Jailed in El Salvador after losing their pregnancies
Jailed in El Salvador after losing their pregnancies
By Guest Writer
May 8, 2016 at 11:45 AM
For many of us around the world, Mother’s Day falls on May 8th this year, which also marks Teodora’s 36th birthday. Teodora has spent eight years in prison, and will spend yet another birthday and another Mother’s Day, which comes just two days after ours, without her family.
Amnesty campaigner Karen Javorski takes us inside one of El Salvador’s most notorious prisons to meet Teodora del Carmen Vásquez and María Teresa Rivera, women jailed after pregnancy complications.
Teodora shares a cell with 70 other women. For María Teresa, it is 250. Cramped together like this, the women often have to sleep on the floor under the building’s hot tin roofs.
This is Ilopango prison on the outskirts of San Salvador, capital of El Salvador. I’m here with my Amnesty colleagues, and our local partners, to visit Teodora del Carmen Vásquez and others from “Las 17”, a group of Salvadoran women who are in prison after suffering pregnancy-related complications.
More:
http://blog.amnestyusa.org/americas/jailed-in-el-salvador-after-losing-their-pregnancies/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Sounds like the kind of people he would love, right?
Here's an article posted on his connections:
Tuesday, August 28, 2012
by Common Dreams
Romney's El Salvador Death Squad Ties
by César Chelala
On two occasions during El Salvador’s terrible war years, I had an inkling of being in front of an unusual experience. One was visiting El Salvador’s Cathedral, where Archbishop Oscar Romero officiated mass. He had been assassinated by one of the country’s death squads. I could almost feel, although he was already dead, that he was still present there. The other experience was meeting a Spanish priest, Ignacio Martín- Baró, who had also been assassinated by death squads for his work with the Salvadoran poor. He was the closest I have ever experienced to a saintly figure. Recently, uncovered evidence ties presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s search for funds to those death squads.
Investigations by The Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post showed that over a third of the $37 million raised by Mitt Romney to launch his highly profitable Bain Capital enterprise in the mid-1980s came from rich Salvadorans linked to the country’s death squads. Former Bain executive Harry Strachan introduced Romney to those investors. “I owe a great deal to Americans of Latin American descent,” said Romney at a dinner in Miami in 2007.
Some, among El Salvador ruling class, supported the death squads during the country’s civil war to crush left-wing guerrillas and social reformers such as Martín-Baró. According to Strachan, Romney had asked him to make sure that none of the new investors in Bain Capital had ties to illegal drug money, right-wing death squads or left-wing terrorist groups in El Salvador. After Strachan assurances that those investors didn’t have questionable ties, Mitt Romney met with the investors at a Miami bank and approved the investment.
While investing in the U.S., though, some of those families were financing Salvadoran death squads, groups that were responsible for almost 35,000 civilian deaths between 1979 and 1984. The groups’ atrocities provoked international condemnation. In 1982, El Salvador’s independent Human Rights Commission, confirmed that most of the 35,000 civilian killed died at the hands of the death squads. Robert D’Aubuisson Arrieta, a major in the Salvadoran army and founder of the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party was considered to be the leader of those right-wing death squads. He was known as “Blowtorch Bob” because of his frequent use of a blowtorch during interrogation sessions.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/views/2012/08/28/romneys-el-salvador-death-squad-ties
[center]
Blowtorch Bob. [/center]
Blowtorch Bob died of cancer, but unfortunately for El Salvador, his son is around to serve as a mayor. Blowtorch Bob was trained at the School of the Americas, by the way, before getting underway as a massive sociopath.
