UN General Assembly
1992

Others took advantage of the problems of our political and economic development to transplant their hostilities to our soil. Therefore, for more than 30 years our country was involved in foreign and alien confrontation that left only suffering in its wake and led to neglect of the central problems of our society. As a small country, Guatemala suffered from the ups and downs of an international system based on ideological confrontation. As was the case on a world-wide scale, economic resources necessary to give impetus to the process of our people's socio-economic well-being were earmarked to finance a sterile and cruel confrontation. The attention of the various sectors of our society was distracted from genuine questions of development and obfuscated by an ideological polemic whose outcome was violence and stagnation. Problems of hunger, education, social well-being, health and poverty are among those that were left unattended and unsolved throughout these irretrievably lost decades. The whole Central American region found itself in a similar situation so much so that it became the focus of international attention as a result of