GUATEMALA CITY (Reuters) - Guatemala's new President Alvaro Colom said on Monday he will open army files for the first time to make public details of massacres and torture by soldiers during the country's 36-year civil war.
"We are going to make all of the army's archives public sowe can know the truth, to start building on a foundation oftruth and justice," said Colom, who beat a right-wing formergeneral to take office in January.
Almost a quarter of a million people were killed ordisappeared during the 1960-1996 conflict between leftistguerrillas and the government. Over 80 percent of the murderswere committed by the army, according to a UnitedNations-backed truth commission.
The commission, which compiled thousands of interviews withvictims after the 1996 peace accords, named no officials, inpart because the army files were not open to the public.
Colom's uncle, Manuel Colom Argueta, a leftist politicianwith presidential ambitions, was killed by the army in 1979 ina well-coordinated ambush.
Rights groups say the new army files will help solve warcrimes when matched with information in the police archivediscovered in June 2005, as police collaborated with the army.
Colom said all the information from the military will beturned over to the human rights ombudsman, also in charge ofcleaning and categorizing the thousands of police documentsleft molding in an old warehouse behind a dump for rusted cars.
The massive paper trail gives hope to family members whoare looking for answers about their long-disappeared relatives.
Eighty-year-old Emilia Garcia hopes the army files willcontain clues about her son Fernando Garcia, a union leadershot by police in 1984, taken to a military hospital and neverheard from again.
"We have been waiting 24 years for the state to give ussome answers. All I want is to find my son's remains, he is nota lost dog," she said.
(Reporting by Herbert Hernandez and Brendan Kolbay, editingby Philip Barbara)
