His pockets bulging with petro dollars, Chavez's next target could very well be El Salvador's fledging new democracy...

Fidel Castro and Latin American communists learned a lot from Chilean President Salvador Allende's failed power grab in 1973.

And he used the lessons of that bitter defeat to coach Venezuela's Hugo Chávez to dictatorship under the guise of democracy more than 25 years later.

Now Latin America's revolutionaries may be experiencing another setback and this time they can't claim that a military coup removed their would-be dictator. Instead, former Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was arrested by order of the Supreme Court and deposed by Congress. And despite enormous international pressure, the Honduran democracy has so far defended its rule of law.

Yet far from giving up, Castro protégés are already using what they learned in Tegucigalpa in El Salvador. Central America's most promising free-market democracy is now fighting for its life.

Allende got the boot from his military because he had been trampling the constitution. The Supreme Court, the Bar Association and the Medical Association all denounced his disregard for the rule of law. According to James R. Whelan, author of a history of Chile titled "Out of the Ashes," the lower house of its Congress passed a resolution on Aug. 22, 1973, that "said bluntly that it was the responsibility of the military . . . 'to put an immediate end' to lawlessness and 'channel government action along legal paths . . . .'"

Less than a month later, the military complied. The lesson from Chile for the hard left was that success depended on first getting control of the institutions with the power to check an aspiring tyrant.

Now the leadership of El Salvador's FMLN party, composed of many former terrorists and guerrillas, is attempting just that. It took some 20 years for the political party of the FMLN to get to the presidency and many Salvadorans distrust it because of its violent history. But FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes ran as a moderate, and the economy had suffered under former President Tony Saca of the center-right Arena Party. Disillusioned Salvadorans sought change in Funes…

Without Mauricio Funes, the FMLN had little to no chance of gained political power because of the people’s distrust of their violent and terrorist past. This group of recalcitrant and frustrated communists went so far as to threaten that if they did not win these elections, that they would burn the country.

It should be noted that a widening rift has developed in the ranks of the militant left due to the fact they thought Funes would be easily manipulated, but so far Mauricio Funes seems to be his own man and has chosen to remain the president of all Salvadorans.

Albeit, the people must remain alert and on guard during these fragile period in their fledging democracy, because at present only Mauricio Funes stands between the militant terrorist left and their life long dream of reaching power…