<i>Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala</i>, by Kirsten Weld
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, by Kirsten Weld. Durham, Duke University Press, 2014. xvi, 335 pp. $26.95 US (paper). In June 2005, investigators with Guatemala's Human Rights Ombudsman's Office (PDH) stumbled upon what appeared to be vast quantities of old papers in derelict offices of Guatemala's infamous national police. The human rights workers soon realized they had discovered the largest collection of secret state documents in Latin American history. The incredible story that follows this discovery, along with the gruesome tale that precedes it, is the heart of Kirsten Weld's brilliantly narrated and written first book. The story Weld tells, while engaging in its own right, holds concrete lessons and insights not only for scholars of Guatemala and Latin America, but for anyone interested in the politics of history and memory, the power of archives and state terror, as well as the process of postwar transition and reckoning. While the role of Guatemala's military in the state-sponsored genocide that took place in the Guatemalan countryside during Guatemala's civil war (19601996) is well known, Kirsten Weld takes us into a lesser known, but equally important, history of the national police and Guatemala City. Paper Cadavers is divided into four parts covering the initial of the archive, the history of the police archive and its role in Guatemala's counterinsurgency, the role of the archives in social reconstruction at the ends of war, and finally the institutionalization of the archive and the development of a new culture in Guatemala. The thread tying these parts and chapters together is the national police archive itself and Weld's compelling argument for archival thinking: putting archives--their histories, silences, distortions, and politics--at the centre of our questions. Drawing upon recent works comprising the archival turn, Weld argues that archives must be analyzed as more than the sum of their parts--as instruments of political action, implements of state formation ('technologies of rule'), institutions of liberal democratization, enablers of gaze and desire, and sites of social (p. 19). The heart of Paper Cadavers is thus a story of how this one particular archive was transformed from a weapon of surveillance, social control, and ideological management for a counterinsurgent state to use against its enemies into a weapon of democratic opening in the pursuit of justice for war crimes for a demilitarized Left, victims of state terror and their families. In the first part of the book. Weld narrates the explosive of the archive and the challenges faced by human rights workers as they grappled with what to do with 75-million pages documenting over a century's worth of blood-filled history. The discovery of the archives, however, was not entirely accidental. Beginning in the mid-1980s, family members of those disappeared and killed in Guatemala City organized around the collective demand for information about victims' fates and state transparency and their struggles provided instructive lessons for those involved in the rescue of the national police archive. The second part of the book takes up these state secrets by looking backward into the history of the national police and its practices. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".