More than ten years ago, when I visited the place known as La Isla for the first time—where the Historical Archive of the Guatemala National Police is currently housed—rescuing that sordid accumulation of papers and aberrations was still an ambitious and risky project, which on more than one occasion came close to being cancelled. Today the Archive is public (http://archivohistoricopn.org); the painstaking work of cataloging millions of police documents has facilitated the legal clarification of cases regarding the disappearance of persons and other crimes against humanity.
I want to thank Gustavo Meoño, Director of the Archive Recovery Project, who allowed me, a fiction writer, to venture onto that island.
Rodrigo Rey Rosa
2017