Tracing Weapons in the Archive: The Paperwork of Policing in Late Colonial Guatemala

This paper examines the Bourbon-era practice, initiated in the 1790s, of tracing confiscated weapons into the criminal case files of Guatemala City residents. Laws prohibiting the carrying of weapons (portación de armas) grew increasingly expansive over the course of the Bourbon era, eventually encompassing any instrument, including sticks and stones, deemed capable of causing bodily harm. These laws were also prosecuted more aggressively over time. Criminal case files from the 1790s and early 1800s show the result of these policing reforms: many more people were tried and sentenced for portación de armas. Drawn or traced into the margin of criminal cases, the illustrations served as evidence for the prosecution. Most of the confiscated weapons in Guatemala were knives, but some were awls, scissors, or saws. Indeed, as the cases make evident, the carriers of these instruments almost always described the confiscated instruments as work tools.

What did officials accomplish by recording an image of the weapons on paper? This presentation will seek to answer this question by examining complementary and concurrent technologies of surveillance and archival practices used by Bourbon law enforcement. It attempts to trace the practices, then, to both their origins and their ultimate objectives.