ORIGINAL PAPER On or off the record? Detecting patterns of silence about death in Guatemala’s National Police Archive Tamy Guberek 1 • Margaret Hedstrom 1 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 Abstract This paper investigates how the production of police records was linked to the policies of repression and violence during Guatemala’s civil war. We provide empirical evidence from the Historical Archive of the Guatemalan National Police that the police used language, terminology and codes to record deaths in ways that produced silences about the level of violence during the height of repressive mili- tary rule. Using a dataset derived from a statistically valid sample of police records together with qualitative archival analysis, we find evidence of profound changes in the terminology used to record and report on deaths—changes that follow a pattern consistent with the policies of information control and concealment of the three different military regimes that ruled Guatemala between 1978 and 1985. We argue that researchers will need to consider the silences created through the selective use of terminology in documents when using archives to produce historical knowledge. Detecting and intercepting silence will be especially important as state records are increasingly sought in service of ongoing pursuits for truth and justice about past atrocities. Keywords Guatemala Á Sampling in archives Á Silences Á Police archives Á Violence Á Human rights Tamy Guberek wrote an earlier version of this paper as her M.A./M.Sc. thesis: ‘‘Off the Record: Concealing State Violence in Guatemala’s National Police, 1978–1985’’ (Columbia University and London School of Economics and Political Science, 2012). & Tamy Guberek tamyg@umich.edu Margaret Hedstrom hedstrom@umich.edu 1 School of Information, University of Michigan, 3433 North Quad, 105 S. State Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA 123 Arch Sci DOI 10.1007/s10502-017-9274-3