El Salvador prepares for crucial election

Voters in El Salvador will line up at a crossroads of history Sunday, deciding whether to give the presidency to a political party that 17 years ago was waging guerrilla war on the government.

Although polls indicate that the race has tightened considerably, most analysts say that Mauricio Funes, the candidate of the former guerrilla group known as FMLN, is still slightly favoured to beat ARENA party hopeful Rodrigo Avila. That would end a 20-year hold on the presidency by the right-leaning ARENA.

“It’s a sign that there’s democracy in that country, which is something the United States tried to foster,” said Bernard Aronson, who as President George H.W. Bush’s assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs from 1989-93 was heavily involved in ending El Salvador’s 12-year civil war.

The FMLN, which is the Spanish acronym for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, was formed in late 1980 as an umbrella group for five leftist guerilla organizations fighting a U.S.-backed military dictatorship.

The guerrillas and the government signed a peace pact in 1992, and the FMLN became a legitimate political party.

By some estimates, 75,000 Salvadorans died during the war.

The new president will find “a country that still retains a lot of bitterness, a lot of division,” said Peter Hakim, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue policy institute.

The election, Hakim said, “is an important test of how far El Salvador has come.”

The result also will be an important test of how far *El Salvador will go.

With an economy in deep trouble and neither party having enough seats to control the national Legislative Assembly, much will depend on the party that loses.