Jose Cabezas / AFP/Getty Images Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front candidate Mauricio Funes, center, with wife Vanda, and running mate Salvador Sanchez Ceren, claimed victory for the leftist party. Experts called his lead insurmountable. He has compared himself to Obama.
El Salvador elects first leftist president
Email Picture Jose Cabezas / AFP/Getty Images Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front candidate Mauricio Funes, center, with wife Vanda, and running mate Salvador Sanchez Ceren, claimed victory for the leftist party. Experts called his lead insurmountable. He has compared himself to Obama.
A party led by former guerrillas unseats the conservative party that's governed for two decades. 'Thank you for choosing the path of hope and for overcoming fear,' says victorious Mauricio Funes.
Reporting from San Salvador -- Salvadorans on Sunday elected a former TV reporter as the country's first leftist president, unseating a conservative party that ruled for two decades and choosing a government that will be dominated by former guerrillas.
Mauricio Funes, an affable political moderate running on behalf of the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, claimed victory after nearly complete returns gave him a lead that experts said was insurmountable.
Election time in El Salvador
In El Salvador election, old battle lines have been erased
"This is the happiest night of my life, and I also want it to be the night of greatest hope for El Salvador," an emotional Funes said in a crowded hotel conference room, as cameras flashed and supporters cheered. "Thank you for choosing the path of hope and for overcoming fear."
He called for a spirit of reconciliation and collaboration similar to that which helped end El Salvador's bloody civil war 17 years ago.
With this victory, the FMLN completed its evolution from a coalition of Marxist rebels fighting U.S.-backed regimes in El Salvador's rugged hills to a broad-based party.
Funes, 49, who helped give the FMLN a following beyond its traditional militant base, frequently compared himself to President Obama as an agent of change and promised to maintain good relations with Washington. Instead of the FMLN red, he wore white guayabera shirts and dark business suits as he traversed the nation and pressed his message of national unity.
The Arena party's candidate, Rodrigo Avila, acknowledged defeat Sunday night. Armando Calderon Sol, an Arena leader and former president, told The Times: "It is irreversible. History is written."
FMLN supporters took to the streets in celebration. They filled downtown plazas here in the capital, waving red flags and posters of their candidate and chanting "Mauricio! Mauricio!" -- as well as the old standard, "The left, united, will never be defeated."
Analysts said a leftist win would indicate that voters were more concerned with poverty, unemployment and raging crime than the fear, fanned by the right, that Funes and the FMLN would push El Salvador down a radical communist path.
"The campaign of fear did not work 100% because the desire for change, even among conservatives, was so strong," said Raymundo Calderon, dean of the social studies institute of the University of El Salvador. "We were in such a difficult situation but always supporting the same politics. There's a limit. People decided they had put up with it 20 years and said, 'Enough.' "
U.N.-brokered peace accords ended El Salvador's civil war in 1992. About 75,000 people were killed in 12 years of fighting and atrocities by death squads, some of which were associated with founders of the ruling Arena party. During the war years and since, around a quarter of El Salvador's population -- about 2.5 million people -- fled or was driven to the U.S., with many ending up in Southern California.
Despite widespread disenchantment with the Arena-led government, the party enjoys the backing of major media and big business, and in its closing days the race was too close to call. Avila, Arena's candidate, is a former police commander who repeatedly invoked his Catholic beliefs and warned that a leftist victory would align El Salvador perilously with Cuba and Venezuela.
About 60% of the electorate cast ballots. Walking, riding in dark-windowed SUVs or piled in the backs of pickup trucks, Salvadorans surged to polling stations. Buses festooned with the flags of one party or another clogged streets.
Thousands of Salvadorans returned to their homeland from the United States to vote, including Tere Torres and her two adult sons, who flew into town Saturday from Los Angeles and were up at dawn to head to the fairgrounds to vote.
"It was worth making the trip so that we don't forget why people like us left in the first place," said William Torres, 24, a graphic designer in Los Angeles. "The economic situation is really bad and people need to know they have opportunity based not just on privilege and what party you belong to."
His mother, who left El Salvador while the war raged and now cleans houses in Culver City, said the election was too important to skip. "It could be that the change we wanted for so long is possible this time," she said.
El Salvador remains divided by great social and economic inequity, with a vast underclass struggling to afford food and medicine.
But the idea of dramatic change is exactly what scared some voters.
"What do we need a revolution for?" asked Alex Aviles, 18, a first-time voter and law student, dressed in a red, white and blue Arena T-shirt. "People don't have money because they don't work."
Arena conjured up images of the war to paint the FMLN as violent radicals and plastered San Salvador with posters linking Funes with Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and Cuba's Fidel Castro. El Salvador has been a staunch U.S. ally. Washington backed repressive Salvadoran governments in the 1970s and 1980s, and equipped and trained its army against the guerrillas. El Salvador sent troops to Iraq at President Bush's request, and under Arena made the U.S. dollar its currency.
President-elect of El Salvador, Mauricio Funes 
Sunday night, Mauricio Funes of the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) party declared victory in El Salvador's 2009 presidential elections. Although El Salvador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal has not yet certified a winner, Funes shows an insurmountable lead in the results, besting Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) candidate Rodrigo Ávila by a margin of 51.27% to 48.73%, with 90.68% of votes counted. Ávila conceded defeat, vowing that ARENA would remain vigorous in opposition. 

Funes' victory marks a major shift in the politics of the country: ARENA has controlled the presidency of El Salvador since the end of El Salvador's civil war in 1991. The FMLN was founded by Marxist guerrillas who fought in the civil war. When the guerrillas and the government signed a peace agreement in 1992, the FMLN became a political party. 

Funes, a former television journalist, is the first FMLN leader not to have been an combatant in the war. In his victory speech in San Salvador Sunday night, he said: "I want to be the real president of the real reconstruction of the country, which starts with the reconstruction of people."

"I want to thank all the people who voted for me and chose that path of hope and change," added Funes. 

During the polarizing electoral campaign, Ávila tied the FMLN to communism and said that an FMLN victory would turn El Salvador into a satellite of Hugo Chávez's Venezuela. Discontent with unemployment, gang violence and corruption under the government of ARENA president Antonio "Tony" Saca trumped concerns that the FMLN would return to its radical roots or spoil El Salvador's historically close relationship with the United States.

About 60% of the electorate voted, including thousands who returned to the country from the United States in order to cast ballots.