Go Home

D'Aubisson

1 document found in 0.001 seconds.

Romney, Bain, Oligarchs and Death Squads

Back in July, I wrote a post about Romney and Bain, and how he will never tell the truth. In that post, I mentioned his connection to Latin American oligarchs and how they funded a substantial chunk of his initial Bain ventures.

Now the Huffington Post has picked up that thread and run with it. What they've uncovered is ugly and violent. It layers on another layer of taint to Bain Capital's founding, Romney's offshore accounts, and his equally unsavory offshore associations.

In The Real Romney, the author mentions Romney's trip to Latin America to raise money for the initial Bain Capital funding rounds. Romney and his partners had been encountering difficulties raising funds for that initial round and had agreed not to approach existing Bain investors. So Romney reached out to his Latin American friends for help. The family mentioned in the book is the Poma family, but the Huffington Post article has much more.

"I owe a great deal to Americans of Latin American descent," he said at a dinner in Miami in 2007. "When I was starting my business, I came to Miami to find partners that would believe in me and that would finance my enterprise. My partners were Ricardo Poma, Miguel Dueñas, Pancho Soler, Frank Kardonski, and Diego Ribadeneira."

Romney could also have thanked investors from two other wealthy and powerful Central American clans -- the de Sola and Salaverria families, who the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe have reported were founding investors in Bain Capital.

While they were on the lookout for investments in the United States, members of some of these prominent families -- including the Salaverria, Poma, de Sola and Dueñas clans -- were also at the time financing, either directly or through political parties, death squads in El Salvador. The ruling classes were deploying the death squads to beat back left-wing guerrillas and reformers during El Salvador's civil war.

Great pains were taken to make sure The Real Romney readers understood that Romney and Bain vetted these investors to make sure they were not becoming an investment vehicle for illegal drug money or other ventures which might not look so great.

Continue reading »