\n A UN group has asked Guatemala to open up military sites to help in the search for the thousands of people disappeared during the country's 1960-1996 civil war.\n<\/p>\n
\n The counterinsurgency waged by state forces and allied death squads against leftist guerrillas and activists left around 200,000 dead or disappeared, according to a UN-sponsored Truth Commission created following a 1996 peace agreement.\n<\/p>\n
\n The most \"urgent and necessary actions\" for finding missing people are \"the opening of (the) archives\" of the Guatemalan Armed Forces and \"the opening of all military establishments\" where soldiers spent time during the war, Ana Lorena Delgadillo, an expert with the UN Working Group on Enforced Disappearances, told a press conference on Thursday.\n<\/p>\n
\n \"It's one of the clearest requests of the victims\" that was passed on to President Bernardo Arevalo, Delgadillo said, when she presented a preliminary report by the working group to the left-leaning leader.\n<\/p>\n
\n In June, Arevalo announced a plan to locate around 45,000 people disappeared in the conflict.\n<\/p>\n
\n Families of victims and war survivors, most of them Indigenous Maya, have spent years requesting the government open the doors to all military bases after it came to light that several contained clandestine cemeteries.\n<\/p>\n
\n The UN group's report said that there is \"a persistent historical debt the State owes to the victims of grave human rights violations, including enforced disappearances.\"\n<\/p>\n
\n Delgadillo also criticized the \"absolute dismantling\" of investigative teams documenting war crimes by the former Attorney General Consuelo Porras, who has been sanctioned by over 40 countries, including the United States, for alleged corruption and crimes against democracy.\n<\/p>\n
\n The expert requested that the new attorney general, Gabriel Garcia Luna, open a \"serious\" investigation into the accusations that UN specialists made in February against Porras for a case of illegal adoptions of indigenous children in the 1980s -- a charge the former prosecutor has denied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A UN group has asked Guatemala to open up military sites to help in the search for the thousands of people disappeared during the country's 1960-1996 civil war. The counterinsurgency waged by state forces and allied death squads against leftist guerrillas and activists left around 200,000 dead or disappeared, according to a UN-sponsored Truth Commission […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[553],"tags":[],"ji_location":[],"class_list":["post-161193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-feed"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n