Now a leaky warehouse crammed floor-to-ceiling with 3 million documents may finally provide answers.

Few families from Guatemala 's Indian majority were spared in the 36-year war and its state-sponsored obliteration of hundreds of villages. On top of the known death toll, some 40,000 people simply disappeared.

Yet even now, after a U.N. truth commission, an apology from President Bill Clinton for the U.S. involvement and the discovery of graves every few days in remote mountain hamlets or jungle camps, much of the truth about what happened remains hidden or buried.

Some of the perpetrators live freely in mansions in Guatemala 's capital, where they remain wealthy, powerful and openly scornful of efforts to hold them accountable for atrocities committed before a peace treaty took effect on Dec. 29, 1996.

However, the June 2005 discovery of the archive of the once-feared, now-defunct National Police may help Guatemala turn a corner.

Human rights workers using high-speed scanners are preserving the decaying documents in an electronic database of evidence that holds the prospect of punishment for the worst atrocities, or at least solid information about what happened to the victims, according to Sergio Morales, Guatemala 's special prosecutor for human rights.

Gathering dust alongside driver's license forms, officers' pay stubs and citations for public drunkenness that date back to 1896, Morales said, is proof that police wrongfully detained or kidnapped suspected leftists all over Guatemala , torturing and killing many of them.

"There are thousands of documents with information about every class of atrocity," said Morales. "And that's just among the few we've been able to check."

For now, his office is releasing almost no information, fearing that even hinting at the files' secrets could encourage sabotage by those threatened with exposure as human rights abusers.

Nineth Montenegro was able to use her clout as a congresswoman to get inside the warehouse. She says she spent a few hours on her hands and knees searching among the moldy files for information about her husband, Fernando Garcia.

What she found was a roster showing who was on duty at the police station where Garcia, a guerrilla movement activist and union organizer at a bottle factory, was taken on Feb. 18, 1984, and tortured for months. It was the kind of evidence whose existence the government had always denied: the names of witnesses who might lead authorities to those responsible for his death.

"If they know that, why are they not going to look for those people?" she says.

Easier said than done, Vice President Eduardo Stein told The Associated Press in an interview. Resolving the murders of today is hard enough, let alone atrocities from decades ago, he said.

"During the war years, the justice system became so debilitated that we haven't been able to strengthen it," he said. "We are trying our very best, but there has not been much progress."

It will likely take a year to convert the documents into a searchable database.

Interior Minister Carlos Vielman, whose National Civil Police replaced the National Police in 1997, said the priority is to tackle today's drug trafficking and street gangs, and suggested the importance of the archive is overstated.

The government supports the search for secrets in the files, he said, but "a certain mystique has been created around them, a myth-like status."

Montenegro doesn't expect a criminal trial of those who killed her husband.

"What I hope to find is the body, the rest of Fernando," she said.

For Graciela Ramirez Monasterio, the database means she will be able, with a few keystrokes, to find every reference by the police to her brother Augusto, a Catholic priest who preached liberation theology. He was abducted in 1983 and shot nine times in the back. She has been silent ever since because, "We had to promise not to bring charges or make any questions just so they would give us the body."

It means that Rigoberta Menchu, the Mayan village activist who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize, may find out who ordered the fire in 1980 that killed her father and 36 others who were occupying the Spanish Embassy to protest the killing of Mayans.

She says she wants to be able to prove to her son that, "Your grandfather was not a criminal ... They burned him alive in the Spanish Embassy, but he had not committed a crime."

For many families, just finding out the fate of a loved one would count as progress after what was the longest and bloodiest of all the conflicts that devastated Central America during the Cold War.

The war's outlines have long been known: Dissident military officers rebelled against military regimes installed by the CIA's overthrow of an elected president and joined forces with leftists emboldened by the 1959 Cuban revolution.

U.S.-backed military regimes wiped out entire villages of Mayan Indians suspected of aiding the rebels, the survivors fleeing deeper into the mountains or neighboring Mexico . Death squads swooped down on students, union leaders and political dissidents whose mutilated bodies turned up in ditches or were never seen again.

Washington, a key ally of right-wing leaders throughout Latin America during the Cold War, sent U.S. advisers to help the Guatemalan military.

Declassified CIA documents show high-level U.S. officials were kept informed of the atrocities.

The U.S. Embassy's deputy chief of mission in Guatemala , Viron Vaky, complained in a March 1968 memo to Washington : "Murder, torture and mutilation are all right if our side is doing it and the victims are communists; I have literally heard these arguments from our people."

But CIA documents made public came with key details blacked out. And while the U.N.-brokered peace accord ended open warfare, the U.N. truth commission wasn't allowed to name names or provide evidence for criminal trials.

It said 93 percent of the war's human rights violations, including 626 massacres, were perpetrated by soldiers or army-sponsored civilian paramilitary groups during a campaign to wipe out real or imagined rebel strongholds that amounted to genocide against Mayan villagers.

Guatemala's former leftist rebels begged forgiveness "with profound pain and humbleness" for their actions, and Clinton acknowledged the U.S. role in Central America 's "dark and painful period" of civil wars and repression. But those who were in power at the time have offered no expressions of remorse and that has left a culture of impunity that still vexes Guatemala .

"What's past is past," Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores, who ruled from 1983 to 1986, told The Associated Press. "I don't want to talk about that stuff from last century."

The government said no documents were kept on dissident arrests until Morales' team discovered the archive that proves otherwise. Activists now hope to force Mejia and other former leaders to acknowledge their actions in public, if not in court.

"These are official documents that can't lie," said Carla Villagran, director of analysis for Morales' office.

Only 14 Guatemalan soldiers are behind bars for massacres, in part because the CIA refused to release evidence implicating individuals.

The United Nations also agreed not to assign blame to avoid provoking the army into blocking the peace deal. Working with the oral testimony of survivors, the commission managed to show the overwhelming scope of atrocities. But it fell short of the kind of public disclosure that encouraged national healing in South Africa , where a post-apartheid truth commission granted amnesty to those who confessed and showed repentance.

Guatemala's war was bloodiest between 1978 and 1984, when Gen. Romeo Lucas Garcia took power, only to be overthrown by Efrain Rios Montt, a brigadier general who was himself replaced in a coup by Mejia Victores.

While Lucas Garcia died last May at age 81, other key military leaders remain influential. Twice elected president of Congress, Rios Montt, 80, ran unsuccessfully for president three years ago and still lives in a spacious and well-fortified home, where bodyguards told the AP no one would comment for this story.

"What I find very staggering is that those who are accused of committing acts of genocide aren't only free but also very powerful," said Sebastian Elgueta, an Amnesty International investigator. "Look at Rios Montt. He got 700,000 votes."