Terrorism in the Archives

According to Professor Jay Rosen in New York, once the United States government declared war in Iraq, it lost its legitimacy and dragged with it all the press that, at the time, could not and did not want to warn what was really happening.

It is because of this that the sources of WikiLeaks, in Rosen’s opinion, prefer to pass the information to the former hacker Julian Assange rather than hand them over in the garage of some journalist. They trust him more.

The explanation is suggestive and has the virtue that it does not place value judgment about whether WikiLeaks is good or bad. To the contrary, there is an attempt to try to understand what WikiLeaks is. One could add to the speculation that WikiLeaks — aside from being an organization without a country or jurisdiction that pays homage to the Internet — completed a work that today can be considered subversive: taking away the monopoly that the powerful have on memory.

Think for a minute — or not — about how useful it would be for Colombia that WikiLeaks, or any other organization of its kind, devoted its energies to the care and management of official information. Regardless, state behavior has not been exactly exemplary in the matter of archives.

It serves as an example how there were declared “dead files” concerning the time of the violence and its 300,000 victims, after which came the issue of a resolution ordering them to be burned, including the precise dates of 1948-1958. Or what about the files that were never made, through incompetence or by strategic planning? What about the files that can never be consulted because they are rarely shown due to the secrecy of the military? What about the files that are stolen, as in the recent case of the DAS? And what about the files that are manipulated for strategic reasons, including the files from Reyes’* computers?

The list is longer, but the principle is the same.

*Editor’s Note: Raul Reyes was a former member of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).