* Closing his campaign, Mauricio Funes, via AP.
"I am not proposing an interventionist state, but I am proposing a regulating state, vigilant, which allows for competition to exist in the country, which respects institutionality, which respects private property, and above all guarantees judicial security," the Salvadoran presidential candidate Mauricio Funes said last week, in an interview with DPA.
Funes fate is decided today (hopefully) in an election billed as the first in which a leftist has a real shot at winning the Salvadoran presidency. A former television journalist, Funes is running with the FMLN. His chief opponent is conservative Rodrigo Avila, who during the campaign has attempted to link Funes to Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro, and has promised to govern with "Christian values." This is the same strategy so effectively employed in Mexico in 2006 by Felipe Calderon during his campaign against Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. And we all know how that turned out.
El Salvador, like so many other countries in the Americas have done recently, is making a choice at the voting booth on Sunday between 'fear' and 'change,' with so much of the battle being waged in the media. For updates on the results, follow coverage here, here, here, and here, and with Roberto Lovato at Of America.
* See also El Faro.