Information policies and the right to know : declassifying Dirty War evidence in Mexico's national archive

For many years, archives were regarded as objective portals to the past. A repository for rare documents waiting to be discovered and pieced together. However, with the archival turn in the late 20th century, this notion began to shift. As a result of Jacques Derrida (1996) and Michel Foucault’s (1972) contributions, the archive was elevated from a repository of objects to an object in and of itself. No longer seen as a neutral space, scholars and archivists began to redefine the role of archives. By the early twenty-first century, Carolyn Steedman (2002), Achille Mbembe (2002), Arlette Farge (2013), and Ann Stoler (2009) reconsidered how archives structure historical narratives, as well as their capacity to create and legitimize narratives. During this same time, with the end of the Cold War, archivists around the world were recasting archives as tools for society to hold governments accountable and prescribing what constitutes a well-managed archive. While these two fields of study have advanced archival studies and transformed how archives are read, few scholars have examined the policies that govern the opening, or closing, of archives. By doing so, I argue, we can better understand the role of archives in society and politics. This study offers an examination of the information policies that guarantee, or deny, the right to publicly held archival information in Mexico. By bridging these two fields of study, this case study contributes to the archival turn debate by tracing information policies and demonstrating how policies influence how people interact with archives using Mexico's Freedom of Information law.Latin American StudiesInformatio