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Presidential candidate Mitt Romney started Bain Capital using money associated with Death Squads

Crescent International

US backed elites banded together with the CIA to train and arm death squads to terrorize the country, in which over 70,000 people were killed in a 10-year period.

Washington DC,

August 29, 2012, 17:15 EST

Hurrican Isaac nearly blew away Mitt Romney’s party to be crowned the Republican Party candidate for president. He already had the requisite delegates even though Ron Paul supporters were upset at being shut out and evicted from their seats on the convention floor.

Isaac turned its fury on New Orleans, the city battered by hurricane Katrina only a few years earlier. Even while Romney was having his house party, people in New Orleans were having their houses blown away.

This typifies Romney’s message. He believes rich people are blessed and smarter; that is why they are rich (the corollary to that is that poor people are stupid, that is why they are poor!). He wants the rich to rule America to make more money unencumbered by government regulations or taxation. This is raw capitalism at its worst. Romney advocated the ideology of dog-eat-dog, not that it is much better even today. To see Romney’s philosophy in action, let us look at Bain Capital.

Romney often justifies himself as a better choice for President than Barack Obama by pointing to his success with Bain Capital, his private investment firm. In speeches, he characterizes himself as a successful business leader with experience and financial savvy, and Obama as an untested ideologue. However, according to recent revelations, Romney started Bain Capital with funds from rich families tied to Central American death squads in the 1980s.

Ryan Grim, the Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief for the Huffington Post, has recently publicized the links between Romney and the CIA-sponsored terrorism in Latin America. When Romney was raising funds for Bain Capital in 1983, he raised around 40% of his startup funds (amounting to $9 million) from wealthy Latin American families in Miami who helped sponsor death squads in El Salvador and other countries.

These families were opposed to socialist governments in Latin America,, which had nationalized the coffee trade and had imposed other public welfare measures that interfered with their profits and oligarchic power over the country. These elites banded together with the CIA to train and arm death squads to terrorize the country, in which over 70,000 people were killed in a 10-year period.

Romney has been open about his links with these families, declaring in a 2007 speech given in Miami: “I owe a great deal to Americans of Latin American descent . . . When I was starting my business I came to Miami to find partners who would believe in me and finance my enterprise. My partners were Ricardo Poma, Miguel Duenas, Pancho Soler, Frank Kardonski, and Diego Ribadeniera.”

These figures, and the wider community of Latin American oligarchs, are also responsible for the murder ofArchbishop Oscar Romero, a courageous defender of people’s rights and freedoms against death squads. The Latin American oligarchs continued to have significant business ties with Romney. “Throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, Bain Capital made just absolutely extraordinary returns, something like 88% annual return over two decades, which is just an absolutely astounding amount of money”, noted Grim, “If you apply that to $9 million initial investment, you get an absolute fortune.”

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