Digging for the truth

At Doyle's suggestion, Villagran adopted the open-source Martus document management application developed by the nonprofit Benetech Initiative. It is designed specifically to help human-rights groups manage and analyse information they collect. Martus is a free PC application with built-in encryption that is configured for automatically backing up its data to remote servers.

As the 24-hour guard at these document buildings suggests, this is a sensitive project, with alleged perpetrators still alive in Guatemala and facing prosecution.

"The Guatemalans have understood the importance of securing their information," says Tamy Guberek, Benetech's Latin America projects coordinator. "They're very strict on data security. They've taken a huge initiative to understand the tool and get the most out of it."

Hard as Villagran's team tries, the size and disorganized state of the archive mean the work to scan it all by December, when the US$2.5 million budget for this phase of the project ends, won't be done. The team prioritizes the scanning of files with potential human rights investigative value from the civil war period, but the archive contains other records, including administrative and bureaucratic paperwork spanning about a century.

Here Benetech is also helping Villagran's team by taking random samples from the archive, so that it will be possible to reach conclusions about its composition, such as what percentage might contain information related to human-rights violations, Guberek says. The technology builds "a level of accountability into the analysis of documents that we didn't have before," Doyle says.

Sidebar: Tough environment

Even though Guatemala's 36-year civil war ended 11 years ago, the country continues to struggle to establish domestic security. An Amnesty International report in August 2006 cited cases of murder, death threats and a kidnapping of human-rights workers or their close relatives.

A rising homicide rate in 2005, along with organized crime, youth gangs and clandestine security forces, combines to make stemming violence "a national priority owing to its effects on public security and the creation of a state of public alarm," the United Nations Commission on Human Rights reported last year.