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By: Alejandro Peña Esclusa

Seven months ago in El Salvador, Mauricio Funes, the candidate of the former communist guerrillas’ Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), was ahead in the polls with more than fifteen percent. The FMLN had –and still has– massive illegal funding, supplied by Venezuelan Marxist strongman Hugo Chávez. Everything indicated that El Salvador would fall into the clutches of Chavez, as has happened with Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua.

However, in the midst of the election campaign, evidence emerged of the ties between Chavez and the FMLN. Chavez went public, declaring openly that he was favoring Funes and confessing on national television that he intended to build «one nation», with Cuba, Venezuela and El Salvador.

As Chavez tightened the communist grip on Venezuela, seizing property and amending the Constitution to remain in power, the Salvadoran people became afraid that his associate Mauricio Funes would do the same in their country, and decided to change their preferences.

With only a few days left before the presidential elections, all serious polls indicate that the candidate of the Nationalist Republican Alliance party (ARENA), Rodrigo Ávila, still has a slight advantage over Funes. In his growing megalomaniacal euphoria, Chavez can not allow his plan for an Iron Curtain of Marxism unifying all of Latin America to suffer a humiliating setback in El Salvador. Therefore, he has instructed his former guerrilla allies of the Marxist Farabundo Marti Front to activate Plan B, which consists in proclaiming that an electoral fraud is underway, disavowing the expected results and then unleashing violence. This is precisely the method used by former Mexican presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, also with the political support of Chavez.

In El Salvador Plan B was activated few days ago. Websites controlled by Latin American Marxist revolutionary movements, published articles claiming that the only way the Marxist FMLN would lose the election would be through fraud. Playing along in the charade, Chavez protégé Mauricio Funes closed his campaign, also claiming that electoral fraud was being planned by the anti-Marxists who are leading the polls.

In recent days, the Venezuelan Embassy has intensified its efforts to subvert a democratic result in the El Salvadoran election. The Latin American media controlled by Chavez, such as TeleSur, are ready to promote hysteria and disorder after March 15 — if the results are not favourable to Funes. It is also expected that Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Daniel Ortega and other members of the Chavez alliance, intend to discredit the electoral process in El Salvador.

(*) President of UnoAmerica and author of the book The São Paulo Forum: A Threat to Freedom in Latin America