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:
“When the peace is a trade route, figures
For the budget, reduction of population,
Life grown sullen and immense
Lusts after immunity to pain.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“... the history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.”
—Catherine E. Beecher (1800–1878)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.”
—Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)
“We are in a period when old questions are settled and the new are not yet brought forward. Extreme party action, if continued in such a time, would ruin the party. Moderation is its only chance. The party out of power gains by all partisan conduct of those in power.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)