Paper Cadavers Quotes

“found that having her two sons work with her at the Project helped them to finally understand why they had grown up abroad without the regular presence of their mother.”
― Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

“The abiding need to restore honor to the armed conflict's victims—and, by extension, to themselves—inspired Project workers’ daily labor of sifting through gruesome photos and endless pages of bureaucratic minutiae in search of nuggets of evidence.”
― Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

“The reivindicación, or restoring of honor and agency to the dead, was a major motivating force for nearly all the ex-militants with whom I spoke. Even in the face of the testimonial and forensic evidence compiled in the CEH and REMHI reports, the Guatemalan air still hung thick with a homegrown holocaust denial: the charge that the genocide of the 1980s and the urban counterinsurgency were the invention of “subversives” seeking to discredit Guatemala on the international stage. Efforts by the state, business elites, and some journalists to discredit and attack war victims had always drawn their strength from the idea that nobody could “prove” the truth-value of the events in question, and therefore the victims were making it all up.”
― Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

“They simultaneously wrestled with and reified their losses, all while seeking to marshal them for the purposes of effecting change in the present.”
― Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

“But without necessarily finding any truths; sometimes you find nothing more than the stamp of repression upon their bodies.”
― Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

“In the majority of cases, mentions of loved ones did not bring new information but simply offered an “official” version of what had transpired—that an individual was killed by “unknown individuals,” or else nothing more than a brief mention of the name. “I have found documents about my closest loved ones dead, their photos, very painful things,” María Elena told me, trailing off in tears as gunshots from the police firing range pounded in the background.”
― Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

“There are a lot of people who are unemployed in Guatemala because they aren't willing or able to work in anything except human rights. I include myself in that group. I can't find anywhere to work besides the academy or human rights”
― Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

“It's very gratifying [to work at the Project], because in these difficult conditions, we continue doing the same work, but in a different form. That's how some of us consider it. This work is a continuation of what we did before.”
― Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

“I decided that it was fine…because I felt something there, like a hope, that this could contribute to Guatemala. I feel like I am working toward the same goals, but now with different conditions.”20”
― Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala

“Humberto, a case investigator, envisioned his participation as part of a broader compromiso—a fundamental moral position, a political consciousness linked directly to his decades of involvement in the FAR and the EGP:”
― Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala