Word: salvadors
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...Salvador Rebels Take Power, Peacefully A political party largely composed of former leftist guerrillas swept into power in El Salvador's presidential election on March 15, ushering in a new era for a nation dominated for two decades by the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance. Mauricio Funes, a former television journalist and the first Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front candidate never to have served as a guerrilla commander, capitalized on voter disaffection with widespread poverty and soaring crime rates to win 51% of the vote. Funes, who styles himself as a political moderate in the mold of popular Brazilian President...
...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...
...Ironically, despite its iron-fisted reputation, ARENA has not been able to tackle El Salvador's most urgent crisis, violent crime. The country has been overwhelmed by transnational Central American gangs like the Mara Salvatrucha - which actually originated in Los Angeles among the children of Salvadoran refugees waiting out the civil war - and today El Salvador has one of the world's highest murder rates. The problem is exacerbated by the social stress caused by the global recession, which is shrinking the remittances from Salvadorans living abroad that account for a large chunk of El Salvador's economy...
...waging war against a U.S.-backed government was for his FMLN forebears. It's still not clear how ready ARENA and its more hard-line backers are to accept Funes' narrow victory of 51% to Avila's 49%. But Avila's prompt concession was an encouraging sign that El Salvador will probably avoid unrest. And it was just as encouraging a signal that the country may have completed its evolution from a 20th century "tomb" to a cradle of more temperate 21st century politics...