A new terrorist state on the horizon?

Will the Central American nation of El Salvador – one of the United States’ strongest friends in the hemisphere – soon join the terrorist axis of evil?

It will if Salvadoran voters elect Shafik Handal their president in Sunday’s upcoming election.

Handal is a die-hard enemy of the United States and a lifelong ally of this country’s enemies. Polls have him and his FMLN party running second behind the candidate of the ruling ARENA party, Tony Saca. But ARENA voters are notorious for not bothering to vote – potentially handing victory to lifetime terrorism supporter Handal, just as they did in previous legislative elections.

As one of the five top commanders of the FMLN guerrillas in the 1980s, Handal bears personal responsibility for having plunged his country into a terrible internal war that cost tens of thousands of lives. As longtime head of the Salvadoran Communist Party, the millionaire Handal devoted his political life in the service of the Soviet Union. He used his ethnic Palestinian roots to make common cause with the PLO during its worst years of terrorist violence. And more recently, he has joined a new terrorist international, the Foro de Sao Paulo, to maintain networks with radical political groups and terrorists across the hemisphere and around the world.

If Handal wins, the US will be forced to reassess its entire political, diplomatic, economic and security relationships with El Salvador. That spells trouble for a long-suffering country has, until now, been making a remarkable recovery.