Democrats seek to hit Romney over Bain investors' family ties to Salvadoran paramilitaries

Democrats are latching onto some early Bain Capital investors' alleged family ties to funders of right-wing paramilitaries in El Salvador in the latest effort to hit Mitt Romney over his tax records.

The GOP presidential candidate is refusing to release more than two years of his tax records, which he calls a “private” matter. The Obama campaign has been hammering the issue in order to paint Romney as someone who has something to hide, and the Los Angeles Times added fuel to that fire with an investigation into Bain Capital's early investors.

Bain Capital raised about $9 million from rich Latin Americans when Romney was getting it off the ground in the mid-1980s, the newspaper reported Thursday, including Salvadoran exiles in Miami. Family members of some of those early investors allegedly had ties to right-wing paramilitaries involved in death squads in the country's brutal civil war, although the paper found no evidence that the investors themselves had ties to paramilitaries. 

"Some family members of the first Bain Capital investors were later linked to groups responsible for killings," the story says, "though no evidence indicates those relatives invested in Bain or benefited from it."

The Romney campaign says Bain conducted thorough background checks before taking the investors' money. The campaign points out that Newsweek reported in 1994 that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) had hired a Washington law firm to investigate the same claims when Romney ran against him, but came up short.

That didn't prevent the Democratic National Committee from latching on to the story and pushing out expressions of outrage from a handful of Hispanic-American Democrats.

“Today's Los Angeles Times investigation into where Mitt Romney got his money to start Bain Capital convinced me, and I imagine everyone who read it, that he needs to come clean about his finances,” Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), the co-chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, said in a statement. 

“We now know that he built his fortune thanks to murky foreign donors who routed their money through Panamanian and Swiss accounts that helped obscure their sources. Among those early donors were British financiers later convicted of fraud and an expatriate Salvadoran group with family ties to paramilitary death squads.”

Bain and the Romney campaign deny any wrongdoing to the newspaper.

"There were many investors who saw the opportunity of a firm that could help fix broken companies and help them grow," campaign spokesman Matt McDonald told the Times.
 A state delegate from Maryland who says she's the first Salvadoran-American elected to public office in the United States also weighed in. 

In a statement, Ana Sol Gutierrez called the report “deeply troubling.”

“Having spent my childhood in El Salvador before migrating to the United States and becoming the first Salvadoran-American to ever hold elected office, I know firsthand the strife that El Salvador was going through during that time and the sensitivity of the issue for Salvadorans in the U.S.,”  Gutierrez said. “Our community is still healing from the scars from this tragic time in our history and now, more than ever, Salvadoran-Americans and Latinos all over the U.S deserve answers about his 'profit at any cost' way of conducting business."

This post was updated at 1:50 p.m. with comment from the Romney campaign

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