WOLA-Duke 2015 Human Right Book Award: Paper Cadavers, by Kirsten Weld

The Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) and Duke University have named Kirsten Weld's book, "Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala" (Duke University Press, 2014) as the winner of the 2015 WOLA-Duke Human Rights Book Award. Weld will be at Duke University Libraries to receive the award, discuss and read from her book. The award presentation will be followed by a reception and book signing. "Paper Cadavers" documents the heroic effort of hundreds of idealistic, activist youth who rescued and organized the National Police records under the leadership of a former guerrilla, Gustavo Meoño. In 2005, activists from the Human Rights Ombudsman's Office (PDH) of Guatemala, while inspecting police premises for improper storage of explosives in Guatemala City, accidentally came across a trove of 75 to 80 million half-moldy pages of National Police (PN) records. Kirsten Weld, assistant professor at Harvard University, shows how information once employed by the police state to control society and pursue subversives was put to use by the human rights community to reveal the identity of perpetrators of human rights abuses and to bring many of them to trial. In the words of the author, "Records once used in the service of state terror are repurposed by surviving reformers as building blocks for the rule of law and tools of social reckoning."