An ISU alumna has been doing international work to ensure the history of countries marred by genocide do not go unwritten.

Trudy Peterson, retired director of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, spoke Monday night in the Sun Room of the Memorial Union about her efforts in Guatemala doing what she said was the largest processing of police records ever in the Western Hemisphere.

Much of Peterson’s work involved sorting through records, organizing them and making sense of them. She said records are not limited to just documents – they can include testimonials, video, audio, analyzed data, e-mail and even objects.

“There’s an international archival standard for how you describe records, and you always describe records with two things: the content of the records and the context of the records,” she said.

After the United Nations negotiated a peace accord in 1996 between the Guatemalan government and guerillas in the region, there was a noticeable absence of police records from the previous 30 years of repression and genocide. Of the 12 million people in Guatemala at the time, Peterson said an estimated 150,000 had been killed and another 50,000 had gone missing. She said there was a demand, not just by the U.N., but by families of victims, to know what happened to these people and the police records.

Government officials denied knowledge of the existence of such records, but they were soon found almost by accident in a former ammunition storehouse used by the government. The files were stashed in back rooms and in almost complete disarray – there was no order to the filing and a lot of the archives had suffered severe water damage. There was even wildlife living among the papers.

“It was the first time I was ever dive-bombed by a bat while looking at records,” Peterson said.

Peterson was paid by the Swiss to go to Guatemala and oversee the arduous task of restoring the archives. After she made progress with the records, Peterson compared her role in the project to that of an agricultural extension service, flying back and forth between the U.S. and Guatemala to oversee the project.

“The idea was you go out and train farmers on new techniques, then you come back and visit a little later and see how the crops are doing and do a little more training, and that’s essentially what I did,” Peterson said.

Peterson said similar projects have been taking place around the world in the past decade or so, in places such as South Africa, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Kosovo. This archive work does not come without risk – an investigator who was researching the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was himself assassinated just a few days ago.

The benefits of this research, however, is monumental. She said records archived from countries’ times of genocide are not only of historical benefit, but also provide valuable insight on sociology, political science and human rights.

Peterson’s experience in Guatemala and with the U.N. is chronicled in her book, “Final Acts: A Guide To Preserving the Records of Truth Commissions.”