Would you love your country if it were ruled by drug lords, guerrillas and corrupt politicians? Would you risk your life and the lives of your children to serve it? Would you go on a hunger strike in order to fight for reform?
Ingrid Betancourt, the Colombian senator and presidential candidate, has said yes to all of these questions. Her memoir, “Until Death Do Us Part: My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia,” is an impassioned personal account and a stinging indictment of the violent corruption that’s strangled Colombia for decades. Told in the present tense, filled with harrowing details of death, love, loyalty and betrayal, it contains all the makings of a fast-paced Hollywood thriller.
Of course, the dramatic struggle is not unique — countless thousands have suffered from the chaos that Gabriel García Márquez drew on in writing his novel “100 Years of Solitude” — but Betancourt’s story is especially powerful because the 40-year-old politician could have avoided Colombia’s strife. She grew up pampered in Paris. Her father served as Colombia’s ambassador to UNESCO while she attended French schools, married a French diplomat. Only later in life did she return to Colombia, when the guilt of living far away from the country’s pain became overwhelming.
And with that return, followed by a decision to run for office, Betancourt’s life changed forever. When her crusade against corruption and drug trafficking earned attention and a seat in the legislature, bodyguards became an everyday companion. Smear campaigns suddenly appeared and death threats forced Betancourt to send her children away, to live in New Zealand with their father, her ex-husband.
Neither the loss of her children, nor the power of her enemies, has managed to sap Betancourt’s high dose of commitment. She’s near the bottom of the presidential polls, her critics say she cares more for attention than reform and the Colombian press has largely ignored “Until Death Do Us Part,” which came out in Colombia with the more combative title, “La Rabia in el Corazón” (“The Rage in My Heart”). But in France, the book is a bestseller, and Betancourt remains convinced that her message will resonate with those she cares most about — the Colombian people.
Salon chatted with Betancourt, between stops on her American book tour, about Colombia, corruption and her unique campaign for reform.
What do you make of the news that President Andres Pastrana has broken off relations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the FARC), the left-wing guerrillas who have been fighting against the government for decades?
In his position, I would have done the same. The problem is that the peace process was in crisis. The president has given a lot to the guerrillas and the guerrillas have given nothing in return.
The move of President Pastrana is also a strategy to regain confidence from the people of Colombia, to make them believe again that it is possible to negotiate but to negotiate in healthy phases — those in which the government has not to be kneeling before the guerrillas, but where the conditions are put up front and met by the guerrillas and the government.
You note in your book that one of your goals is to break ties with the paramilitaries who often fight these guerrillas on the government’s behalf, and who are responsible for most of the war’s civilian massacres. How exactly do you propose to do this?
We have to recover our democracy first. We need to be sure that the people in the army — the officials that have participated in illegal operations with the paramilitaries — are imprisoned. They must pay for the barbarian acts that they have achieved. This is something that is not happening today in Colombia because the officials that have been related to illegal activities have the protection of the system. They act with impunity. They don’t go to jail and there’s no law enforcement.
So there needs to be judicial reform, not just democratic reform …
Yes. If we really want to cut the ties between the paramilitaries and our state military, we need to be sure that our judicial system will work. In order to make it work, we need to be sure that corruption is not going to play a major role in its activities. We have to cut the alliance between politicians and drug traffickers. Those ties are what keep the system from working.
I’m sure there are a lot of people who agree with you on the trafficking issue but drug money is so intertwined with Colombian life, with everything from banks to the war to local village economies. How would you rid the system of this pervasive influence?
By going after the politicians that are serving the interests of the drug traffickers. If you do that, you will clean the system. If we have the possibility of having fair elections in Colombia; if we have a system where the elections will be transparent; if the officials who are counting the votes are neutral people who are not serving individual interests, then we will have a Congress that’s representative of the Colombian population. And if they are representative of the population, we will be able to do the reforms that we haven’t been able to do for a long time — reforms in the judicial system and in the public administration.
There is a strong vein of anti-American sentiment in Colombia, and even here in the U.S. many Americans have a hard time supporting the drug war as it’s being waged in Colombia. Where do you stand on the issue? To what extent would you welcome U.S. aid if you were president?
We have to welcome and be thankful for the aid we’re receiving from the U.S. government. It has helped us a lot. But what we have to see is that this aid is primarily going to military issues. This is good to the extent that it has transformed our techniques, and given us technological support. But as long as our military has clandestine ties to the paramilitaries, we are not really doing what we should be doing. Because this aid will not be used properly; it will be used to defend dark interests. We need to be sure that the financial aid that the American government is giving to Colombia is arriving in the right hands. And I would say today that, because of the corrupt politicians who are everywhere in the public administration, the aid is in the wrong hands.
Should the U.S. government stop giving aid? Is it doing more harm than good?
This is a decision for the Americans to make, but I would say that the Americans should help us clean the political system in order to have a guarantee that the aid is going to be used properly. If we don’t do this, we are wasting our time, we are wasting our money — and we are frustrating both the Colombians, who are expecting a lot from the American aid, and the American people, who want to see results.
You come from a prominent Colombian family but you grew up in Europe. How did you get started in politics?
At home everyone spoke about politics. My father was an ambassador and my mother was linked to social issues in Colombia, and the major issues in the home were political issues. From very early in life I was forced to listen to people talking about Colombia, about our future, about our rights, about what we could expect as Colombians. I also think that because I was brought up in France, I was very sensitive to some issues like human rights protection, the environment and anti-corruption.
I returned to Colombia because I felt that Colombia was living in a very difficult crisis and it didn’t feel good to be living outside Colombia knowing that my friends and relatives were facing problems in Colombia while I was living abroad. I had a sense of responsibility. I felt that I had to be with my people in their moment of difficulty. I felt like I could have a very comfortable life while others were putting their lives at risk in order to save our country.
Also, there was an incident. I’m very close to my mother and when I was abroad, she was participating in Louis Carlos Galan’s presidential campaign. Galan was a leader that we all considered to be a moral figure; we thought that he was going to save Colombia. And the day he was killed, my mother was with him.
But the story is very strange. That night, I couldn’t sleep; I had nightmares. And in the morning, the only thing I wanted to do was call my mother in Colombia. When I called her, she was at the other end of the phone, crying and yelling “They killed him, they killed him.”
Then she told me the story, which is really incredible. She was behind him at the moment the shot was fired, but she had fallen down because she was wearing high heels. And that fall saved her.
So what I realized at that moment, when she was telling me the story, was that I could have called her that morning and someone else could have answered — someone who told me that Mother had been killed. Suddenly, I had this obsession that I had to go home and home wasn’t abroad. Home was Colombia.
Since returning, you’ve made many sacrifices for your cause, watching friends die, going on a hunger strike to fight for an investigation of the sitting president and sending your children to live with their father in New Zealand. Which of these was most difficult?
The hardest sacrifice is a daily sacrifice. I have been living apart from my children for six years, and there is not one day that I don’t suffer.
And didn’t you have to send your children away under dangerous circumstances?
We received death threats. The children were very young and there was a guy who came to my office. He was threatening us, so we had to leave. We took a plane the next day and I left them in New Zealand with their father. I thought that perhaps it was not going to be too long, but six years have gone by, they’ve grown to be teenagers and I haven’t been able to live with them.
How old are your children now, and what do they think of your crusade?
My children were 10 and 7 when they left; they’re now 16 and 13. I think I’ve been lucky because my children could have been traumatized or they could have hated me because of the decision I have taken. But they have grown into very healthy teenagers, very confident in themselves, and they support me. They are proud of me, they understand what I’m doing and they don’t feel that I’ve abandoned them. They feel that I’m doing the correct thing. I have their support; it’s a gift from heaven.
Do you think it’s substantially harder to be a woman, a female leader, in Colombian politics?
Well, what’s happened in Colombia is that we’ve been living through a civil war for 50 years, and when you live in Civil War — or any war — men go to fight and women take care of the important things, as I would say it. In Colombia, 70 percent of the families are raised solely by women. Women have been forced to take responsibility not only in family issues but also in economic issues. All women in Colombia work. Even among the wealthy, everyone works. I have no friends who stay at home as housewives.
This has opened the path to politics. What’s also helped a lot is, well, men have done such a lousy job in politics that people think women will do it better. This is the hope that people have so they will vote more readily for a woman than a man.
But once you get into politics, things change. Once you’re elected and you have the confidence of the people, the battle in the political field is terrible because those guys [in power] won’t respect anything. They won’t confront your ideas; they’ll try to knock you down by attacking you in personal fields. This is something that we as women have to bear, the fact that they attack you for leaving your children, or because you have a divorce or because you’ve been married several times.
You’ve used some unconventional campaign tactics to fight back, such as handing out condoms as a sign that you would protect the people from the disease of corruption. How has the public responded?
At the beginning it was kind of shocking because Colombia is a conservative society. Church is very influential in Colombian society, and having a young woman distributing condoms in the street — especially because condoms are a man’s device — was very shocking to a lot of people. But then they started to understand the symbol of the thing. They understood that I was trying to make them think that we needed to react against corruption, and that’s why I was elected.
I think there is an enormous space in Colombia to do symbolic actions and be very pedagogical with the public to make them understand something that it would normally take years to make them understand.
Your detractors argue that all you want is publicity and that you’re self-righteous — that you think of yourself as the lone crusader fighting Colombian corruption. How would you respond to such criticism?
I would say that you may choose your life, but you don’t choose the suffering that you have to overcome. It’s not pleasant to be fighting drug traffickers. It’s not pleasant to fight corrupt politicians, to confront senators and representatives who insult you and threaten you. So I think it’s very unfair to say that what I have done is just to gain publicity. There are other ways to get publicity. One way is to get naked in the road. Then you’ll have publicity but you won’t be at risk, it’s not dangerous.
The criticism is really a way of undermining my struggle [against corruption]. My struggle annoys a lot of people in Colombia. There are many people who are not comfortable with what I do because they are using Colombia to tolerate corrupt attitudes and cover them and camouflage them.
But we need to raise the standards of our ambition. We need to have high standards for our democracy. We cannot just say we are a democracy and have institutions that don’t work, have corruption everywhere, have human rights violations as a systematic way of dealing with our problems. This has to change.
In your book, you point fingers at those who are corrupt and you obviously believe that your sacrifices will eventually be rewarded. Yet, the murder rate in Colombia has nearly doubled since 1995 and many feel that the country is worse off than when you first entered politics in the late ’80s. Do you ever feel like a failure? And in a country so filled with confusion — in which you too have been accused of corruption — how do you know who is being honest and who is lying?
It is not possible to fight corruption as I have been fighting it if you have something to hide. It’s easy to throw dirt and say she’s done this, she’s done that, but the truth is that I am very lonely in this. If I had done something wrong, I can assure you that I would be in prison because I have so many enemies. This is a game where you cannot play in two camps; you have to be very straight.
But do you think it’s obvious, who is honest and who is not?
Well, in Colombia there is a gray zone. Many things that are considered corrupt in other countries are considered normal in Colombia. We have to be very radical in order to change public opinion about what is corruption. We have to really ask for accountability in order to change the idea of what politicians can and cannot do.
The way of knowing who is corrupt and who is not is simple: You have to investigate. Everything that I have said in my book has appeared in the media in Colombia. The only difference is that I have put the picture together. In Colombia, the information will appear as a little line at the end of the page of the newspaper. They won’t give it the importance it has. All I’ve done is put it all into context.
You’re far down in the polls and two of the candidates who are running for president — Horacio Serpa and Noemi Sanin — you denounce as corrupt protectors of the Colombian status quo. Do you think you can beat them? Or is your campaign simply an attempt to raise public awareness about the dangers of corruption?
This is a very serious campaign. I have worked to have a very professional campaign. I have a big headquarters in Colombia and a 100 person staff. There are many people who would like to see this as a symbolic campaign, but it’s not. It’s a very true and serious campaign.
My chances? I think I have a 100 percent chance. The elections are open to everyone. The only thing that I fear is fraud in the elections. That’s why I’m asking the Americans to help me in having people cover the elections. Journalists, politicians, congressmen and women — we want them to come to Colombia to help us guarantee that we will have fair elections. Because when you present yourself in an election, you’re willing to lose but you only want to lose in a fair way. You don’t want your elections stolen from you.
I know I’m low in the polls but those are official polls. I don’t really believe in them. When I was a candidate for the Senate, an official poll came out — it was everywhere, in all the papers — and I didn’t appear in the list of those who were going to be elected. And I became the senator who was elected with the highest number of votes in the country.
What will you do if you lose the election? How will you continue to fight if you’re not in office?
There’s no other choice but to win. But I will continue fighting in or out of the presidency. We have to win this battle against corruption. Perhaps the only thing that I really want to convey to Americans is that they must understand that if we continue tolerating corrupting governments all over the world, we will always be at risk — all of us. Because corrupt governments nourish drug trafficking and terrorism and this is what is tearing my country apart. I’m fighting to clean my country to have a democracy that’s as strong and as effective as the one you have here in America, Europe and other countries. It’s the basics that we’re asking for, not the luxuries.
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.
But 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.”
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.
Clad 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.”
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.”
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.
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.
Josefina Vasquez Mota (Credit: AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini) 
Henrique Capriles Radonsk (Credit: AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos) 
Mitt Romney (Credit: Jessica Rinaldi / Reuters) 
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) 
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) 
