Excerpt from National Bipartisan Report on Central America: Hearings Before the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, Ninety-Eighth Congress, Second Session; February 7 and 8, 1984; Printed for the Use of the Committee on Foreign Relations We did believe that an attempt should be made to see which elements of the insurgent groups, and if possible all of them, would be prepared to participate in a genuinely free political process and to negotiate about assurances by way of an electoral commission and other means in which the security guarantees could be given for a genuinely free political process. At the same time, we have to face the fact that maybe this diplo matic approach will not work. And it is in this context that it is our View that security assistance is of fundamental importance. Where I and my colleagues might differ from some of the statements one sees in the press occasionally is that we do not think, or I do not think, that diplomacy is an alternative to security efforts but a com plement to them and a consequence of them. And we would like noth ing better as a Commission than a diplomatic outcome along the lines that we sketched here. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.