Monday, March 16, 2009

The elections in El Salvador

Leftist Mauricio Funes of El Salvador's former Marxist rebel FMLN party has won the country's presidential election.
He defeated his conservative rival, the Arena party's Rodrigo Avila, who has admitted defeat. Arena had won every presidential election since the end of El Salvador's civil war 18 years ago.
The FMLN won 51.3% of the vote against Arena's 48.7%, Reuters news agency reported.
FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) party was founded by Marxist guerrilla fighters from the civil war.The conflict ended in a UN-sponsored peace accord in 1991, after the loss of some 70,000 lives over less than two decades.
Mr Funes is a former television journalist.
El Salvador has one of the world's highest murder rates. It has also been badly hit by the world economic downturn, with remittances from Salvadorians living abroad falling dramatically.
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