Those allegations of Romey's ties to Salvadoran death squads

Yesterday I wrote about El Faro and its editor Carlos Dada and their excellent investigative journalism.   Today Dada published an example of his journalism which touches on the US presidential race.

Various left wing blogs and publications in the US have attempted to link Bain Capital under US presidential candidate Mitt Romney to right wing death squads which operated in El Salvador during the 1970s and 1980s.   An example is this piece from Democracy Now which contains the inflammatory statement:
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is facing new scrutiny over revelations he founded the private equity firm Bain Capital with investments from Central American elites linked to death squads in El Salvador. After initially struggling to find investors, Romney traveled to Miami in 1983 to win pledges of $9 million, 40 percent of Bain’s start-up money. Some investors had extensive ties to the death squads responsible for the vast majority of the tens of thousands of deaths in El Salvador during the 1980s.
Today Carlos Dada at El Faro provided a close analysis of the actual proof offered, viewed from the standpoint of El Salvador, where the personalities and families are well known.  In his article titled Mitt Romney and the Death Squads, Dada concludes that, at most, there is evidence that Bain Capital received funds from people who had relatives who had links to the death squads.   But, he points out, in El Salvador the civil war often divided families, set brother against brother, uncle against nephew, generation against generation.   In short, saying that Bain Capital received early financing from wealthy Salvadorans is not the same as saying the money came from someone who funded a death squad.

The proof is stronger, Dada asserts, that support from the Republican Reagan administration flowed to people  in Miami and El Salvador who provided backing to the shadowy squadrons of death.   But no one in the US is interested in talking about that.

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