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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 ...