ONUSAL

ONUSAL, acronym for the United Nations Observer Mission In El Salvador, (), was a peacekeeping mission from July 1991 to April 1995. Created towards the end of the Salvadoran Civil War, the United Nations oversaw the transition to peace between Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and the government of El Salvador. The UN was invited by both parties involved for monitoring the human rights conditions within the country.

== Establishment == The situation in El Salvador in 1990–1991 was characterized by a continuing civil war and hopes for peace that culminated in intense UN-sponsored talks. These achieved a cease-fire agreement in a December 1991 New Year's Eve "Act of New York" which expanded the original ONUSAL established by Security Council Resolution 693, whose limited mission was restricted to monitoring human rights, and converted it into a new major UN verification and observation mission. Contra demobilization in Nicaragua provided a useful precedent for FMLN demobilization in El Salvador. With the expanded ONUSAL came the end of the now much-diminished ONUCA, whose personnel and assets were quickly moved to El Salvador in January 1992. ==Difference from ONUCA== ONUSAL differed from ONUCA, a similar peacekeeping mission in Central America, in one key respect: the police function. A key element in the Salvadoran peace process was that demobilization of the FMLN would be accompanied by demobilization of certain military and police units which had been associated with some of the more brutal human rights violations of the ten-year civil war. To replace the old security and police forces, there would be a new National Police which would include personnel from both the old police and the FMLN. These new National Civilian Police differed from tradition in that they were categorized as separate from the military. These personnel had to be trained quickly, and this was one of the functions of the Civilian Police Division of ONUSAL, also known as CIVPOL.