In England The Financial Times:"Washington loses El Salvador ally as left clinches election win"

Washington loses El Salvador ally as left clinches election win
By Adam Thomson

A former Marxist guerrilla army turned mainstream political party has swept to power in elections in El Salvador, completing central America's leftward drift.

The result marks the first time the leftwing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front has won a presidential vote since a 1992 peace accord brought to an end 12 years of civil war that cost 75,000 lives.

The result removes central America's last openly rightwing government and Washington's most trusted ally in the region.

With 99.4 per cent of the vote counted, Mauricio Funes, FMLN candidate and a former television journalist, won the election with 51.3 per cent.

Rodrigo Avila, candidate from the incumbent conservative Arena party and Mr Funes's only rival, had 48.7 per cent.

Electoral authorities were expected to make an official announcement yesterday.

Late on Sunday night Mr Avila accepted the defeat, telling Salvadoreans: "We will be a constructive opposition, an opposition that ensures that our country does not lose its freedoms."

Throughout an aggressive campaign, Mr Avila had told Salvadoreans that a vote for Mr Funes would be a vote for Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's leftwing president - with devastating consequences for private enterprise.

In fact, most experts see Mr Funes as a moderate. "He is well-intentioned," says Michael Shifter at the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank in Washington.

While promising greater social spending to head off the effects of the global economic crisis and reduce terrifying levels of violence, Mr Funes has also tried to reassure private business. "There is nothing in my programme that goes against private property or business," he told foreign journalists last week.

Mr Funes has also gone to great lengths to keep the US onside, even using President Barack Obama's "yes we can" campaign slogan.

He travelled to Washington several months ago to hold meetings with Tom Shannon, at that time the US administration's highest-ranking official on Latin America.

Last week Mr Funes said he expected to maintain "a relation of understanding and mutual respect" with the US. He takes office without a legislative majority. Yet at the press conference last week, the 49-year-old dismissed the idea that it could prove difficult to form alliances.

"If we want to extract this country from crisis I understand that I have to govern closely with my own party but also with that of the other legislative groups."

Mr Funes said he would crack down on tax evasion by the rich and use the funds to create jobs for Salvadorean immigrants returning from the US. He has also promised to invest in farming to reduce dependence on imported food.

* The US government congratulated Mr Funes on his victory, saying that it wanted to work with the new government.

Robert Wood, a State Department spokesman, said the elections were "very free, fair and democratic".

"I want to specifically congratulate Mauricio Funes as the winner of the presidential election and also his opponent, Rodrigo Avila, for participating in the election and for respecting the election results," he said.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009 17/3/2009

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