President Obama likes to lecture Americans that “the Cold War is over.” If only he would acknowledge the Soviet-style totalitarianism that lives on in Cuba, or the ambition to copy it that is alive and well elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere.

Sometimes the U.S. even props up these antidemocratic actors. One example is El Salvador, governed since 2009 by the former Soviet-backed guerrilla group, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).

In the late 1990s El Salvador implemented changes that made it second in the region only to Chile in economic freedom. Many of those reforms have been erased under the FMLN, and El Salvador risks becoming another Venezuela, complete with political persecutions and a state-controlled economy. Nonetheless Team Obama has dumped hundreds of millions of dollars in bilateral aid into its pockets.

The latest chapter in the FMLN power grab is a move by the government of President Salvador Sánchez Cerén—a former guerrilla leader during the bloody Marxist insurgency of the 1980s—to rein in the independence of the National Association of Private Enterprise (ANEP) by placing the FMLN’s preferred candidate in charge. A vote to choose the association’s next president comes this week.

This is a pivotal moment for the nation but also for Central American stability. El Salvador is part of the “Northern Triangle,” where organized crime financed by U.S. drug consumers has made life unbearably violent and spurred emigration. If the country becomes a Venezuela Mini-Me, things will get even worse.