Kate Doyle, a senior analyst of U.S. policy in Latin America for the National Security Archive, will discuss “Proving Genocide: Historical Archives and the Prosecution of Human Rights Crimes in Guatemala” when she speaks March 2 at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Doyle’s free presentation – Ohio Wesleyan’s biennial Robert Kragalott Lecture on Genocide, Mass Atrocity, and Human Rights – will begin at 7:30 p.m. March 2 in Room 301 of Merrick Hall, 65 S. Sandusky St., Delaware.
At the National Security Archive, Doyle directs multiple research projects, including the Guatemala Project, which collects declassified U.S. and Guatemalan government documents on the countries’ shared history from 1954, and the Evidence Project, which connects the right to truth and access to information with human rights and justice struggles in Latin America.
Since 1992, Doyle has worked with Latin American human rights groups, truth commissions, prosecutors, and judges to obtain government files that shed light on state violence. She has testified as an expert witness in numerous human rights legal proceedings, including the 2008 trial of former President Alberto Fujimori of Peru for his role in overseeing military death squads; the case before the Spanish National Court on the 1989 assassination of Jesuit priests in El Salvador; and the 2010 trial of two former policemen in Guatemala for the disappearance of labor leader Edgar Fernando García in 1984.
Doyle has edited and published two of the National Security Archive’s major document collections: “Death Squads, Guerrilla War, Covert Operations, and Genocide: Guatemala and the United States, 1954-1999” and “El Salvador: War, Peace and Human Rights 1980-1994.” Together, the collections contain more than 5,000 declassified records for use by scholars, journalists, and researchers.
Doyle’s work was featured in the award-winning documentary “Granito: How to Nail a Dictator,” by Pamela Yates and Paco de Onís, which narrates her role in the collective effort to indict former Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide and crimes against humanity. In 2012, Doyle was awarded the ALBA/Puffin Foundation prize for Human Rights Activism, which she shared with Fredy Peccerelli of the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala. Doyle holds a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University.
Ohio Wesleyan’s Kragalott Lecture honors the career, contributions, and memory of Robert Kragalott, Ph.D., a professor in the OWU Department of History from 1964 to 1991. In years when lectures are not held, the endowment supports a student research project supervised by a faculty member in the history department. Learn more at www.owu.edu/history.
