Ending 20 years of rule by the right wing ARENA party, Mauricio Funes of the Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN) won the presidential election, held this past Sunday, in El Salvador.

“Today, the citizenship that believed in hope and defeated fear has
triumphed. In the wake of an aggressive campaign, he promised to “cast aside
confrontation and the spirit of vengeance. My government will be based on the spirit of national unity,” Funes said.

The official count has Fulnes winning 51.3 percent of the vote against 48.7 percent.

The ARENA candidate, Rodrigo Avila, ran with ads linking Fulnes and his party, which were the Marxist rebels during the long, bloody Salvadorian civil war, with Hugo Chavez and Cuba, trying to inspire a new level of red fear that the voting public didn’t fall for.

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, interviewed our amigo Roberto Lovato, the son of Salvadorian immigrants and a journalist who is in El Salvador.

“Let the joy come and wash away the suffering.” It’s something on an order I’ve never seen in my life. As a child of Salvadoran immigrants and as someone who’s spent time here and as someone who saw the Obama experience, I really can’t tell you what this is like, when you’re talking about ending not just the ARENA party’s rule, but you’re talking about 130 years of oligarchy and military dictatorship, by and large, that’s just ended last night. You’re talking about $6 billion that the United States used to defeat the FMLN, as you mentioned earlier. You’re talking about one of the most formidable — a formerly political military, now political forces, in the hemisphere, showing the utter failure of not just the ARENA party but of somebody in particular, too, who has a special place in many of our hearts: Ronald Reagan. This is the defeat of Ronald Reagan, nothing less.

Via / New York Times and Alternet