Archival Ammunition: Policing, Surveillance, and Gendered Racial Terror in Guatemala

This talk presents the unsealed Historical National Police Archive (AHPN) in Guatemala as an archive of warfare with a special capacity to police and surveil. Building upon Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s description of archival power “to define what is and what is not a serious object of research and, therefore, of mention,” this talk traces AHPN’s archival power to literally and metaphorically record, compose, select, retain, purge, and police people, particularly women. By theorizing AHPN in this way, its archival capacity is foregrounded as a more hidden form of epistemic violence that spans eras and national frames: namely, the capacity to violently omit and erase alternative processes of social visions, histories, organizing, struggles, memorialization, and the assemblage of state documentation, including evidence of violence.