Guatemala: Arrests Create First Possibility of Justice for Death Squad Dossier Victims
Published: Jun 4, 2021
Edited by Kate Doyle
Research assistance: Megan DeTura
Former Col. Jacobo Esdras Salán Sánchez, a defendant in the Death Squad Dossier case.
Picture courtesy of Famdegua Guatemala
Pre-trial proceedings to occur as Vice President Kamala Harris meets with Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei in Guatemala City on June 7
Washington, D.C., June 4, 2021—Twenty-two years after the National Security Archive published the notorious “Death Squad Dossier” of Guatemala – which chronicled the kidnapping and disappearance of 183 people by government agents over a period from 1983-85 – police arrested 11 former military and security force officials on varying charges of forced disappearance, torture, rape, and assassination connected to the document.
The Associated Press first reported the arrests on May 27. Since then, the defendants’ arraignment hearings have begun and a twelfth suspect has been detained.
The Dossier, or Diario Militar (Military Logbook), is a collection of military intelligence and police records documenting the Guatemalan regime’s use of clandestine detention, torture and death to target people perceived as leftists and enemies of the state. Entries in the logbook describe the capture by security forces of 183 men, women and several children, and contain photographs of the victims, the dates and locations of their seizure, their alleged connection to guerrilla groups, and in half of the cases codified references to their secret executions. Although the crimes took place in the mid-1980s at the height of the 36-year armed civil conflict, the Military Logbook was smuggled out of Guatemala and given to the National Security Archive in 1999, more than two years after peace accords ended the war and shortly after a truth commission or “Historical Clarification Commission” issued its groundbreaking report.
Since then, families of the Military Logbook’s disappeared have repeatedly called for an investigation into the crimes depicted in the document and a search for the remains of their loved ones. There have been advances in the intervening 22 years. In 2005, the Historical Archive of the National Police was discovered and many thousands of records located in it that confirmed police and military involvement in the Diario Militar kidnappings. With the help of the logbook’s entries, forensic anthropologists were able to identify the skeletal remains of six of the logbook’s victims, beginning in 2011. And in 2012, the Inter-American Court for Human Rights ruled that Guatemala was responsible for crimes associated with the Diario Militar and ordered the State to determine who committed them, locate the victims’ remains, provide psychological support to families, and various reparations.
More:
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/news/guatemala/2021-06-04/diario-militar
