Communist Guerrilla Leader ‘Wins’ El Salvador Elections

Source : http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/humberto-fontova/communist-guerrilla-leader-wins-el-salvador-elections/

Communist Guerrilla Leader ‘Wins’ El Salvador Elections

March 21, 2014 by Humberto Fontova

A former Communist guerrilla commander linked to various butcheries during El Salvador’s savage civil war in the 1980s won that nation’s Presidential elections this week by a squeaker.

Nowadays this former FMLF (Faribundo Marti Liberation Front) commander is accused of partnering with murderous Salvadoran drug-smuggling and human-trafficking gangs that operate in 40 U.S. cities, have been declared  “international criminal organizations” by the U.S. Treasury department, and have had members convicted of multiple murders, rapes and tortures within sight of the U.S. capitol. One of these rape-murders was of Washington intern Chandra Levy.

Salvador Sanchez Ceren is the “former” Communist guerrilla declared winner of El Salvador’s presidential elections this week by 6,600 votes. Since 2009, he had served as El Salvador’s Vice President. Ceren’s electoral opponents of the center-right ARENA party alleged blatant Venezuelan-mentored electoral fraud. But the Salvadoran “Supreme Electoral Tribunal” (staffed and controlled by Ceren’s party) overruled ARENA.

Roger Noriega, a former assistant secretary of state for Western hemisphere affairs with many high-level contacts in the region warns that El Salvador’s FMLF is linked, not only to the Communist leadership of the Castro-Venezuela axis, but to the biggest and wealthiest narco-traffickers in the hemisphere, along with their distributors and retailers in the U.S.

Chief among these U.S.-based retailers are the Salvadoran MS-13 and MS-18 gangs. These are not your father’s “gangs,” by the way. Latin gangs have come a long way since the Sharks of Westside Story. And “street gangs” in general have come a long way since the Cripps and Bloods. In 2012, the Obama administration declared MS-13 an “international criminal organization,” quite a distinction for a “street gang” and the first case of such an “honor” for a gang operating in the U.S. Some background:

In the 1980s the Cuba-Soviet backed FMLF waged a terror campaign trying to Cubanize the small and impoverished Central American nation of El Salvador. The government fought back and tens of thousands of Salvadorans perished in a variety of ways on both sides of what became a full-fledged and—as usual for such conflicts– brutal civil war. The U.S. media habitually pegged all resulting deaths on “right-wing death squads”—often spicing up the description with “U.S.-backed” or “U.S.-trained.”

It’s an old story for anyone who fights Communist terror. “If rape’s inevitable” goes the joke, “lay back and enjoy it!” Same apparently goes for Communist revolution. Any resistance will only make things worse and get one demonized by all “respectable” academic and media precincts. There are no historical exceptions to this rule. From Pilsudski and Horthy in Eastern Europe, through Franco in Spain, to Pinochet in Chile— all violently (and successfully) resisted the violent communization of their nations.  And all sport horns and a tail in media/academic depictions.

After being crushed militarily thanks to help from the Reagan administration in the 1980s, the FMLF renounced violence and went respectable as a political party in the 1990s. Now they steal and buy elections. Chicago politics will get you what Bolshevik terror couldn’t, seems like the new motto for Latin American socialists.

This stealing and buying of elections is made easy by the billions of dollars flooding into the area from narco-trafficking. So essentially it’s facilitated by Americans’ appetite for drugs.  Nowadays “revolution” in Latin American is all about narcotrafficking. The Best and the Brightest (and most experienced) in this field is Colombia’s FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia). Colombian officials estimate the FARC’s annual earnings somewhere between $2.4 and $3.5 billion.

The Marxist mumo-jumbo still pops up in “communiqués” and press releases from the FARC from their Venezuelan Chavista allies, and from the FMLF itself. But after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Latin American Communists of every stripe found their new vocations (and funding) in narco-trafficking.

Hollywood tells us that mobsters hate commies. “I kill a communist for fun!” snarls narco-trafficking capo Tony Montana in Oliver Stone’s 1983 screenplay for Scarface. “For a green card, I gonna carve him up real nice!”

In real life it doesn’t work that way. To wit: “Thanks to Fidel Castro,” boasted late FARC commander Tiro-Fijo in a 2002 interview, “we are now a powerful army, not a hit and run band.” A report by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency attributes half of the world’s cocaine supply to Columbia’s FARC, the largest, oldest and most murderous terrorist group in our Hemisphere, whose murder toll dwarfs that of Al Qaeda and the Taliban combined and includes many murdered U.S. citizens. Yes, this same drug-running FARC thanks Fidel Castro for their immense fame and fortune.

“We lived like kings in Cuba,” revealed Medellin drug Cartel bosses Carlos Lehder and Alejandro Bernal during their trials in the ’80s and ’90s. “Fidel made sure nobody bothered us.”

Venezuela’s oil windfall (the nation supposedly sits atop the largest oil reserves on earth) also helps the area’s election-rigging and vote-buying by allied parties and essentially keeps Cuba afloat financially.  Alas, Venezuela’s “21st Century Socialism” is having the predictable effects on oil production. Remember Reagan’s old joke about a sand shortage if socialists controlled the Sahara dessert? Well the same punch line is playing out real-time in socialist Venezuela with oil.  Venezuela’s oil exports to the U.S. dropped from $41.9 billion in 2011 to $30.8 billion in 2013, for instance.

So now many Chavista officials are “wetting their beaks” (in the famous phrase of Don Fanucci in The Godfather) from the narco-trafficking windfall that links Venezuelan officialdom with neighboring Colombia’s FARC and with El Salvador’s FMLF. These latter sit strategically on the main route for FARC/Venezuelan drugs to the U.S. market.

In the ’80s the drug-trafficking route often went from Colombia straight across the Caribbean to Florida, with Cuba as a way station and toll-booth. “The case we have against Fidel and Raul Castro right now is much stronger than the one we had against Manuel Noriega in 1988,” a federal prosecutor in south Florida told the Miami Herald in 1996. Four grand juries at the time had disclosed Cuba’s role in drug smuggling into the U.S. The Clinton administration, hellbent on cozying up to Castro at the time, refused to press ahead with the case against the Castro brothers’ dope trafficking.

Now the main route takes the Colombian-Venezuelan drugs through Central America and Mexico, and eventually across the southwest U.S. border, usually with the help of the FMLF and their Mexican gang allies. Our Southern Command headquartered in Panama does its best to stop them before they reach Mexico but given its status as the red-headed stepchild of U.S. overseas commands it can’t do much.

“Because of asset shortfalls [i.e. Defense budgets cuts],” admitted South-Com commander Marine Gen. John Kelly to the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, “we’re unable to get after 74 percent of suspected maritime drug smuggling. I simply sit and watch it go by.”

Sanchez-Ceren’s “electoral” victory will not make General Kelly’s job any easier.