Please see El Salvador's Election first:
"Leftist will be El Salvador president" by Marcos Aleman | Associated Press March 14, 2014
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — El Salvador’s electoral court on Thursday declared leftist candidate Salvador Sanchez Ceren the winner of the tight presidential election, making him the first former rebel commander to gain the presidency of a nation where 76,000 died in a civil war.
With all the votes counted, the electoral court announced on its website that Sanchez Ceren, candidate of the ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the FMLN, got 50.1 percent of the votes. Norman Quijano, of the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance party, known as ARENA, got 49.9 percent.
With about 3 million ballots cast in Sunday’s runoff election, Sanchez Ceren won by fewer than 7,000 votes, and Quijano’s party vowed to challenge the results unless authorities agree to a vote-by-vote recount.
Outgoing President Mauricio Funes was a journalist who was sympathetic to the FMLN rebels during the 1980-1992 civil war but was never a guerrilla, unlike Sanchez Ceren, who most recently served as Funes’s vice president.
A scare campaign comparing El Salvador’s left to Venezuela’s brought Quijano from far behind in the polls to a near tie.
What that says to me is the election could not be stolen.
But Sanchez Ceren has sought to distance himself from the Venezuela’s crises. ‘‘El Salvador is not and cannot be Venezuela,’’ Sanchez Ceren said during the campaign.
Related: Simón Díaz, 85; Venezuelan folk musician
Okay, I'll stop throwing stones.
Instead, he said his role model is Uruguayan President Jose ‘‘Pepe’’ Mujica, who spent 14 years in prison during Uruguay’s dictatorship. A flower-farming former guerrilla, Mujica gives away 90 percent of his salary, does not have a bank account, drives a 41-year-old Volkswagen and never wears a tie.
‘‘Mujica is the example to follow, because he works on two main fronts: development and social investment,’’ Sanchez Ceren said.
He has promised to maintain good relations with the United States, where hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran migrants live.
Much like Mujica, Sanchez Ceren, 69, favors rolled-up shirt sleeves and usually eschews suits and ties.
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Sanchez Ceren was one of 12 children born to a carpenter and a food vendor. Once he started working, he quickly became a teachers’ union activist, pressing demands for better salaries and working conditions. Given the bloody repression against union leaders in El Salvador in the 1970s, it was not a surprise that he also gravitated rapidly toward the rebel movement, then a series of leftist groups allied under the umbrella of the FMLN.
By 1978, Sanchez Ceren headed into the mountains as an armed guerrilla, and by 1983 he became one of the rebels’ five top commanders, using the nom-de-guerre ‘‘Comandante Leonel Gonzalez.’’ He was seen within the movement as an advocate of dialogue, and he served as a negotiator in the 1992 peace accord that ended the war.
‘‘He is true to his revolutionary principles; he is a stalwart who is a lifelong party member, but he is not stuck in the past,’’ said Miguel Montenegro, an official of El Salvador’s Human Rights Commission.
However, Sanchez Ceren is likely to face continued resistance from emboldened activists of ARENA, which governed El Salvador for two decades before losing the presidency to Funes in 2009.
Quijano, 67, has said he will dispute the results, alleging fraud, including multiple voting by FLMN backers. And he has been organizing Venezuela-style street protests.
Sanchez Ceren will also have to deal with one of the highest murder rates in the world. A 2012 gang truce seemed to cut the country’s daily average of 14 dead by half, but the drop appears to have been short-lived. Police statistics show 501 murders the first two months of this year, an increase of over 25 percent from a year ago.
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