El Salvador to Elect New President SundayMauricio Funes, FMLN presidential candidate, answers at a press conference with the foreign media in San Salvador,12 Mar 2009
13 March 2009
Salvadoran citizens are set to vote for a new president Sunday in a race that could interrupt two decades of conservative rule with a leftist victory.
Left-leaning candidate Mauricio Funes, a former television journalist and representative of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, a former leftist rebel group known as FMLN, is pitted against conservative former national police chief Rodrigo Avila.
Avila represents the National Republican Alliance, also known as the ARENA party, which has had control of the government for the past 20 years.
Polls give the advantage to Funes. If elected, he would succeed President Elias Antonio Saca, who is barred from seeking another five year term, and El Salvador would join a growing number of left-leaning governments in Latin America.
Some four million people are eligible to take part in the vote, in a country wracked by poverty and crime that depends heavily on remittances from family members in the United States.
Friday in Washington, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Tom Shannon said the United States supports the democratic process in El Salvador and will work with whomever is elected.
El Salvador has been under conservative rule since the end of a civil war in 1992. The 12-year conflict involved the government and both leftist and right-wing guerrillas. Some 75,000 people died in the conflict before it ended with the signing of peace accords.
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-03-13-voa42.cfm
