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THE MISSION ENDS: MINUGUA LEAVES GUATEMALA.

Article Excerpt
MINUGUA is gone. The acronym for the UN Verification Mission in Guatemala has become a household word throughout the country, and the institution for which it stands has been the international guarantor of the security of many of those households for a decade. MINUGUA officially came to Guatemala in November 1994, authorized by one of the agreements that would become part of the December 1996 Peace Accords, ending 36 years of internal war between the state and the group of guerrilla armies that formed the Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (URNG).

Initially, the mission was to oversee and verify respect for human rights, an impossible task in the ravaged nation, but, as President Oscar Berger noted in the ceremony marking its departure, "From the beginning of its activities after the signing and coming into effect of the Global Accord on Human Rights, MINUGUA started to save lives."

That much is unquestionably true. Some of the lives saved were those of people who came forward to testify to the atrocities that took place during the years of war that saw more than 200,000 people killed or disappeared. That testimony could not have been given without the presence of MINUGUA, and there would today be little record of what happened....

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