El Salvador Revisited

El Salvador Revisited

Jon Weiner wrote in The Nation, 7/19/12, Bain Capital’s Ties to Salvadoran Death Squads.

“When Bain Capital was founded in 1984, Romney and his partners had trouble raising funds for their initial investments. “$9 million came from rich Latin Americans,” the Times reports, “including powerful Salvadoran families living in Miami.… At the time, U.S. officials were publicly accusing some exiles in Miami of funding right-wing death squads in El Salvador. Some family members of the first Bain Capital investors were later linked to groups responsible for killings.

“The civil war in El Salvador lasted from 1980 to 1992 and killed more than 70,000 Salvadorans. It started after Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated while giving a mass shortly after he published an open letter to President Carter asking him to cut off US military aid to the Salvadoran military regime.”

When I read about this connection between Romney and El Salvador, which apparently is still going on,  I remembered an article I had cut out of our local paper and kept all of these years.  The article appeared originally in the Toronto Globe and Mail, and was reported by the Scripps Howard News Service in our local paper, The Telegram-Tribune, 1/14/91, Death squads threaten foes. Following are excerpts from this article.  I am only leaving out extraneous material such as what some Salvadorans like Archbishop Arturo Rivera Y Damas were saying.

“SAN SALVADOR – The worst fears of El Salvador’s leftist political leaders came true during the weekend, when a San Salvador radio station broadcast a threat from two of the country’s death squads to kill opposition and labor leaders, priests and intellectuals. 

The general commands of the Maximillian Hernandez Martinez and Aquiles Baires death squads sent the written statements by mail to the radio station, which broadcast the contents on Saturday…

“At this time,” the statement reads, “we are going to talk in all frankness about our philosophical basis and the politics of our movement.

This country’s society is divided into three classes:  a superior creative class composed essentially of specialists and large landholders; a smaller class that tries to imitate this superior class; and an inferior rustic class that is made up essentially of workers, poor peasants, students and small businessmen.

Another group exists that we hold in low regard and consider very small – the dangerous intellectual class that tries to contaminate the above mentioned classes.”

The death squads’ message to this intellectual class and opposition leaders is clear.

“The superior capitalist class in our country is naturally the strongest, and its destiny, without question, is to govern and regulate the inferior classes.  And what is more, it has a duty to exploit, dispose of, conquer and even exterminate elements of these inferior classes when the benefits of capitalism require such.

Our adversaries, the subversives and the great inferior mass, must be exterminated, or at least their leaders."

Thinking about these articles at the same time I am listening to what Der Mitt says he will do as soon as he is elected, I truly do get shivers.  He wants to eliminate all of the government entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.  He wants to get rid of Planned Parenthood, and the Affordable Health Care Act, which has provisions in to support pregnant women, but also just to get rid of all of it.  He would like to get rid of unemployment benefits, pension benefits, teachers, fire fighters, and law enforcement.  These are the programs that the “inferior classes” rely on.

He talks constantly about how capitalism much be unfettered by government regulation – that corporations know best how to run their business, and he believes that corporations have the same rights as people. 

At the same time Der Mitt is campaigning on the above issues, the Republican Party, wherever they are in power in states, are doing their utmost to keep from voting the “inferior classes when the benefits of capitalism require such.”  If these voter suppression laws actually stay in effect during the November elections, it is estimated that approximately five million people, mostly students, elderly, and minority voters who would vote for President Obama, will lose their right to vote.  People will no longer be “equal before the law”.  Some will be more equal than others, by far. 

For years during elections, I have heard “we are at a crossroads” so we must vote for blank.  Well, during this election, we are at a humongous crossroad.  One of the first things a potentially totalitarian government does is take away the people’s right to vote, or to have any say in their government.  If these voter suppression laws are not overturned and if Romney is elected, watch out.  We are in for a terrible time. 

As the old Yiddish curse says, “May you live in interesting times”.  Well, these are certainly interesting!