Princeton University Library (PUL) has published a new digital archive that documents the ground-breaking atrocity trials that occurred in Guatemala’s domestic courts after that country’s 36-year armed conflict (1960-1996). The court records in this archive were collected by Temple Law Professor Rachel López, formerly a fellow of Princeton’s Program in Law and Public Policy, curated by PUL’s Librarian for Law and Legal Studies David Hollander, and summarized by Guatemalan human rights attorney Astrid Escobedo.
In total, López identified 32 cases involving atrocities committed during the armed conflict that resulted in convictions starting from 1993 to the current day. This archive includes court records of the conviction and sentencing decisions in 24 of the cases, which López obtained from multiple sources, including the human rights lawyers and prosecutors who litigated them, the judges who oversaw them, or the judicial archives in municipalities across Guatemala. Under Guatemalan law, these judgments are technically public, but because of the extraordinary difficulty of obtaining them, this project was the first to pull them together into one collection.
López explained, “I started collecting the court records of these cases as a Fulbright Scholar in 2016, often traveling for days on dirt roads in rural Guatemala to find the courthouse with the only known copy of the case file. Together, these records show the evolution of transitional justice in Guatemala, from the early convictions that characterized the atrocities as common crimes by rogue actors to the most recent ones that trained their focus on some of the most powerful state officials in Guatemala.”
The curators hope that this collection will be an important resource not only to researchers, but also to the Guatemalan people, providing access to historical documents that otherwise would remain hidden away from public view, and if not preserved, gradually vanishing. “Because so much case law is widely available through online databases, it is uncommon to encounter a collection that includes court decisions that exist only in a remote rural courthouse,” said Hollander. “It has been so gratifying to work with Professor López, who did the hard work of collecting these court decisions in person, to make them available to a wide audience.”
Visit the digital archive to learn more and to access the documents.
The photo in this post was captured by Rachel López on August 30, 2016 at the funeral of Jacobo Lopez. Jacobo was an indigenous activist who disappeared in Guatemala in 1983, after two military commissioners accompanied by a group of masked men came to his home and dragged him away. His whereabouts were unknown until his remains were found in 2016 in one of largest mass graves found to date in Guatemala—at a military base known as CREOMPAZ. The evidence recovered from the exhumation of those graves became the basis for the largest case of enforced disappearance in Latin America.
Source: Library Webpage