Historical Clarification Commission

Guatemala, report published 1999. With commissioners appointed by the UN Secretary-General, the commission drew on the accounts of some 9,000 witnesses and survivors of the civil war, whose worst violence fell between 1981 and 1983. Its conclusion went further than almost any commission before it: the commissioners stated that genocide had deliberately been committed, describing the massacres of indigenous communities as an attempt to exterminate an ethnic group as such. Like Chile's, it was not allowed to name perpetrators or attribute individual responsibility, and pointed instead to the institutions responsible. Read it for the moment an official inquiry used the word genocide about its own country's past.