El Salvadorans are mature enough to make decisions without following blindly in the footsteps of Venezuela!

VHeadline commentarist Kenneth T. Tellis writes: Will a victory by Socialist Candidate Maurico Funes change El Salvador? That is what Salvadorans should be asking themselves today ... but no one should follow the line that Mauricio Funes is really a Marxist at all, because this is a holdover from the days when the rightists under U.S. tutelage were ruling El Salvador with an iron fist.

What Salvadorans must try do is over ride the rumors and propaganda that have been endemic in their country for many years under a puppet regime which took its orders directly from Washington.

As a TV journalist, Mauricio Funes is more likely to fair and above board in his dealings with the people of El Salvador, and might possibly bring El Salvador a new birth of freedom and justice that it never knew before under the oppressive regimes that were ruling the country. If Funes wins the El Salvadoran presidency perhaps all the propaganda fielded by the U.S. under past regimes will exposed to the light of day as just one more attempt to delude the people into voting for the ARENA (the pro-U.S. Nationalist Republican Alliance, a right wing coalition) candidate Rodrigo Avila. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front is fielding a man they feel can change El Salvador, even though he is not a former member of the guerillas.

• The FMLN can now borrow the slogan from U.S. Democratic Candidate and president-elect of the U.S., Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois: CHANGE WE CAN LIVE WITH!

Of course there will always be bad memories in the minds of El Salvadorans like Belky Hernandez the owner of a store selling memorabilia of the El Salvadoran CIVIL WAR, and whose mother was shot and killed by U.S.-backed Salvadoran troops and that is to be expected. But that should not make her throw away her hopes that El Salvador will one-day soon return to true democracy without any outside involvement in its internal affairs.

The opponents of FMLN are either deliberately creating the impression that El Salvador will join the Latin American leftist bloc led by Venezuela, or they believe U.S. propaganda, which is a standard policy of the Bush regime, vis-a-vis Latin American states that have thrown off the yoke U.S. Salvadorans should not have any more fears regarding the U.S., because as of January 20, 2009, a new administration under the Barack Obama and the Democrats will be taking over, and no doubt the present harsh policies that were in place before will be removed. Thus there will be no call for El Salvador to pursue anti-U.S. rhetoric any more. El Salvadorans are mature enough to make decisions without following blindly in the footsteps of Nicaragua or Venezuela.

Of course El Salvador needs to take a more sensible approach to health standards, because while its currency id the greenback, it should not become a carbon copy of the U.S. Those U.S.-style fast-food joints and malls are a hazard to the health of Salvadorans and should be brought under control.

The damage done by past regimes in the long drawn Civil War has maimed too many people and its scars remain to remind Salvadorans, many of whom are former-fighters incapable of earning a living and are in wheelchairs, combined with the flight of close to a quarter of the population that fled the country during the disastrous Civil War.

Perhaps, there is hope yet, for the day when Salvadorans can live a normal happy and prosperous life without fear of any kind.

That out of the experience of the Civil War will come a new generation that will replenish and rebuild their broken homeland again, and that hope must never die.

Kenneth T. Tellis
kenttellis@rogers.com