Guatemala's president will soon set up a long promised national commission to look into the many children still missing six years after the end of a 36-year civil war, according to the UN.
"President Alfonso Portillo has given me assurances that this will be done, Olara Otunnu," UN Secretary-General Mr Kofi Annan's special representative on children and armed conflict, told reporters after a recent visit to Guatemala.
An estimated 200,000 people were killed or disappeared during the conflict that pitted leftist rebels against the military government and ended in a 1996 peace agreement.
That agreement provided for establishment of a formal commission on missing children. But so far, only a temporary body has been set up, Mr Otunnu said.
The country's lenient laws, combined with Guatemala's extreme poverty and many war orphans, have spurred a thriving international adoption business but have also led to unscrupulous adoption rings that steal babies and sell them overseas, according to the United Nations.
Most of the adopted children end up in the United States. Mr Otunnu said the world body strongly supports adoption but wants Guatemala to follow through on a commitment to bring its adoption laws up to international standards.