A key witness, who hadn’t testified before, was Terry Karl, a Stanford political scientist widely regarded as one of the world’s most knowledgeable experts on the Salvadoran military. She had spent the war years on fact-finding missions to El Salvador, cultivating government sources and interviewing military men. Drawing from US cables and firsthand testimony, she could lay out with encyclopedic clarity how much Vides Casanova and García had really known about the armed forces’ rampant abuses given the structure of the high command. The government had been a military dictatorship, she argued:
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