Information buried in Guatemalan police archives is being used for the first time in the trial of two former police officers accused of the forced disappearance of a union leader during a 36-year civil war.
A Guatemalan judge decided today to send officers Hector Ramirez and Abraham Gomez to trial based on evidence from an 80 million-page archive that was discovered in a rat-infested Guatemala City munitions depot in 2005.
Human rights activists say union leader Fernando Garcia, 27, was on his way to work in February 1984 when he was shot by police officers and taken to a police hospital. He was never seen again.
"Documents found in the archive allow us to demonstrate that the capture and illegal detention took place, and to identify those responsible and the chain of command," Gustavo Meono, coordinator of the project to restore the archives, said.
A date has not been set for the start of the trial.
Around a quarter of a million people are thought to have been killed during the 1960-1996 conflict that pitted successive right-wing governments against leftist insurgents.
Around 45,000 of the victims were forcibly disappeared in a campaign that mostly targeted the indigenous Maya.
A United Nations-backed truth commission found the armed forces and police were responsible for 93 per cent of human rights violations during the war.
The civil war-era police force was so linked to repression and disappearances that it was dissolved in 1997 after the guerrillas and security forces signed a peace agreement.
"There are dozens more cases under investigation, three or four of them very advanced which could also be brought to trial," Mr Meono said.
Human rights workers stumbled upon dusty floor-to-ceiling stacks of papers when they went into the abandoned warehouse in Guatemala City to investigate complaints by nearby residents about old explosives stored there.
Reuters