The AHPN has a group of highly qualified people with the skills necessary to identify, process, and analyze documents containing information relating to events that constitute human rights violations.
[4] Since the discovery, forensic teams have been carefully archiving the files they have found, with the help of specialized organizations like Benetech and Human Rights Data Analysis Group, and software such as Martus.
Investigators described the room as “brim with head-high heaps of papers, some bundled with plastic string, and others mixed with books, photographs, videotapes and computer disks—all told, nearly five linear miles of documents.”[8] This archive contains approximately 80 million pages of information from the Guatemalan National Police, the largest collection of state secrets ever found in Latin America.
The archive most notably sheds light on kidnappings, tortures and murders of tens of thousands of people during the country's 36-year Guatemalan Civil War, which ended in 1996, while the collections date back to the 19th century.
They found that over 200,000 people were killed, in which "State forces and related paramilitary groups were responsible for 93% of the violations documented.”[11] Public mobilization against the government was highest between 1978 and 1982 and so was the rate of murder and human rights abuses.
Part of this negotiation was the creation of the Human Rights Accord, signed in March 1994, which created mechanisms for ensuring fair and equal treatment of government dissenters.
Former head of the national police, Hector Bol de la Cruz was charged and convicted in the case of Fernando Garcia, a 27-year-old student activist who disappeared on February 18, 1984.
[13]: 35–37, 58 Human rights groups, including the Centro Para la Acción Legal en Derechos Humanos (CALDH, Center for Human Rights Legal Action), the Grupo de Apoyo Mutuo (GAM, Mutual Support Group), the Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia y Contra el Olvido y el Silencio (HIJOS, Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice and Against Forgetting and Silence), the Oficina de Derechos Humanos del Arzobispado de Guatemala (ODHAG, Human Rights Office of the Archbishop of Guatemala), and Seguridad em Democracia (SEDEM, Security in Democracy) volunteered to assist with the digitizing of records.
Investigators soon employed the help of database software and statistical analysis, with the assistance of Benetech, a non-proift founded in Palo Alto, California in 2000 with the slogan "Technology Serving Humanity."
He continues, “The point of all human rights work is to understand the past, so we can build a future that doesn’t repeat it… we give [organizations] the technical tools to preserve their information…and provide them with technical support to assure that the process is systematic, thorough and scientific.”[14] From July 2009 the ownership of Guatemala National Police Archive moved from the Ministry of Interior to the Ministry of Culture and Sports, under the guidance of the General Archive of Central America (AGCA).
In his view, understanding how the National Police went bad and preventing it from happening again—"that's real improvement...Now it's the world's job to dig through the material and make sense of it.