adminSAN SALVADOR – Balloting is under way in the second round of El Salvador’s presidential election, with a former guerrilla commander favoured to win the runoff vote. Polls ahead of Sunday’s vote suggested that Salvador Sanchez Ceren from the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) was comfortably ahead of Norman Quijano, the candidate of the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) and mayor of the capital, San Salvador.
Sanchez Ceren (69), is a teacher by profession and the country’s current vice president. He is also a former education minister, and was one of five top guerrilla commanders during the civil war.
He fell just shy of an outright victory in the first round last month and polls now give Sanchez Ceren an advantage of between 10 and 18 points, AFP news agency reported.
Quijano (67), is a law and order candidate who has campaigned against the country’s high crime rate and the notorious “mara” street gangs at the root of much of El Salvador’s drug dealing and extortion rackets.
The conservative candidate has tried to paint Ceren as a communist “radical” with blood on his hands but in a country where one-third of people live in poverty and many rely on money sent home from relatives living in the United States, the FMLN’s social programmes are popular.
Ceren has promised to expand those programmes for the poor and fended off his opponent’s claims that he will impose extreme left-wing policies.
Under the FMLN, the government says the poverty rate has fallen from 40 percent to 29 percent.
“No other government has done these things,” Beatriz Herrera, a fruit seller in Santa Ana, El Salvador’s second-biggest city, told Reuters news agency. “The FMLN really got to work to help those of us who are poor.”
A victory for Ceren would give the FMLN a second consecutive term.
El Salvador has remained a deeply polarised society since the war, in which the FMLN fought a series of US-backed right-wing governments. The conflict killed about 75,000 people and left many with a deep distrust of the former rebels.
The FMLN has steadily won over supporters by moderating its policies but it has still struggled to push economic reforms through a divided Congress or overcome years of sluggish growth that has fuelled the rise of violent street gangs.
Today, the wealthy live in gated communities and shop in lavish malls filled with US chain stores under the watch of armed guards. The poor, meanwhile, struggle in neighbourhoods of cinderblock homes controlled by the country’s violent gangs. – Agencies/Al Jazeera.
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