Free Republic

Malik Fard Muhammad, 25, and his girlfriend Kristin McGuire traveled from Indianapolis, Ind., to Portland, Ore., to fight with cops. Muhammad will be extending his stay for an extra ten years, compliments of the feds. Muhammad is alleged to have traveled to Portland with his girlfriend from their home in Indianapolis for the specific purpose of violently engaging in civil disorder during recent area riots. On September 5, 2020, during a large civil disturbance in east Portland, demonstrators threw dangerous objects at police, including commercial grade fireworks, Molotov cocktails, and bottles. At least one demonstrator was seriously burned by a...

Reports that operatives from Cuba and Venezuela had possibly infiltrated protests in Miami first surfaced Monday on Primer Informe, a blog run by former El Nuevo Herald reporter Casto Ocando. According to the blog post by Ocando, FBI counter-terrorism agents had detained and questioned people in Miami and other cities who admitted to having been paid by activists to participate in the protests, and were investigating possible ties to Venezuela and Cuba..... And a woman participating in Sunday's march, identified by the Miami-based En Vivo TV as Hellen Pena, acknowledged when pressed that she was a supporter of the late-Venezuelan...

After Basic Training Stone landed in Vietnam on September 16, 1967, and was assigned to the 2nd Platoon of Bravo Company, 3rd Battalion, 25th infantry, stationed near the Cambodian border. He was wounded twice in action, and was later transferred to 1st Cavalry and assigned to a Long Range Reconnaissance Platoon in April of 1968. It was during this time that he Juan Angel Elias, who would become the inspiration for Sgt. Elias (Willem Dafoe) in Platoon, which drew heavily on Stone's Vietnam experiences. Eventually Stone was discharged in November 1968 after 15 months of duty, and received two personal...

When Donald Trump said this month he would end temporary protected status for almost 200,000 Salvadorans, the number of immigrants standing to lose protections under this president approached the 1 million mark. This includes people, like those from El Salvador, that now stand to be deported to countries where their lives could be in danger. El Salvador has one of the world’s highest homicide rates—due in no small part to the policies of the country now trying to expel them. Trump promised to end the protected status granted to Salvadorans in 2001 following a devastating earthquake. Then, a few days...

Gerardo Hernandez, a spy for Communist Cuba and the man responsible for the murder of four humanitarian workers (three of whom were American citizens) over international waters, was freed from prison last year by the Obama administration, due in part to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). This was revealed at a February 6, 2015, celebration of Hernandez’s release, along with two of his fellow Cuban agents (collectively known as the “Cuban 5.. At the beginning of the event, an IPS official thanked all who who took part in the 17-year campaign and singled out a number of organizations that...

On its surface, the presidential election in El Salvador on Sunday shouldn’t matter to the average American. But this is no ordinary election. Experts say an expected win by the current ruling party, the FMLN, will turn El Salvador into a haven for gangs and narco-traffickers with dire consequences for the United States. Stunning recent evidence and leaked government documents suggest the country’s current President and ruling party for years have been secretly backed by the MS-13 gang, which is considered by many as America’s most brutal enterprise because of its reputation for using machetes to hack people to death....

21st Century SocialismThe attempt to destroy democracy in Latin America.  The Obama administration started out on the wrong foot in world affairs. It used techniques better suited for domestic political campaigns — popularity contests — in its foreign policy. In our own hemisphere, the result was confusion for our allies and our enemies alike. The overriding objective of U.S. policy — in Latin America and elsewhere — should be to advance U.S. national interests, not to curry favor with foreign leaders. If we can be liked while advancing our interests, so much the better. But when we try to befriend...

President Barack Obama has nominated Mari Carmen Aponte to become the next ambassador of El Salvador, a decade after she was forced to withdrawal her name from consideration for a similar post following concerns about alleged ties to Cuba, Newsmax.com reports. A former FBI official told Fox News that Aponte’s 1998 nomination by president Clinton began receiving attention after the foreign relations panel questioned her about a past relationship with Roberto Tamayo, who was alleged to have "possible ties to the Cuban government" and made "repeated trips there." Current White House spokesman Tommy Vietor responded, "as has been previously reported,...

Two big questions hang over President Obama's radical "Green Jobs Czar" Van Jones. Is he still a communist? Is he a security threat? Many have assumed that Van Jones' committment to communism ended when the organization he helped to lead STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) dissolved in 2002. Yet a 2004 treatise Reclaiming Revolution: History, Summation, and Lessons from the Work of Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement written and endorsed by a majority of former STORM members makes it clear that most ex STORMers are still committed to the revolutionary movement; From page 49. When...

El Salvador has officially joined the Red regimes of Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Bolivia. South America is turning Red, dark Red, and little is being said to alert North Americans of the encroaching Red plague. Perhaps that's because North America is moving in the same direction. The President of the United States has surrounded himself with socialists, and some of those closest to him have had a part in turning South America Red. According to the Associated Press (March 17, 2009), Mauricio Funes, the presidential candidate of the Farbundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) is the new head of...

It's good, occasionally, to take a trip down memory lane. It helps to put things into perspective. Hugo Chavez ought never to have been elected president. By rights, he ought to be growing old in a jail cell somewhere. Well, it's been seventeen years, maybe he’d be in a half-way house by now. As an army officer in 1992, he led a military revolt against the legal, constitutional government of Venezuela, and attempted to overthrow the democratically elected president of the time, Carlos Andres Perez. He gambled that once the shooting started, the minister of defense and the rest of...

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), then based in the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, vigorously lobbied for Nicaragua's Sandinista regime, the Cuban-style Marxist regime that shot its way to power in 1979. Today, WOLA pretends it is concerned about the rule of law in Honduras after the Honduran Congress and Supreme Court supported removing the leftist president for defying its constitution. WOLA and Jim Wallis' publication Sojourners have teamed up to spin Honduras' defense of its democracy as another example of a U.S.-supported, imperialist military coup. The constitutional coup in Honduras was...

The strategy of a "diplomatic truce" with the People's Republic of China implemented by President Ma Ying-jeou and his Kuomintang government faces its severest test yet in the wake of the election of leftist television journalist Mauricio Funes as president of El Salvador last weekend. The triumph by Funes, the candidate of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, a former revolutionary guerrilla movement, over former National Civic Police director Rodrigo Avila of the far-right ARENA (Nationalist Republican Alliance) by a 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent margin March 15, ends 20 years of consecutive ARENA. Since winning the race, Funes has...

This week the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, won the presidential election in El Salvador. The former Marxist rebels, who fought a guerilla war from 1980-1992, are the first leftist party to come to power in the country's history.

The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, made history on March 15, when its candidate Mauricio Funes captured the presidency become the first leftist party elected to El Salvador´s highest elected office, after three failed attempts since it laid down its weapons 17 years ago. The FMLN, which was defeated in three straight presidential elections since 1994, fought for power with arms during El Salvador´s 1980-92 civil war, that left some 70,000 dead. Funes captured 51.3 percent of the vote, topping his closest rival, Rodrigo Ávila, of the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, party, who won 48.7 percent...

Hemisphere: El Salvador elected a leftist president in a peaceful vote Sunday that by all accounts was fair. But the odds are now against this U.S. ally remaining democratic. That could cost the U.S. in more ways than one.The narrow election of Mauricio Funes, a representative of the Marxist guerrilla FMLN party, as president of El Salvador Sunday, is a body blow to U.S. influence and the free market model in the region. Don't take it from us, take it from them: "This is the defeat of Ronald Reagan, nothing less," crowed Roberto Lovato, a Funes supporter identified as a...

The presidential candidate of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the communist revolutionaries in El Salvador the Reagan administration battled in the 1980s, is, a Monday Washington Post story noted, “a former correspondent for CNN en Espanol.” In the March 9 article, “In El Salvador Vote, Big Opportunity for Leftists,” reporter William Booth relayed from San Salvador that the journalist-turned-politician “considers himself to be El Salvador's Barack Obama.” Booth relayed: After a 12-year civil war and a peace undermined by soaring crime, leftists in El Salvador are on the verge of completing a remarkable journey from armed struggle to...

SUCHITOTO, El Salvador (Reuters) - Belky Hernandez was three days old when U.S.-backed government troops shot dead her mother, a Marxist guerrilla, in a forest in war-ravaged El Salvador. Her father, also a rebel, was already dead. Seventeen years later, she runs a stall selling civil war memorabilia and mementos of Cold War revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Alongside them, she now sells campaign T-shirts for Mauricio Funes, the man she hopes will heal old wounds by bringing a party of softened former rebels to power for the first time in presidential elections in March. Funes, a bespectacled former...

In military terms, the Western Hemisphere is the strategic rear area of the United States. The U.S. needs a secure and prosperous hemisphere not only to ensure a peaceful neighborhood in which to live, but also to be able to project its power to the farthest reaches of the globe and win the War on Terror. What is happening in our neighborhood? Press reports indicate that a leftist-populist alliance is engulfing most of South America. Some Andean and Central American countries are sliding back from economic reforms and narcotics eradication, and the Caribbean remains irrationally hostile to the U.S. This...

The new “Arafat’s Plaza” in San Salvador will be adjacent to the capital city’s “Jerusalem Plaza.” This despite the fact that El Salvador is one of only two countries in the world to maintain their embassy in Israel’s capital, Jerusalem, rather than Tel Aviv. Israeli Ambassador to El Salvador Jonathan Peled officially protested the decision, condemning the honor accorded the PLO chief in several local newspapers and local TV channels. The Municipal Council of El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador, responded to Peled’s statements by harshly criticizing Israel for interfering in its local affairs. The body decided to write an official...