In mid-January 1986, a forty-four-year-old Salvadoran labor leader who went by the name Alejandro Rodríguez took the stand. He was a husband and father of four, who had worked as an industrial electrician in El Salvador and had been the secretary of a large construction union. State security forces had jailed and tortured him for his work, and he fled with his family to Mexico. (“We’re not going to get into ears and eyes and individual tortures,” Judge Carroll warned from the bench.)
