The breaking news that the CIA has destroyed tapes showing what can only be evidence of war crimes comes just as I’ve been reading about Guatemala in a couple different places. A U.S. supported coup against the elected head of state in 1954 began the long reign of military terror in that nation. The resulting dictatorships killed at least 200,000 and waged virtual genocide against the indigenous Mayan Indians. The military and police were armed, trained, and paid by the U.S. An article in this month’s Harper’s reminds us that these state torturers and murders are also bureaucrats: they kept records of their deeds, and after years of denying that they did so, a trove of them was recently found. Thousands of the disappeared are being returned to memory; history will out. (There’s an exhibition at ICP about archeologists uncovering Franco’s handiwork in a Spain still very leery of examining the years of reaction; Spain remains a potent reminder that fascism was not defeated in 1945; three other exhibits at the same museum also reference the murder of Republican Spain). Meanwhile, a new book by Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder: Who Killed the Bishop? is about the 1998 execution of Bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera, a Roman Catholic human rights advocate in Guatemala who was killed just after releasing a large well-documented report on the “civil war” that ended there only two years earlier.