SALON

Latin America

Wednesday, Jul 5, 2000 7:00 PM UTC

The unquiet death of Jennifer Odom

The Pentagon says the Army pilot's crash in Colombia last July was a "mishap," but her family believes she was shot down -- the first of many soldiers likely to die in our undeclared war.

By

Only hours before she taxied down a dark runway for her last fateful flight over the Colombian mountains on July 23, U.S. Army pilot Jennifer Odom had a worried, agitated conversation with her husband in El Paso, Texas.

U.S. efforts to stop the flow of Colombian cocaine, she complained, including her own nighttime electronic spying missions, hadnt amounted to “even a speed bump” against the surging illicit traffic. The flow of drugs north had doubled in the past year.

More worrisome, she said, her four-engine turboprop, crammed with sophisticated electronic gear to eavesdrop on cellphones and take infrared photos of cocaine factories, had been “lit up” — tracked — by hostile missile radar on recent flights.

That meant only one thing to Odom and her husband, retired Army Lt. Col. Charles Odom, an officer who’d had top secret clearances: Narco-guerrillas in the jungle below had obtained advanced ground-to-air missiles, the kind that emit pre-launch signals a plane like Odom’s could pick up. The war in Colombia, the Odoms agreed, had entered a new stage, and Jennifer believed her plane could be blown out of the air at any time.

Sometime after 3 a.m. that same night, Odom failed to make her regularly scheduled contact with an Army Intelligence communications base in Key West, Fla. She and her crew of four Americans and two Colombian liaison personnel had crashed on the side of a steep, unmapped mountain near the border with Ecuador. All were dead.

Thus did Jennifer Shafer Odom, 29, a slim, motorcyle-riding brunet and top graduate of West Point, become the first U.S. military casualty of Washington’s “war against drugs” in Colombia. Now, a year later, Congress is sending $1.3 billion in direct military aid to Bogota, raising the stakes even higher. The measure includes an untold increase in U.S. military and civilian “advisors,” on top of the several hundred DEA agents and Green Berets already there, ensuring that Odom wont be the last to disappear into the Colombian maelstrom.

Indeed, the U.S. is likely to plunge even deeper into the bottomless civil wars of the Andes, where the differences among cocaine traffickers, left-wing guerillas, right-wing death squads and corrupt government troops have become increasingly blurred, and every element — even the U.S. military, apparently — has been corrupted by drugs.

As Congress debated the aid package, a Colombian rebel leader said the escalation of military assistance would “throw fuel on the fire” of the nations civil war, and threatened to launch missiles against U.S. aircraft. But the family of Jennifer Odom believes that already happened. The Pentagon just didnt want anyone to know.

Almost a year after Odom died, her family is still seeking answers about what really happened that moonless night in southeast Colombia. The Army classified her death as a “mishap,” saying she unwittingly flew the plane into an uncharted mountain even though she was an experienced pilot flying in good weather conditions, in a plane equipped with state-of-the-art, forward-looking radar and navigational aides. Her family suspects she was shot down.

No such evidence can be found in the Armys thick, three-pound report on the incident, although so much of it was blacked out by censors that answers to the hard questions can’t be found in it.

Most disturbing to the family, Odom reported to Col. James Hiett, the top U.S. counter-narcotics official in Colombia. Hiett meanwhile was helping his wife launder the proceeeds of her cocaine smuggling through the U.S. embassy with the help of his chauffeur. The arrest of the Hietts five months after Odoms death shocked the family and left it wondering whether Hiett or other U.S. officials responsible for sensitive drug interdiction missions could be trusted.

“Jennifer briefed Hiett on her mission on July 14th. Nine days later the crew was dead,” says her grief-stricken mother, Janie Shafer.

No evidence has surfaced that Hiett had anything to do with Odom’s death. But if the U.S. chief of counter-narcotics in Colombia cant be trusted, Shafer wonders, who can?

Hiett, who is scheduled to be sentenced in mid-July, could not be reached for comment. His wife is serving a five-year prison term.

Few Americans even realized Jennifer Odom and four other soldiers had died in Colombia on July 23. The media’s attention was riveted on the disappearance of another small plane, this one piloted by John F. Kennedy Jr. near the posh Martha’s Vineyard resort off Cape Cod. Indeed, the Pentagon deployed a virtual armada to search for Kennedy, his wife and sister-in-law, at a cost of untold millions. Navy divers eventually recovered their remains, and a solemn funeral followed at sea.

In stark contrast, no U.S. military planes could be found to look for Odom and her crew mates in Colombia. Two days passed before their crash site was even located by a Colombian plane, and four more days passed before U.S. Embassy personnel rappeled down from hovering helicopters to pick through the wreckage and retrieve the bodies.

Through all this, the families waited in agony for definite word of their loved ones’ fate. When it finally came, low-ranking officers called. The Pentagon, meanwhile, tightly held the names and addresses of the crew from the media.

The families of Odom and the other casualties were also given constantly conflicting dates and times for when the caskets would arrive at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. Only the last-minute intervention of U.S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, who represents Odom’s rural western Maryland district, allowed her husband and family to get there on time.

No senior White House officials were on hand to greet the arrival of the crew’s flag-draped coffins at 1:30 a.m., in sharp contrast to the high-profile, prime-time attendance of U.S. presidents when other American personnel have been killed in service abroad. Attorney General Janet Reno, a civilian, did attend. The solemn ceremony was closed to the media.

“It was almost as if they didn’t want us to be there,” Odoms grieving mother said last week as she sat in a living room darkened by drawn shades and filled with mementos of her only daughter’s achievements in 4-H Club, high school and West Point, where she graduated in the top quarter of her 1992 class. Outside, a searing hot breeze ruffled the family’s corn fields.

There is no joy in this house, a plain white clapboard bungalow in the rolling farmland of Maryland. The Shafers are simple people, farmers, American Gothic. They don’t understand why their daughter was mixed up in Colombia, an undeclared war. They can’t fathom why they were treated in such a dismissive, even hush-hush way by the Pentagon.

Shafer and her son-in-law, Charles Odom, suspect that the White House and Pentagon deliberately played down the crash of Jennifer’s top-secret “Dash-7″ to dampen speculation about the full extent of U.S. military intervention in Colombia’s civil war, which is “much bigger” than commonly thought, Odom asserted, with “hundreds of Special Forces people running all over the country.”

“We’re pretty involved down there,” Odom said, “and we don’t want to let people know how deeply we’re involved. And that FARC” — the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the main Marxist guerrilla group fighting the government — “may have shot that plane down.”

“Every time they came back from a mission,” Odom recounted, “there’d be small-arms bullet holes on the fuselage or the tail. I asked her about it, and she said, ‘It’s a dangerous place. We’re always getting shot at and lit up (by guerrilla radar).’

“It wasn’t Colombian government radar,” Odom declared. “It was a missile lock.”

In congressional testimony last March, the commander of U.S. forces in Latin America, Gen. Charles Wilhelm, said intelligence sources were reporting the presence of ground-to-air missiles in the rebels’ inventory, including U.S.-made Redeyes and Stingers and Russian Sam-16s, all available on the black market. Only the newest models emit pre-launch signals that a target plane can pick up.

That was alarming enough. But a bigger point went unremarked: If Jennifer Odom’s DeHaviland-7RC aircraft was detecting missiles, that meant the U.S. Army had either drifted over the line from tracking narcotics to gathering intelligence on the rebels, or that the cocaine cartels and the guerrillas had now become inseperable. Either way, the U.S. was taking sides in Colombia’s civil war, a shooting war, without the American public’s knowledge, understanding or approval.

“We have no choice right now but to believe that they crashed,” says Adam Isacson, who follows the drug war for the Center for International Policy, a liberal think tank in Washington. “But they were intercepting communications at night — not your traditional counterdrug mission. And the only communications you intercept when you’re flying over Putamayo are guerrilla communications.”

In a statement last year, FARC’s commander neither claimed credit for nor denied the rebels had shot down the plane. But he warned that the U.S. was risking more casualties if it chose to interfere in Colombia’s civil war. FARC and two other leftist groups hold nearly half the country.

To maintain the appearance of noninvolvement in the civil war, U.S. Army policy mandates that intelligence on FARC not be turned over directly to their Colombian counterparts, but sent up through channels to Washington. Only then is it passed to the Colombian army.

The Central Intelligence Agency has “hundreds” of officers in Colombia, Isacson and others said. Companies like DynCorp, in Arlington, Va., have been hired by the Pentagon to deploy at least 200 more former U.S. special warfare types to Colombia, and hundreds more, along with advanced U.S. helicopters, are expected shortly with passage of the new military aid bill.

Several aspects of Odom’s death inspire her family and more than a few former colleagues to doubt the Army’s official verdict.

First, the recon missions were regularly flown in groups of three aircraft, they said, the better to look out for each other in the treacherous, mostly uncharted high mountains. On the night of July 23, Odom’s plane was sent out alone because the unit’s two other planes were in maintenance. She was also weary from many missions, her husband said, although she’d be the last officer to duck an order.

“Odom’s peers and her chain of command considered her as a very competent and meticulous PC [command pilot] and a professional aviator,” the Army said in its incident report.

Odom had flown helicopters and multi-engine craft on reconnaissance missions in dozens of countries, from Bosnia to Latin America, many of them classified, with 600 hours in the Dash-7 alone. She was dispatched to look for Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s plane when it went down in Croatia in 1996. She was a favorite of top army commanders, known for taking her Harley-Davidson roaring down the desert highways outside El Paso, the home of Company D of the 204th Military Intelligence Battalion.

On the night she died, she’d been flying over the Andes for 13 months and was scheduled to take command of her company the following week.

The forecast for her flight path that moonless night was generally clear, with scattered and broken clouds at 10,000 feet and winds variable at 5 mph, according to mission records. The weather report heightens many people’s doubts that an accomplished pilot, aided by advanced radar, could have flown dead-on into a mountain.

Of course, accidents are always possible. “You can’t predict what can happen,” said one soldier with experience flying the missions, echoing a common view. “The winds and fog and rain come out of nowhere. There can be a quick downdraft or wind shear that knocks you off course.”

But inexplicably, the Army report says Odom had turned off the instrument radar (IFR) in favor of visual navigation (VFR) while flying through a 10,000-foot high moutain range in the pitch black night.

If that’s true, how the Army knows it is another mystery. Curiously, and against tremendous odds, neither the aircraft’s voice cockpit or flight data recorder were working that night, according to the Army’s report, further eliminating any chance of gathering objective evidence on what caused the crash.

Additionally, maintenance records for the recorders “were not made available” to the accident investigating team, and the full-page conclusion of its findings on the recorders was also kept classified.

The Army says Odom flew into the mountain “at cruise airspeed,” pulverizing the aircraft and crew. But the entire “Finding” section of the report, released to her family, is blacked out by Army censors.

“Why is that blacked out?” Chuck Odom asks. “Does that have something to do with national security?”

There’s yet another troubling aspect to the incident: A U.S. Special Forces team was dispatched to blow up the remains of the aircraft. Its rationale was to destroy remnants of the classified electronic intelligence gear that had been on board, but photographs of the crash site show that that the aircraft already had been smashed to bits by hitting the ground at a force of 200 Gs.

An eyewitness called Chuck Odom to tell him that “he was deeply upset by that decision, and he was having trouble sleeping and so on,” because it was so obviously unnecessary to set explosives to the wreckage. There had to be another reason, the eyewitness source told Odom, such as obliterating “traces of a missile hit.”

Why? To obscure the clear and present danger of the flights, Odom says, and the fact that U.S. military personnel were involved in an undeclared war.

Finally, the corruption of Army Col. James Hiett, the top U.S. counter-narcotics official, and his drug-dealing wife, Laurie, upset the family tremendously.

The Hiett scandal obscures a more common — and deadly — reality, says Robert White, a former U.S. ambassador to Paraguay and El Salvador: the subversion of local narcotics-fighting agencies that the U.S. must work with.

“Cocaine is now Colombia’s leading export,” White says, ridiculing “the idea that an operation of that magnitude can take place without the cooperation of business, banking, transportation executives and the government, civil as well as military.”

Now the corruption has spread to a top American official. With the U.S. working hand-in-hand with local authorities, the leak of sensitive information, like the flight paths of U.S. surveillance plane, is inevitable, White suggests.

“There’s always been a fear of this by sensible people in the Pentagon,” White said. “You know, the legend is that the United States military is incorruptible, but that has proven not to be the case. There are quite a few instances of this corruption.”

A group of U.S. Army sergeants were corrupted by the Noriega regime in Panama, a handful of local and federal prosecutors have succumbed, and customs agents are regularly arrested for taking bribes, but there’s been nothing like the arrest of Hiett and his wife to surface — yet.

Shafer can’t help but wonder whether the corruption tied to Hiett had anything to do with her daughter’s death. But no evidence of that has surfaced.

“It’s been very, very hard on her,” Chuck Odom says gently of his mother-in-law. “The bottom line,” he says of his late wife, “is that she was a great gal, a great soldier, a great wife and no one in this family will ever get over this loss. We just go on numbly each day.”

In a morbid coincidence, he notes, she died on their seventh wedding anniversary. The family will gather for a memorial ceremony next month in her hometown of Brunswick, Md., where she is buried.

Beneath Odom’s grief, however, is a steady, quiet determination to get to the bottom of his wife’s death, about which there remain so many unanswered questions. Odom, who has had sensitive intelligence assignments himself, says he will not give up until he gets all the facts.

Jennifer’s mother, meanwhile, says she’s a long way from being over her daughter’s death. She still thinks about the day, weeks after Odom died, when the doorbell rang unexpectedly. When Shafer opened the door, she saw a UPS truck driving away, and found a small cardboard box at her feet. She opened it up. Inside were a handful of her daughter’s personal effects, unceremoniously shipped home to Maryland with no condolence message from her Army superiors or colleagues.

“You get up every day feeling sick, and there’s nothing you can take for it,” said Shafer, lines of unending sadness etched in her face.

At the very least, she wants the Clinton administration to come clean about how deep it’s involved in South America’s drug wars, now that Congress is about to add $1.3 billion in direct military aid to Colombias army.

“What are we hiding here?” she asks. “If that happens to be our cause, let’s be upfront about it.”

Jeff Stein is the coauthor, with Khidhir Hamza, of "Saddam's Bombmaker: The Daring Escape of the Man Who Built Iraq's Secret Weapon." He writes frequently for Salon on national security issues from Washington. More Jeff Stein.

Wednesday, Feb 15, 2012 4:08 PM UTC

The threat to Mexico’s machismo culture

As the nation's first major female presidential candidate, Vazquez Mota is challenging a slowly changing boy's club

By , GlobalPost Josefina Vasquez Mota (Credit: AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)
This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.

MEXICO CITY — At El Mirador, a cantina frequented by Mexico’s political and economic elite, you can see a fine selection of spirits and a menu that features dishes like pickled pigs’ feet and beef tongue tacos.

Global PostBut what you won’t see are women.

El Mirador, a relic from the country’s machista past, politely refuses to serve them. The bathroom has only a urinal and a sink.

So it may have come as a surprise to some when Mexico’s PAN party decided to nominate Josefina Vazquez Mota, a woman, for president – the first time a woman has ever been nominated by a major Mexican party.

Accepting her nomination, Vazquez Mota, a longtime government official, said, “I will be the first woman president of Mexico in history.”

Even if they are not yet welcome in the cantina at El Mirador, women are making noticeable inroads into other areas of Mexican political life.

With the real possibility that Mexico may join Latin American countries like Argentina, Brazil and Chile in electing a female to the highest office, her nomination marks a slow but steady erosion of Mexico’s macho culture, a way of life that lives on in the upper echelon of Mexican business world.

“Back in the 1950s all the cantinas in Mexico City were only for men. It’s the embedded machismo culture,” Ramon Peña-Franco, a former media analyst who worked for Mexico’s current leader Felipe Calderon.

Men gathered in cantinas to drink and play dominoes, while women stayed at home.

While the ban on women is not explicitly stated, it is enforced through the polite entreaties of waiters who explain the “tradition.” A woman in the men-only cantina might “make the other guests uncomfortable,” the Mirador manager said.

More than in the U.S. or the UK, the main stage of Mexico’s business arena continues to be dominated by men. However, more women have begun working in finance, information technology, media and manufacturing. Mexico has also seen an increasing number of female governors and cabinet members in the public sector.

And slowly, old social mores are beginning to evolve.

In 2006 many Mexican states updated the language used in marriage ceremonies, eliminating vows that asked men to treat their wives “with the magnanimity and generous benevolence that the strong should give to the weak,” and asked women to “give to her husband obedience [and] avoid awakening the most irritable and hard part of his character.”

Monica Morales, a financial analyst who was married in Mexico City in 2011, explained that the traditional language that was historically used in nuptial proceedings is too “macho.”

“Now, not even my grandmother would support it,” she said.

“Even my friends who want the most traditional weddings wouldn’t use it,” she said.

Some arenas of public life are evolving as well.

An electoral reform enacted in 2002 requires that major parties select female candidates for at least 30 percent of the seats they campaign for in the country’s congress. In 2003, the first election under the new rules, female candidates won 23 percent of the seats.

Now, women hold 30 percent of the seats in Mexico’s congress, compared to just 17 percent in the U.S.

Still, despite recent progress in the political arena, women have not yet broken through into the highest levels of Mexico’s corporate world.

Unlike in Mexico’s congress, very few seats in the country’s board rooms are filled by women. Only one of Mexico’s top 20 largest publicly traded companies has appointed a female board chair. Not one of Mexico’s largest companies has a female CEO.

When it comes to leading businesswomen in Mexico, Ramon listed “the owner of Grupo Modelo, Maria Asuncion Aramburuzabala. She’s the wealthiest woman in Mexico.”

“Other than that… I don’t think I can remember,” he said.

In July, Mexicans will vote to replace Felipe Calderon, whose six-year term has been plagued by violence from a five-year war on the drug cartels.

Many voters are ready for a change.

“This is a historic nomination, it has the potential to change the dynamics of the presidential race,” said Shannon O’Neil, a Mexico expert from the Council of Foreign Relations, a think-tank in New York.

It is still unclear whether Vazquez Mota, who has served both as secretary of social development, and later education, can convince voters to elect her.

Vazquez Mota’s main rival in the race to Los Pinos, the president’s office, is Enrique Peña Nieto, the candidate from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

The party ruled Mexico as a de facto autocracy for seven decades until it was ousted from the presidency by a candidate from the PAN in 2000, is campaigning hard as well.

Peña Nieto is currently leading in the polls, and most analysts consider him to be the favorite.

Peña Nieto, though, has faced a number of missteps so far in his campaign. At a recent event in Guadalajara, he couldn’t name three books that have influenced his life. After failing to correctly state the price of a kilo of tortillas, a staple in most families’ diets, he shrugged off criticism, saying, “I’m not the woman of the house.”

Vestiges of the macho culture, after all, are still very much present in everyday Mexico.

As the rules change, other aspects of the country’s public life have evolved with time. In 2008, for instance, Mexico City banned smoking in bars and restaurants.

The cantinas begrudgingly complied.

Seated at a table at the Mirador, Ramon said, “Machismo is rooted, so it’s been harder [to change] in Mexico than anywhere else.”

By the exit, there was a table of men in their seventies finishing a game of dominos, getting ready to leave.

“The role of women in political life is changing,” Shannon, the Mexico expert, said.

“The real challenge for women in Mexico, and elsewhere, is to increase the numbers and the breadth of their participation and say in the way things are run.”

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Friday, Feb 10, 2012 2:34 PM UTC

The man who could beat Chavez

A charismatic governor has emerged as the first legitimate threat to the Venezuelan president's 13-year tenure

By , GlobalPost Henrique Capriles Radonsk (Credit: AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)
This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.

MAIQUETIA, Venezuela — An hour’s drive from Caracas, thousands of people gathered in this coastal barrio at Venezuela’s national airport, which was recently given the dubious honor of being the worst in Latin America.

Global PostClad in blue T-shirts and waving tiny red, yellow and blue flags, the lively crowd sang and danced, waiting for the arrival of the man who is the first serious threat to President Hugo Chávez in his 13-year tenure.

Henrique Capriles Radonski is the frontrunner for primaries due to take place on Sunday, in preparation for October’s presidential election.

For the first time in its disjointed history, the opposition he is about to command has finally united to take on the socialist president.

When he arrives, el pueblo — “the people,” as Chávez affectionately calls them — crowds around him.

The 39-year-old Capriles has risen up the political ladder in Venezuela over the last decade, once a mayor and now governor of the country’s second-most populous state, Miranda.

This gives him credibility among those he is trying to woo.

“He’s young, but he comes with experience,” gushed Theresa Carinero, 56, clad in a T-shirt and bandana emblazoned with the candidate’s name, and waving his flag.

Capriles’ support comes largely from people like Carinero, which offers him an advantage over previous opposition candidates.

Former competitor Leopoldo López, who has thrown his support behind Capriles, won the backing of wealthy expatriates, but largely neglected voters at home.

López in 2008 was banned from political office on a corruption charge that never went to court. He denied the allegations and took his case against the Venezuelan state last year to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which overturned the ruling. But Chavez’s government declined to honor it.

In the awkward position of being able to stand for elections but not hold office, López shifted his considerable momentum to Capriles just two weeks ago.

At the rally in Maiquetía, Lopez flanked the main man as he greeted the throngs of supporters.

“It’s not sufficient to just talk about the problems,” Capriles told GlobalPost. “We have to fight against poverty.”

Capriles has based his campaign on improving education, which he sees as a long-term solution to the country’s insecurity and deep poverty. Capriles’ methods are not to shout down Chávez — indeed, he praises many of the president’s ideas — but to change things little by little, on a case-by-case basis, he said.

But it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to unseat El Comandante, as his supporters know him. Chavez has been in power for 13 years. And with world oil prices pushing $120 a barrel, Chavez, head of an oil-rich state, has a full campaign war chest. This week, Venezuela’s state oil company reported a 35 percent increase in profits last year.

“Chávez has begun his campaign, spending a lot of money,” said Luis Vicente Leon, a local pollster.

The president also remains very popular, largely because of the vast number of social programs he has put in place, funded by Venezuela’s vast oil wealth.

According to recent figures from local polling firm Hinterlaces, Chávez is bathing in an outstanding 64 percent approval rating.

Housing, health and other programs have been the cornerstone of Chávez’s tenure.

Critics charge the programs offer only aid, and no new vision for the future. “Why doesn’t Chávez propose a real solution, rather than fixing the odd house just for publicity?” said 24-year-old Yesman Utrera, speaking in his own barrio in the east of Caracas.

He added: “Everyone has a friend of a friend who’s been helped by the government.”

It was a severe lack of wealth distribution that helped bring Chávez to power in the first place.

While Chávez was studying at Caracas’ military academy in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Venezuelans were growing increasingly disaffected with the authorities, pocketing all the oil wealth while bringing neo-liberal reforms to the masses. Chávez capitalized on the disaffection with his 1992 coup attempt against then President Carlos Andrés Pérez.

Despite ending up in prison as the coup failed, Chávez became a national hero, personifying the struggle against a corrupt elite. This would carry him to the Miraflores presidential palace six years later.

Venezuelans haven’t forgotten the Perez regime. Pablo Perez, who isn’t related to the former president, has campaigned under that old party’s banner. But he is still tainted by association. “Pablo Perez isn’t going to win the primary because he’s from the AD,” said Carlos Romero, a political analyst working at Caracas’ Central University of Venezuela, referring to the party’s Spanish initials.

“I’m not part of the old establishment,” Capriles said. He also takes pains to distance himself from any U.S. connection. Though he is fluent in English, he is reluctant to speak the language on camera, pre-emptively parrying attacks from Chávez on any sympathy for the “Yankee empire,” as the president describes Washington’s domain.

Demonstrating a broader shift in Latin American politics, Capriles is also taking a leaf out of the book of former Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

Lula, as Brazilians affectionately know him, has come to represent a more moderate Left, able to support the poor while also working with business and Washington — a shift from men like Chávez and Fidel Castro in Cuba, who position themselves as being against the West.

Lula managed to unite a free market economy with social projects which have given concrete aid to the poor. Brazil is now the world’s most powerful emerging market and Lula is considered responsible for this and the country’s 7.5 percent GDP growth in 2010.

Capriles’ admiration of Lula is evident in social projects in Miranda, the state which Capriles currently governs. For example, he’s sponsored cooking lessons for the poor to help them set up small businesses, in direct imitation of Lula’s Hambre Cero (Zero Hunger) projects in Brazil.

Ultimately, it is popular support through projects such as this that will win it for either Capriles or Chávez in October.

“I wish Chávez a long life,” said Capriles, referring to the president’s cancer scare last year, “so that he sees the change that is coming.”

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Friday, Jan 20, 2012 8:00 PM UTC

The roots of Bain Capital in El Salvador’s civil war

Romney tapped El Salvador's wealthy families, including one linked to right-wing death squads

By Mitt Romney (Credit: Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters)

A significant portion of the seed money that created Mitt Romney’s private equity firm, Bain Capital, was provided by wealthy oligarchs from El Salvador, including members of a family with a relative who allegedly financed rightist groups that used death squads during the country’s bloody civil war in the 1980s

Bain, the source of Romney’s fabulous personal wealth, has been the subject of recent attacks in the Republican primary over allegations that Romney and the firm behaved like, in Rick Perry’s words, “vulture capitalists.”One TV spot denounced Romney for relying on “foreign seed money from Latin America” but did not say where the money came from. In fact, Romney recruited as investors wealthy Central Americans who were seeking a safe haven for their capital during a tumultuous and violent period in the region.

Like so much about Bain, which is known for secrecy and has been dubbed a “black box,” all the names of the investors who put up the money for the initial fund in 1984 are not known. Much of what we do know was first reported by the Boston Globe in 1994 when Romney ran for U.S. Senate against Ted Kennedy.

In 1984, Romney had been tapped by his boss at Bain & Co, a consulting firm, to create a spin-off venture capital fund, Bain Capital.

A Costa Rica-born Bain official named Harry Strachan invited friends and former clients in Central America to a presentation about the fund with Romney in Miami. The group was impressed and “signed up for 20% of the fund,” according to Strachan’s memoir. That was about $6.5 million, according to the Globe. Bain partners themselves were putting up half the money, according to Strachan. Thus the Central American investors had contributed 40 percent of the outside capital.

Back in 1984, wealthy Salvadoran families were looking for safe investments as violence and upheaval engulfed the country. The war, which pitted leftist guerrillas against a right-wing government backed by the Reagan administration, ultimately left over 70,000 people dead in the tiny nation before a peace deal was brokered by the United Nations in 1992. The vast majority of violence, a UN truth commission later found, was committed by rightist death squads and the military, which received U.S. training and $6 billion in military and economic aid. The Reagan administration feared that El Salvador could become a foothold for Communists in Central America.

The notorious death squads were financed by members of the Salvadoran oligarchy and had close links to the country’s military. The death squads kidnapped, tortured, and killed suspected leftists in urban areas fueling an insurgency that retreated to rural areas and waged war on the government from the countryside. The war, which lasted 12 years, triggered an exodus that brought more than 1 million Salvadorans to the United States.

There is no evidence that any of Bain Capital’s original investors were involved in these sorts of activities. But the identities of some of the investors remain secret, and there are family names that raise questions.

Four members of the de Sola family were among the original Bain investors, or “limited partners” in the company, the Globe reported. Their relative and “one-time business partner,” Orlando de Sola, was an important figure in El Salvador. A well-known right-wing coffee grower with an (in his words) “authoritarian” vision for the country, de Sola spent time living in Miami but was also a founding member of the right-wing Arena party, lead by a U.S.-trained former intelligence officer named Roberto D’Aubuisson.

Craig Pyes, an investigative reporter then with the Albuquerque Journal, wrote a series on the rightist death squads based on extensive on-the-ground reporting in El Salvador in the early 1980s with Laurie Becklund of the Los Angeles Times, while the death squads were still active.

Pyes, who has since won two Pulitzer Prizes and is now a private investigator in California, says that no one has produced any proof that de Sola directly funded death squads.

“However,” Pyes says, “he was in the inner circle of the group around D’Aubuisson at the time that D’Aubuisson was well known to be involved in the death squads. De Sola’s name appears in a December 1983 FBI cable as one of 29 people suspected by State Department officials of furnishing funds and weapons to Salvadoran death squads.”

De Sola’s name also turned up in a notebook, seized from an aide to D’Aubuisson named Saravia, that detailed the finances of D’Aubuisson’s terrorist network, according to Pyes.

The Saravia notebook, reviewed by U.S. officials, listed weapons purchases, payments, and what appear to be descriptions of violent plots by rightists, including the assassination of El Salvador’s Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in 1980. Asked about the notebook by the New York Times in the late 1980s, de Sola denied that he had ever helped finance political violence. De Sola could not be reached for comment for this story.

Romney, for his part, who was much more accessible to the press in 1994, told the Globe that year that “we investigated the individuals’ integrity and looked for any obvious signs of illegal activity and problems in their background, and found none. We did not investigate in-laws and relatives.” He also said that Bain had checked the names of the Bain investors with the U.S. government. Given the policy of the Reagan administration at the time, though, it’s not clear going to the government would have been the most effective vetting mechanism.

It’s impossible to fully explore the backgrounds of the original Bain investors because we don’t know all their identities, including the names of the four members of the de Sola family mentioned by the Globe. Neither the Romney camp, Bain Capital, nor Strachan — the Bain executive who recruited the Central Americans — responded to requests for comment.

During his first presidential bid in 2007, Romney more than once touted the Central American investors in Bain while trying to woo Hispanic voters. In a speech in March of that year to the Miami-Dade Lincoln Day Dinner, Romney actually specified five of the original “partners” in Bain Capital — but the de Sola family was not among those he named.

And that August he told the Miami Herald, “The investments for the company that I started, Bain Capital, came largely from Latin America. My largest single investors came from El Salvador, Ecuador, Colombia and Guatemala. And so I feel a deep kinship to people in Latin America.”


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Justin Elliott

Justin Elliott is a reporter for ProPublica. You can follow him on Twitter @ElliottJustin More Justin Elliott.

Friday, Jul 1, 2011 2:59 PM UTC

Chavez reveals he is fighting cancer after surgery

Venezuela's president confirms that trip to Cuba was to remove a tumor

By , Associated Press In this frame grab taken from Venezolana de Television, VTV, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez delivers a televised speech aired from Cuba, Thursday, June 30, 2011. Chavez said he underwent a second surgery in Cuba that removed a cancerous tumor. It was unclear when and where the message was recorded. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)(Credit: AP)

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez revealed that he is fighting cancer after having a tumor removed in Cuba, raising uncertainty about Venezuela’s political future even as he assured his country he expects to fully recover.

Chavez was noticeably thinner and paler as he appeared on television Thursday night, reading from a prepared speech with a serious and at times sad expression. He said he is resolved to “be victorious in this new battle that life has placed before us.”

Chavez’s admission shook the political landscape of a country he has dominated for his more than 12 years in power, and who had vowed to win re-election next year and govern for another decade or more.

There is no obvious successor to the charismatic Chavez within his Bolivarian movement, and his illness may also affect his leadership within the ALBA alliance of leftist Latin American nations.

Chavez said he had two operations in Cuba, including one that removed a tumor in which there were “cancerous cells.” The 56-year-old president said the surgery was performed after an initial operation nearly three weeks ago to remove a pelvic abscess.

A military chief, Gen. Henry Rangel Silva, assured the country on Friday that Venezuela’s stability “is guaranteed.”

“President Chavez will continue because he hasn’t truly stopped exercising his functions as president,” Rangel Silva said on state television. He said Chavez was recovering smoothly and had been on top of his duties while in Cuba.

“He will be in our country soon,” Rangel said, without saying exactly when Chavez was expected to return.

Chavez said the tumor was in the pelvic region but didn’t say exactly where or what type of cancer was involved. He said he is continuing to receive treatment in Cuba but did not elaborate.

He said it was a mistake not have taken better care of his health through medical checkups.

“What a fundamental error,” he said at a podium, flanked by the Venezuelan flag and a portrait of 19th-century independence hero Simon Bolivar, the namesake of his Bolivarian Revolution political movement.

“Now I wanted to speak to you from this steep hill, from which I feel that I’m coming out of another abyss,” Chavez said. “I wanted to speak to you now with the sun of daybreak that I feel is shining on me. I think we’ve achieved it. Thank you, my God.”

Expressing confidence that he will continue to get better, Chavez said: “I invite you all to continue climbing new summits together.”

Chavez didn’t say how much longer he expects to remain in Cuba recovering, and there was no information on when or where his message was recorded.

His appearance came after days of anxious speculation among Venezuelans about Chavez’s health. State television on Tuesday had shown photos and video of Chavez chatting animatedly with Fidel Castro, but officials had been vague about the reasons for Chavez’s continued seclusion in Cuba.

Citing Chavez’s health, the government announced Wednesday that it was canceling a two-day summit of Latin American leaders that Chavez would have hosted next week on the 200th anniversary of Venezuela’s declaration of independence from Spain.

Chavez’s revelation, and the lack of any return date, is likely to further generate speculation in Venezuela about which of the president’s allies could potentially take his place if necessary. Vice President Elias Jaua has led government events in Chavez’s absence, and the leftist president’s elder brother, Adan, recently stepped up his public profile by rallying supporters at a weekend prayer meeting for Chavez’s health.

Chavez supporters gathered in Plaza Bolivar in downtown Caracas late Thursday chanting before television cameras: “Chavez, friend, the people are with you!”

There was no immediate reaction from the main opposition coalition, which earlier had demanded that the government provide details about Chavez’s condition.

Chavez said his first surgery took place June 11 for a “strange formation in the pelvic region that required an emergency operation due to the imminent risk of a generalized infection.”

He said when he arrived in Cuba after visits to Brazil and Ecuador, he had intended to have a simple checkup for a knee injury that had forced him to use a cane in recent weeks. But he said Castro had questioned him “like a doctor” and that tests confirmed the need for urgent surgery.

After that initial operation, Chavez said, doctors began to suspect other problems, and Castro gave him the news of the tumor. A series of tests “confirmed the presence of an abscessed tumor with the presence of cancerous cells, which made necessary a second operation that allowed for the complete extraction of the tumor,” Chavez said.

He didn’t say when the second operation was performed.

Chavez said his condition has been “evolving satisfactorily while I receive a complementary treatment to combat the different types of cells found, and thereby continue on the path to my complete recovery.”

After Chavez’s speech, the vice president appeared on television at the presidential palace, calling for support and unity among Venezuelans.

“There is no time for sadness, but rather for courage and for work,” Jaua said. “Unity is what’s needed at this time.”

Under Venezuela’s constitution, the vice president would take the president’s place during “temporary” absences of up to 90 days. And Jaua would serve the remainder of Chavez’s six-year term if the socialism-preaching president were to die or resign.

With a presidential election looming next year, it’s unclear who might step forward to run in Chavez’s place if the president were to pull out of the race.

During the past few weeks, Chavez has largely remained out of sight, and some of his opponents had accused the government of maintaining secrecy about his ailment.

Chavez last spoke publicly in a call to Venezuelan television on June 12, after his first surgery.

Some opposition politicians had called for the president to temporarily cede his duties to the vice president while recovering in Cuba.

Chavez’s allies, however, insisted he remained firmly in control of government affairs, even as he has been recovering.

The leftist leader has been in office for more than 12 years and plans to run for re-election in 2012. He did not address that issue on Thursday.

Venezuelan pollster and analyst Luis Vicente Leon said on Twitter that Chavez will likely enjoy an initial boost in his approval ratings due to public sympathy, but that “the political risks for Chavez are notably amplified” due to his condition.

In videos released Wednesday, Chavez smiled and discussed Latin American history and his days as an army paratrooper with Castro. Two of Chavez’s daughters and a granddaughter joined in the encounter.

Finishing his speech Thursday, Chavez recited a revolutionary slogan often used by Castro: “Forever onward toward victory! We will be victorious!”

Before finishing, he added: “Until my return!”

After his appearance, some of his closest allies went on state television. National Assembly president Fernando Soto Rojas, who days earlier had denied rumors that Chavez was diagnosed with cancer, said the president is in good hands in Cuba.

“We wish for him to get better soon! Onward, commander!”

Associated Press writer Fabiola Sanchez contributed to this report.

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Tuesday, Mar 22, 2011 9:10 PM UTC

Obama to leave Latin America early

The President will cut his trip short presumably due to the escalating situation in Libya

By , Associated Press U.S President Barack Obama waves at the Centro Cultural La Moneda Palace before his speech to Latin America in Santiago, Chile, Monday March 21, 2011. Obama is in Chile as part of a three-country, five-day tour of Latin America. (AP Photo/Roberto Candia)(Credit: AP)

President Barack Obama is cutting his trip to Latin America short, and will leave Wednesday morning, hours before his originally scheduled departure.

The White House says Obama will leave El Salvador, the final stop on his five-day trip, after holding a conference call with his national security team to discuss the situation in Libya.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

President Barack Obama opened the final leg of his Latin American tour Tuesday in El Salvador, a critical partner on immigration and narcotics wars, issues of increasing concern to the United States.

Obama, along with wife Michelle Obama and their two daughters, arrived in the capital San Salvador Tuesday afternoon under a blistering sun following stops in Brazil and Chile. After being greeted at the airport by children in traditional dress bearing candy, the president and first lady were welcomed at the national palace by El Salvador’s President Mauricio Funes and his wife Vanda Pignato. The two couples stood at attention in front of the flags of both their countries as the national anthems of El Salvador and the United States were played. Obama and Funes then headed into a private meeting at the palace, to be followed by a joint news conference.

Much of Obama’s five-day tour of Latin America has been overshadowed by events in Libya, where the U.S. and international partners are launching military strikes to protect civilians from attacks by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. The White House said Obama was briefed on developments there by his national security team Tuesday during a conference call from Air Force One. He also spoke with British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Nicolas Sarkozy while en route to El Salvador, to discuss NATO’s roll in the Libya offensive.

The White House shuffled Obama’s schedule in El Salvador, moving up a visit to the tomb of slain Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, originally scheduled for Wednesday, to Tuesday evening. The move raised the prospect that Obama might return to Washington ahead of schedule.

Among the issues on Obama’s agenda in El Salvador –the only Central American country on his Latin America trip — is the rising crime south of the U.S. border, from which El Salvador is hardly immune. It has seen murder rates rise amid an influx of drugs and displaced traffickers from crackdowns in Colombia and Mexico.

El Salvador also has one of Central America’s highest rates of emigration, especially to the United States. About 2.8 million Salvadoran immigrants living in the United States sent home $3.5 billion last year, so laws that crack down on immigrants can significantly affect the Salvadoran economy.

Obama can offer little to fix El Salvador’s devastating crime and fragile economy. Fiscal pressures have limited the amount of money the U.S. government can provide as part of its drug-fighting efforts, and congressional politics have made it difficult to restart talks about overhauling the nation’s immigration laws.

In a broad-ranging speech in Chile on Monday that spelled out his policy in Latin America, Obama called on the region’s rising economies to take more responsibility and play a larger role both in the region and around the globe.

He also described U.S. initiatives in Latin America to help curb the proliferation of drugs. Congress approved $1.8 billion for the so-called Merida Initiative to fight drugs in Mexico. After complaints that Central America was shortchanged, Congress created a separate Central America Regional Security Initiative with a total of $248 million so far. Central American leaders say that has not been enough.

Obama also prodded the region to fight poverty, lauding countries that have pushed more of their population into the middle class.

“We’ll never break the grip of the cartels and the gangs unless we also address the social and economic forces that fuel criminality,” he said Monday.

Funes, who despite being elected with support from former Marxist guerillas has charted a moderate course in El Salvador, agrees with Obama that all countries in the region need to contribute to a solution.

Some Central American leaders have expressed annoyance that Obama chose to meet with Funes instead of a broader group of Central American leaders. But Latin America policy experts said it was important for Obama to endorse Funes’ pragmatic approach despite the leftist inclinations of his party.

Funes said he would raise the issue of security with Obama in regional terms. “Security cannot be seen as exclusively an issue in El Salvador, or Guatemala or Nicaragua,” he said recently. “Central American countries all suffer from the same problem.”

Obama conceded Monday that the United States also bears a burden when it comes to gun trafficking.

“Every gun or gunrunner that we take off the streets is one less threat to the families and communities of the Americas,” he said.

But Obama, in calling for a new discussion on guns, recently declined to endorse the very gun control measures he had supported in the past.

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