In Case You Missed This... 'The Roots Of Bain Capital In El Salvador’s Civil War' - Salon

[WillyT]

The roots of Bain Capital in El Salvador’s civil war
Romney tapped El Salvador's wealthy families, including one linked to right-wing death squads
BY JUSTIN ELLIOTT - Salon
FRIDAY, JAN 20, 2012

<snip>

A significant portion of the seed money that created Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, was provided by wealthy oligarchs from El Salvador, including members of a family with a relative who allegedly financed rightist groups that used death squads during the country’s bloody civil war in the 1980s.

Bain, the source of Romney’s fabulous personal wealth, has been the subject of recent attacks in the Republican primary over allegations that Romney and the firm behaved like, in Rick Perry’s words, “vulture capitalists.”One TV spot denounced Romney for relying on “foreign seed money from Latin America” but did not say where the money came from. In fact, Romney recruited as investors wealthy Central Americans who were seeking a safe haven for their capital during a tumultuous and violent period in the region.

Like so much about Bain, which is known for secrecy and has been dubbed a “black box,” all the names of the investors who put up the money for the initial fund in 1984 are not known. Much of what we do know was first reported by the Boston Globe in 1994 when Romney ran for U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy. In 1984, Romney had been tapped by his boss at Bain & Co, a consulting firm, to create a spin-off venture capital fund, Bain Capital.

A Costa Rica-born Bain official named Harry Strachan invited friends and former clients in Central America to a presentation about the fund with Romney in Miami. The group was impressed and “signed up for 20% of the fund,” according to Strachan’s memoir. That was about $6.5 million, according to the Globe. Bain partners themselves were putting up half the money, according to Strachan. Thus the Central American investors had contributed 40 percent of the outside capital.

Back in 1984, wealthy Salvadoran families were looking for safe investments as violence and upheaval engulfed the country. The war, which pitted leftist guerrillas against a right-wing government backed by the Reagan administration, ultimately left over 70,000 people dead in the tiny nation before a peace deal was brokered by the United Nations in 1992. The vast majority of violence, a UN truth commission later found, was committed by rightist death squads and the military, which received U.S. training and $6 billion in military and economic aid. The Reagan administration feared that El Salvador could become a foothold for Communists in Central America.

The notorious death squads were financed by members of...

More: http://www.salon.com/2012/01/20/the_roots_of_bain_capital_in_el_salvador/singleton/

[Jackpine Radical]

1. Jeez, I hope Newt reads Salon.

Stop in & we'll talk it over.

[XemaSab]

2. You think the republicans are opposed to Salvadoran death squads?

Fewer Mexicans, the better, that's what they believe.

[Jackpine Radical]

5. Yeah, maybe you have a point there.

How silly of me. I was kinda overgeneralizing my revulsion for things like genocide, forgetting that most Republicans don't really consider foreign peasants to be human beings.

[WillyT]

3. Damn... I Haven't Had Me Some Old Style Beer In Years

[gratuitous]

4. Oh gosh, more lookin' backwards to the past

The official policy of the United States is that we don't try to second-guess foreign policy stuff, you know, criminalizing political differences, even those involving crimes against humanity. So, where the money came from to make Mitt Romney a gazillionaire all those years ago is just not relevant. He's got money today, and that's all that matters. Unless you're one of those dirty fucking hippies who hates capitalism and free enterprise.

[leveymg]

6. Fascinating story. But, how many lies and contradictions can you spot just in this one section?

Pyes, who has since won two Pulitzer Prizes and is now a private investigator in California, says that no one has produced any proof that de Sola directly funded death squads.

“However,” Pyes says, “he was in the inner circle of the group around D’Aubuisson at the time that D’Aubuisson was well known to be involved in the death squads. De Sola’s name appears in a December 1983 FBI cable as one of 29 people suspected by State Department officials of furnishing funds and weapons to Salvadoran death squads.”

De Sola’s name also turned up in a notebook, seized from an aide to D’Aubuisson named Saravia, that detailed the finances of D’Aubuisson’s terrorist network, according to Pyes.

The Saravia notebook, reviewed by U.S. officials, listed weapons purchases, payments, and what appear to be descriptions of violent plots by rightists, including the assassination of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in 1980. Asked about the notebook by the New York Times in the late 1980s, de Sola denied that he had ever helped finance political violence. De Sola could not be reached for comment for this story. Romney, for his part, who was much more accessible to the press in 1994, told the Globe that year that “we investigated the individuals’ integrity and looked for any obvious signs of illegal activity and problems in their background, and found none.

[WillyT]

7. Yep...

[WillyT]

8. Kick !!!