" ... on the heels of reports generated by a United Nations investigation and a Guatemalan truth commission that established that the United States had not only propped up a series of brutal military dictators but also had trained many of the military leaders involved in ordering and overseeing horrendous human rights violations..."  Even more important was the Catholic Church's own Project to Recover the Historic Memory, which the bishops created after the peace talks established a truth commission with a criminally weak mandate. It wasn't the U.N. which spoke the painful truth about Guatemala's painful past. It was the church.