Peace Process and Legal Opposition Party
On 29 December 1996, a peace agreement was signed by the government and the URNG in the presence of UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, officially ending the 36-year civil war. The Secretary-General of the URNG, Comandante Rolando Morán and president Álvaro Arzú jointly received the UNESCO Peace Prize for their efforts to end the civil war and attain the peace agreement.
The UNRG has since apologized for the atrocities that occurred during the Guatemalan Civil War, asking forgiveness from all victims, families and other who experienced any kind of excesses. This apology came two days after President Clinton admitted the role of the United States in a “dark and painful period” during the civil war in Guatemala.
In the legislative election, held on 9 November 2003, the party won 4.2% of the popular vote and 2 out of 158 seats in Congress. In the presidential election held the same day, its candidate Rodrigo Asturias won 2.6% of the popular vote. At the 2007 elections, the party won with 3.72% 2 seats in the congressional elections. In the presidential election of the same day, its candidate Miguel Ángel Sandoval won 2.14% of the popular vote.
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Read more about this topic: Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity
Famous quotes containing the words peace, process, legal, opposition and/or party:
“The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.”
—Mother Teresa (b. 1910)
“I believe that history might be, and ought to be, taught in a new fashion so as to make the meaning of it as a process of evolution intelligible to the young.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Therefore the love which us doth bind,
But fate so enviously debars,
Is the conjunction of the mind,
And opposition of the stars.”
—Andrew Marvell (1621–1678)
“This will not be disloyalty but will show that as members of a party they are loyal first to the fine things for which the party stands and when it rejects those things or forgets the legitimate objects for which parties exist, then as a party it cannot command the honest loyalty of its members.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)