Romney’s Bain Possibly Linked to Salvadoran Death Squads

The Los Angeles Times reveals that various ultra-right-wing exiles are the Republican’s partners.

They invested $9 million into the aspiring president’s business, Bain Capital.

Mitt Romney, the presidential candidate of the Republican Party, obtained investments for his financial company Bain Capital from right-wing Latin American exiles in Miami, some possibly linked to Salvadoran death squads.

$9 million of the initial investment of the Romney and partners’ private financial company came from Salvadoran families (among other Latin Americans) that resided in Miami during the civil war in their country in the ’80s, reported The Los Angeles Times last week.

Although Romney’s relations with the Salvadoran oligarchic families have already been sporadically reported in the past, questioning has recently intensified over the connections of these first investors in financial company Bain Capital – founded in 1984 by Romney and a group of partners – where they have remained clients and associates of the company until today.

Romney’s campaign and the company have refused to comment on the details of Bain’s initial investors. But The Los Angeles Times recently reported that after the founders of Bain, Romney included, invested $12 million of their own money, they collected around a third of the $37 million in initial investment funds from rich foreigners, the majority through companies registered in Panama.

The first foreign investor of the founders was Jack Lyons, a British financier who invested $2.5 million. Years later, Lyons was convicted through the courts for a financial scandal unrelated to this business. Shortly after, Romney traveled to Miami to negotiate the Latin American’s investment, in particular Salvadorans, in his business. At this time, 1984, American government employees were publicly accusing some exiles in Miami of financing right-wing death squads in El Salvador, indicated the Times. Some first investors’ relatives were connected with the squads, although the rotary informed [the press] that there is no proof that these same relatives in particular invested in Bain, though their relatives did.

In fact, at that time Romney expressed concern at the suggestion of his partner Harry Strachan to seek out investment funds from Central Americans in Miami, since he feared that these funds could be linked with “illegal drug money, right-wing death squads, or left-wing terrorism,” Strachan himself revealed to the Boston Globe years later. But they needed the funds to launch the new business and Romney traveled to Miami. These Latin Americans have remained loyal clients of Bain and at least until 2008, continued to be one of the largest investor groups in Bain, according to Strachan’s memory.

The Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times have identified the Salvadoran families Sola and Salaverría among the first investors, and Romney himself, when he returned to Miami in 2007 to look for financial support for his first presidential campaign, recalled in a speech that he was thankful to various Latin Americans of that city for helping him drive Bain, naming Ricardo Poma, Miguel Dueñas, Pancho Soler, Frank Kardonski and Diego Ribadeneira, the Huffington Post reported yesterday. Some members of these families, the Post indicated, were directly or indirectly financing death squads in El Salvador.

In 1984 the Salaverría family – in particular brothers Julio and Juan Ricardo – were accused by the former American ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White, of financing paramilitary groups in that country, national news program Democracy Now reported today. The Huffington Post adds that this family, like that of the Solas, the Pomas and the Dueñas, had deep relations with Arena, justified by the leader of the death squads, Roberto D’Aubuisson.

The Boston Globe in 1994 and the Salt Lake City Tribune in 1999 reported the connections of the families who invested in Bain with the death squads; now these ghosts return in Romney’s full electoral campaign.