Guatemala is still plagued by urban crime, but it is peaceful now compared to the decades of bloody civil war that convulsed the small Central American country. As he arrives in the capital, Guatemala City, FRONTLINE/World reporter Clark Boyd recalls,  “When the fighting ended in the 1990s, many here wanted to move on, burying the secrets of the war along with hundreds of thousands of the dead and disappeared. But then, in July 2005, the past thundered back.”

It all started with an explosion at a military munitions dump that caused officials to inspect nearby warehouses. What they stumbled upon was another kind of bombshell: the historical archive of the much-feared National Police. The Guatemalan government had for years denied the existence of this archive, but here it was -- a warehouse full of documents in a state of advanced disarray. “Rats, bats, bugs and mold had taken over the building,” says Boyd, over video footage of an early inspection.

“Unit 6 of the National Police in [former dictator] General Rios Montt’s government was based in this building,” says Gustavo Meono, the official who is now in charge of the archive. “And there are many accounts [here] of grave violations of human rights: illegal detentions, illegal prisons, tortures. It is possible that extra-judicial executions took place in this space.”

During more than 30 years of warfare, state-sponsored violence against the country’s indigenous population became a matter of course in the countryside. In the cities, many intellectuals, labor leaders and activists lived in fear of being “disappeared” or executed by the National Police. After the disappearance of her brother, Aura Elena Farfan founded an organization dedicated to finding out the truth about what happened during the war.  She shows Boyd photos of some of the 45,000 Guatemalans who were illegally detained and then vanished. She hopes the records uncovered in the warehouse will provide some answers.

So does Carla Villagran, a lawyer and chief human rights investigator at the archive. She, too, has a personal motivation. At the age of 19, she was married to a leader of a guerrilla movement. “He was kidnapped by the police and disappeared,” she tells Boyd.

But it was a daunting task to deal with the 80 million pages of material. The Guatemalan investigators were overwhelmed and they appealed for help.
Assistance came from an unlikely place – far away in California’s Silicon Valley from a small nonprofit called Benetech. Former rocket scientist Jim Fruchterman founded Benetech to provide high-tech solutions to humanitarian problems. Scanning and analyzing millions of documents did not faze him. “Oh, I thought that’s [just] a medium-sized asbestos litigation.” And when he realized what was at stake in the Guatemalan police archive project – that an official record of abuses in Latin America’s longest, dirtiest war might be lost – he vowed, “That was an injustice we had to fight.”

Dr. Patrick Ball, a computer scientist at Benetech, took on the Guatemala project, providing software that would preserve and analyze the police records, potentially giving families – and human rights prosecutors – the information they’d been hoping to find.

But back in Guatemala, as staff and volunteers cleaned, sorted and scanned the documents into computers, there was resistance from others who feared what dark secrets might be revealed. There were death threats and an attempted fire bombing of the warehouse. Security cameras were installed and the scanned files were encrypted and stored in back-up computers outside the country in Silicon Valley and other locales.

Boyd tracks down the current chief of police to ask him how he feels about the archive project. Although he came up through the ranks of the police during the civil war, the chief insists he is not worried. “If something comes out, then let it come out.”

In a country where many people still do not talk openly about what happened during the war, the biggest vote of confidence in the archive project came from Guatemala’s newly elected president, Alvaro Colom, who made an historic visit to the warehouse earlier this year.

 “When I visited the National Police archives I had a very strong feeling, a longing for justice,” President Colom tells FRONTLINE/World. “My head was filled with images of the past we should never forget. We want justice.”

Like so many others, the president has a personal connection. His uncle, a well-known opposition leader, was gunned down in his car in Guatemala City in 1979 in what was widely believed to be a government-sponsored assassination. The evidence of that murder may lie buried in the archive records, waiting to be scanned by a volunteer and spotted by a computer search.

“I have in my hands a great responsibility,” a young worker at the archive tells Boyd, saying she feels like she’s saving Guatemala’s history for future generations. Soon, the staff hopes these records will be open to the public. And then, they say, thanks to a chance discovery, and some computer technology, the recovered stories of men and women who disappeared from history will never disappear again.