When a landslide is not a mandate

The Guatemala News and Information Bureau (GNIB) was an activist and solidarity group based in San Francisco, California, created in 1978 to support and inform the public about Guatemalan movements for peace and justice, indigenous rights, and labor rights. To support its activities, the GNIB systematically collected a wide variety of materials documenting all aspects related to the civil war in that country, including human rights abuses and the social and political responses to state sponsored violence. Also documented were the negotiations and the implementation of the Peace Accords signed in the mid 1990s. The result was an unparalleled archive of gray literature (published and unpublished documents, pronouncements, action alerts, press releases, flyers, newsclippings, correspondence, and other types of ephemeral material), serials, and policy reports representing the actions and views of activist groups, government officers and politicians, journalists, international solidarity groups, as well as revolutionary organizations. Princeton University Library acquired the archive in 2002 and subsequently digitized over 14,000 items from the Ephemera Section of the archive with the support of the Cooperative Digitization of International Research Materials (CDIRM) project, organized by the Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC).