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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...

SAN SALVADOR (AFP) - An official with El Salvador's leading political opposition was angry at US Vice President Dick Cheney for comparing his country's civil war in the 1980s to the current situation in Iraq and Afghanistan. In his debate late Tuesday with Democratic contender John Edwards in Cleveland, Ohio, Cheney reacted to charges by his rival that violent insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan were making democratization difficult in those countries. "Twenty years ago we had a similar situation in El Salvador," said Cheney. "We had -- guerrilla insurgency controlled roughly a third of the country, 75,000 people dead, and...

As radicals from across the country descend upon New York City this week in their malicious attempt to violently disrupt the Republican National Convention, it appears the perfect time to dissect the affiliations and leadership of one of the most influential anti-Bush “peace” groups to emerge since 9/11: Win Without War. Comprised of 42 environmental, feminist, religious and human rights groups that claim to be united in promoting peaceful solutions for international problems, Win Without War first burst onto the political scene in December 2002, at an international press conference featuring leftist actor Mike Farrell. Although the organization was initiated...

Most of us old enough to have been reading newspapers and watching television in the mid-1980s remember when the Soviet-backed Marxist-Leninist junta “Sandinistas” were battling the anti-communist guerrilla army of “Contras” in Nicaragua. And who could forget the overblown Iran-Contra affair, the attempt to arm the Contras through a deal to swap arms for hostages with the mullahs in Iran. What might be hazy in the memory after 20 years, however, is the Keystone Kops, I-want-to-play-president role of the freshman senator from Massachusetts, John Forbes Kerry. Still humming his “Give peace a chance” mantra from Vietnam days, Kerry jumped into...

With polls showing the race tightening in El Salvador's March 21 elections, President Francisco Flores accused China in an interview of intervening in his country's affairs by aiding leftist presidential candidate Shafik Handal. In addition, Flores told The Miami Herald that Handal's Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front has been receiving large caches of weapons in recent weeks from Latin American leftist groups that he declined to identify. He said the FMLN may use these weapons to create chaos, and thus discourage a large turnout on election day. Flores' government-backed right-of-center candidate Tony Saca is leading in the polls, but analysts...

Salvadorans think that on March 21 they will elect a new president and a new government, but the matter is a lot more dramatic than that. The choice is not between two parties within the same democratic family but between two value systems, two economic models and two concepts of the political reality and international alliances, all of them totally different. One of the two candidates with the best chances of winning is Shafik Handal:a 74-year-old diehard communist, a nostalgic survivor of the Cold War personally linked to the terrible period of violence that cost the country more than 70,000...

Here goes a ''nightmare scenario'' that some senior Bush administration officials are worrying about: the possibility that rightist and leftist candidates with dubious democratic credentials will win upcoming elections in Central America, and unleash a new cycle of violence in the region. It's entirely possible, they say. Consider: • In Guatemala, former dictator and current president of Congress Efraín Ríos Montt, 77, has won a legal battle to become the ruling party's candidate in the Nov. 9 presidential elections. EX-GENERAL Ríos Montt, a former army general whose 1982-1983 military regime was marked by massive human rights abuses against Guatemala's Indians,...

<p>The country's main left-wing party -- which had led in recent opinion polls -- has chosen former guerrilla commander Shafick Handal as its candidate for the March 2004 presidential elections, according to results released Monday.</p> <p>According to party figures released Sunday, Handal had about 53 percent to 47 percent for Oscar Ortiz, mayor of Santa Tecla, a suburb of San Salvador, for the nomination of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.</p>

Dozens of veterans of the Reagan Administration convened at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., the evening of July 8 for a gala dinner in honor of conservative champion Faith Whittlesey. Whittlesey served as director of the Office of Public Liaison in President Reagan's White House and as Reagan's ambassador to Switzerland. Whittlesey was always a strong voice of unapologetic anti-Communism within the Reagan Administration and created the White House Outreach Working Group on Central America. Rene León, El Salvador's ambassador to the United States, attended the dinner and read a letter that had been sent to Whittlesey by Salvadoran...

A party of former leftist guerrillas gained ground in this week's elections but failed to wrest control of congress from conservatives, official results released Monday show. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, won 31 congressional seats — four more than the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA. However, ARENA was counting on the 16 seats of its traditional conservative ally the National Conciliation Party, or PCN, for a slim majority in the 84-seat congress. "We needed to get that legislative majority," lamented Carlos Rivas Zamora who led the FMLN in an overwhelming victory Sunday for the mayorship of...

Morazan, El Salvador -- Seventeen-year-old Odilia playfully pushed her tongue through her teeth as she recalled how she shot seven Salvadoran army soldiers in an ambush a few days before. Odilia's under five feet tall, and her high-powered Soviet-made Dragunov rifle is almost as big as she is. No matter. The bashful Salvadoran teenager is a highly trained sharpshooter for the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). Over the past several months, eastern-bloc and Chinese-made weapons have been distributed to FMLN guerrilla forces nationwide. The rebels say they bought the majority of the new arms, most of which are...

"Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees. The U.S. regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up." Fidel Castro, during his tour of Iran, Syria and Libya. Agence France Press, May 10, 2001 CASTRO AND TERRORISM, A CHRONOLOY by Eugene Pons with a foreword by Jaime Suchlicki Institute for Cuban &Cuban-American Studies Occasional Paper Series September 2001 FOREWORD Since 1948 when, as a young student, Fidel Castro participated in the violence that rocked Colombian society and distributed anti-U.S. propaganda, he has been guided by two objectives: a commitment ...