Romero_Trial_Transcript_8_25_04_53_2

8-25-04 Trial Transcript
19 What was that?
20 A. I led a number of -- I led or participated in, I should
21 say. I shouldn't say "led," they were always led formally by
22 a Congressman, but I went along as the knowledgeable person
23 about El Salvador.
24 And there are so many of them.
25 This was, again, the issue of Central America being
KARL - D
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1 extremely controversial, there were elections that were
2 scheduled for 1988. This was a very difficult time in El
3 Salvador, and it was a time in which the U.S. was pressuring
4 very hard to permit opposition candidates to return who had
5 been in the opposition to the government, to return and to be
6 able to campaign for the 1989 elections.
7 Q. Leaders of opposition that had fled El Salvador?
8 A. That had fled El Salvador. They were returning.
9 And in this particular period, if I recall correctly,
10 between '87 and '88, there was a great effort to see whether
11 opposition leaders could return and actually campaign. They
12 could certainly -- at least some of them could go back to El
13 Salvador without being afraid of being killed if they were
14 high enough level and high enough profile. So they were left
15 alone.
16 The question was would they actually be able to
17 campaign in the election.
18 So there were a lot of questions about whether the
19 elections that were being held in El Salvador in this period
20 had any real guarantees for opposition candidates to be able
21 to participate.
22 And I was investigating a number of those things and
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