Recent revelations about Mitt Romney's highly profitable company Bain Capital help connect the dots between offshore tax shelters, shady investors; and the role that ill-gotten gains plays in today's casino-like finance capital.
Both the Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post published investigations in the last month showing that over a third of the $37 million raised by Romney to launch Bain Capital in the mid-1980s came from rich Latin Americans, the bulk of it from Salvadoran families linked to death squads.
An off-shore tax haven in Panama provided Bain with the secrecy needed to attract the approximately $6.5 million from the Salvadoran families in what many human rights experts would call "blood money."
While living in El Salvador in 1989, my family fell victim to rightwing terror, so I took the news like a punch in the gut. But as a professor, I know that the generation of Americans born since 1980 has little awareness of the troubled U.S. history of aiding Central American militarism. Perhaps that is why this story has not been more widely reported. Let me explain why I use such a rude term as blood money.
The revelations took me back to November 1989 when I worked as a stringer for the New York Times and other U. S. newspapers in San Salvador. It was late at night. I sat on the floor in my bedroom over a TRS-80 laptop finishing an article about recent air force raids on urban neighborhoods in the capital. Moments after sending the file the phone rang. "You have 24 hours to leave the country or you can kiss your family good-by," said a man in accented English.
The shadowy death squads in my articles suddenly materialized into a personal menace — someone with a gun had my toddler son and I in his crosshairs. With the airport and bus companies closed due to fighting, it was impossible to leave, so we spent a nightmarish week with my son in hiding while I pulled long hours running back and forth between him and my office in the foreign press corps — constantly on adrenaline alert with an eye on my jeep's rear view mirror.
Earlier that year we had lost my son's aunt to the terror. Marta Lidia "Tita" Guzman, an activist with UNADES, a group that advocated for victims from the 1986 Earthquake, disappeared a few hours after the National Police raided her office in June 1989. We never found her body. Tens of thousands died in a similar manner, killed by what Political Scientist William Stanley called "a protection-racket state."
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