Romney’s Blood Money: Bain and the Salvadoran Death Squads

[Octafish]

Why Mitt is BFEE:

Bain and the Salvadoran Death Squads

Romney’s Blood Money

by SANDY SMITH-NONINI
CounterPunch Weekend Edition, August 25-26, 2012

EXCERPT...

For me, it is grotesque to imagine that families deeply enmeshed in the operations of the “protection racket” behind Tita’s murder helped finance the rise to power of a candidate for the U.S. presidency. Far from denying the claims, Romney named and publicly thanked several Salvadoran investors for their help in a 2007 speech in Miami. U.S. officials and human rights inquiries had linked close relatives of the investors, belonging to the Poma, Duenas, de Sola and Salaverria families, to paramilitary violence by 1984 when they met with Romney. Some of their relatives were charged with directing violence personally, others with supporting it behind the scenes under cover of the extreme right wing ARENA party which orchestrated the death squads in those years.

The LA Times July 19 article cited Bain’s corporate filings in Massachusetts, as well as a 1994 expose by the Boston Globe, which calculated the Salvadorans’ investment in Bain at $6.5 million, based on writings by former Bain executive Harry Strachan who introduced Romney to the investors. The Globe quoted Romney saying Bain had checked backgrounds of individual investors (none of whom are accused of human rights crimes) but had not investigated their families. The Salon blog also reported on Romney’s recruitment of the Salvadoran investors in January.

Approximately 35,000 Salvadorans were killed, most in political murders from 1979-1984 when the violence reached genocidal levels, with dead and mutilated bodies routinely found in landfills or dumped by roadsides. In his 1992 book How Holocausts Happen Sociologist Douglas Porpora argued that, given the proportion of Salvadorans affected and the systematic nature of the violence in the early 1980s, it was justified to consider this period a Holocaust-like event.

The Reagan administration’s generous foreign aid to the military regime protected a small oligarchy of families whose wealth came from plantations dependent on cheap labor from a peasantry forcibly dispossessed of land. After the 1992 ceasefire a United Nations study blamed 85% of the civilian killings on government military and allied death squads. I documented the human toll from the Salvadoran land grabs and militarism in my 2010 book Healing the Body Politic (Rutgers University Press), which traced 25 years of resistance to the regime by rural community health organizers during and after the 12-year war.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/08/24/romneys-blood-money/

That's why I call "Them" the BFEE -- what Bartcop way back when first termed the Bush Family Evil Empire. BFEE really is shorthand for "the War Party," "War Inc," "the Money Party," "Welfare for the Wealthy," "WealthCare," "Slavemonger," "Gangsters," "Neocons," the Secret Government-Mafia-NAZI-mafia, the "Neo-Confederates" -- all are names for the Empire for Private Profit Warmonger Traitor Ownership Class.