El Salvador's softened rebels see chance of power

Reuters ^ | Nov 14, 2008 | Catherine Bremer

[Tailgunner Joe]

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 TV journalist is the first presidential candidate fielded by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front who is not himself a former guerrilla. An eloquent centre-leftist, he reported on El Salvador's 12-year civil war but never fought in it. ...

"We remember what they fought for. Before, the war was in the streets and now it's inside us," Hernandez said in the former FMLN rebel stronghold town of Suchitoto, ringed by forest where her parents and hundreds of others died.

Since the war ended with 1992 peace accords, the FMLN has lost three presidential elections to the right-wing and pro-U.S. Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA. ....

As the global economic crisis starts to bite in poor countries, ARENA supporters ask how a party built by Marxists can steer El Salvador's export-based economy, with its costly fuel imports and high unemployment, through the turmoil ahead.

"If the FMLN wins, the first thing that will happen is investors will leave," said fisherman Santiago Mancia in La Libertad, a Pacific beach town striving to attract tourists.

"Their ideology hasn't changed, they're just the same as before," said Mancia, 63, remembering when guerrillas hid in the hills and launched attacks against the army.

[o_zarkman44]

More propping up of a marxist revolution from the pseudo journalists from hemmoReuters.

[Tailgunner Joe]

Hugo Chávez Spreads the Loot - NOVEMBER 10, 2008 - In El Salvador, where the former guerrilla group FMLN is hoping to win the presidency in March, FMLN mayors have a company called Alba Petróleos. It receives gasoline and diesel on favorable terms from Venezuela, sells it at a slight discount to the market at its filling stations and captures a fat profit. This allows it to dominate the retail market, and may explain why the party is awash in campaign cash -- some speculate upwards of $60 million