Commie creeping coups south of border

Mary Anastasia O'Grady:

Fidel Castro 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 guerrillas, is attempting just that.

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A couple years back Mr. Merino explained in a media interview the FMLN's political agenda this way: "It is to take power, to conquer the entire nation and, in that way, assure that the form of government does not change. Of course, not with bayonets or persecution. There are examples, like Venezuela, that is our model."

The institutions that stand in Mr. Merino's way are the congress, the Supreme Court and the electoral council. The party tried to wrest control of the high court's constitutional panel, in collaboration with Mr. Saca while he was still president. Luckily, the backroom deal was challenged and the rule of law prevailed.

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Speculation about such political machinations increased last month when 12 Arena congressmen announced a break from their party. Calling themselves "independents," they proceeded to vote with the FMLN against an investigation Arena wanted into abuses of agricultural subsidies.

What prompted the defection? Mr. Cristiani told me that a high-ranking member of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) has told him that at least one PDC congressman has been offered $700,000 to vote with the FMLN. Separately, the secretary general of the PDC, Rodolfo Parker, has publicly warned of multiple offers from a middleman of between $300,000 and $500,000.

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They are just a few votes short of the super majority they need to take control. Based on this administration's stand with the bad guys in Honuras, it is unlikely that it will do anything to stop this illegal power grab in El Salvador. As a result the evils of socialism will force even more illegal immigrants to leave that country and head north.