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Even in a Central America riddled with messy civil wars during the 1980s, El Salvador was in a league of its own when it came to Cold War brutality. The country was strewn with countless victims of right-wing death squads, leftist guerrillas and a national army that enjoyed the backing of the Reagan Administration despite its penchant for civilian massacres. The war ended with a peace agreement in 1992 that ushered in a stable democracy. Ever since, at least until last Sunday, the presidency has been the exclusive preserve of the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) - whose party anthem...
...Sunday's presidential election was won by Mauricio Funes, the candidate of the leftist guerrilla movement turned political party the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). "This is a night of great hope for El Salvador," Funes told supporters Sunday night after his ARENA opponent, former national police director Rodrigo Avila, conceded defeat. "ARENA now passes into the opposition, [but] it can be assured that it will be listened to and respected." (See pictures of the gangs of El Salvador...
...manner of the FMLN's victory tells the story of a leftist movement eschewing its armed-rebel image for more mainstream political branding: Funes, 49, a former television journalist, is the first FMLN presidential candidate who was never a guerrilla commander. In El Salvador's last presidential election, in 2004, the FMLN led in early polls until it announced its candidate - the former communist and guerrilla chief Schafik Handal - and went on to be crushed by the ARENA incumbent. This time, the right-wing party managed to narrow Funes' early lead in the polls by painting him, often maliciously...
...campaign and met with the Brazilian a number of times. He hit the stump not in the lefty-red attire favored by FMLN leaders (and by Chavez) but in white guayabera shirts. He also assuaged voter fears by convincing his own party to drop its insistence on lifting El Salvador's amnesty for civil-war crimes, on revising the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and on reversing El Salvador's 2001 adoption of the U.S. dollar as its currency...
...ARENA, too, has come a long way since the 1980s, when its founder, Roberto d'Aubuisson, sponsored death squads that terrorized the nation and assassinated its leading cleric, Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken champion of El Salvador's vast poor. But it is still widely regarded as the party of the wealthy, right-wing landed oligarchy targeted by the FMLN in the civil war, and under its tenure, the poor still feel marginalized. That's why the FMLN claimed 35 of 84 seats in January's national assembly elections and won Sunday's presidential poll...