December 2019 • Natalia Mora
Natalia: Working on the database codification has been quite frustrating: from the monotony of ctrl+f down to combing through the archive itself to find information that isn’t obvious from the case descriptions within the database. The first frustration and biggest struggle was deciding what we meant by disappeared. Is it someone who was taken and then never seen again or can someone who was then found also count as someone who was disappeared? We decided to codify people who were later found as different than those who were never seen again. Alongside this we have a different category for people who were threatened but were not disappeared. Then to further complicate the idea of disappearance, there are people who have two incidents of disappearance. How do we describe someone who was taken, appeared, and then disappeared and never found? At first it felt like there was only one case where this happened but as I kept “ctrl+f”-ing to make sure there were no duplicates I kept stumbling across more cases of this kind.
When I got to the part of the database that focuses on the department of Chimaltenango everything changed. Because I had done research on Chimaltenango, 1982 especifically, when I got to that department there were names that I recognized. It was shocking for me to catch things that I didn’t notice before because I now have more background on their disappearances. Also since I was no longer focusing on a specific year I was able to see other connections between the people in 1982 and themselves or others in other years.
Finally, as I scrolled through the archive there were many last names which were repeated with the same date of disappearance. It’s made me wonder if they were related and if so how?
