elections! part dos

First of all, I'm so sorry for taking so long to update my blog. This past month has been a little crazy with three different visitors in four weeks (I'm not complaining! ) so I've had less time to sit down at the internet and record what's been going on.
The most important thing that has happened in this past month, and for that matter in the past twenty years since the Salvadoran Civil War, were the presidential elections here on March 15th.
For the first time in the history of El Salvador, the left wing has won a democratic election. This is an amazing step in the democratization of this country; it is so amazing that these two political parties were recently fighting a bloody civil war, which just ended in 1992, and are now able to have a peaceful election. It is an exciting time to be in this country.
Despite the legacy of the civil war, the new president, Mauricio Funes, was in a large part able to win because of his removal from the conflict. Whereas other left wing candidates have failed in the past because of their history in the guerrilla forces, Funes was a journalist and actually not even an FMLN party member until he received the nomination. In this way, he was able to stand as a moderate left wing leader, in the mold of Lula from Brazil, as opposed to Chavez.
This is not to say that this self-portrayal was accepted by the right wing. This campaign was particularly dirty and the right wing Arena party bombarded the airwaves with commercials trying to tie FMLN with Chavez. There were TV ads with clips of Chavez railing against the U.S., with the intention of showing what would happen in El Salvador if the left wing wins. Another interesting commercial came out after the election of Obama in the U.S., saying that just because he was left wing doesn't mean he would support the left wing here. It was funny because Funes tried to model himself after Obama, adopting the slogans of "change" and "hope" and the right wing put out another advertisement about how he is nothing like Obama because Obama went to Harvard and Funes doesn't have a college degree. I was like, "what about Obama going to Columbia???" :). But in all seriousness, like I've mentioned before, the U.S.-El Salvador relationship is extremely important to many people here, on both sides of the political spectrum. With over 2 million Salvadorans living in the U.S. and 17% of GDP coming remittances that these emigrants send back, no one wants to jeopardize their ties with the U.S. government.
As Peace Corps volunteers, we have to be neutral about politics here. A friend of mine asked me if this was hard to do, but the truth is, it feels natural. Though I am happy to see a peaceful democratic transition and excited to watch how this step in Salvadoran history, I also believe that this election cannot be understood without the context of the civil war and we as outsiders must be very careful about pronouncing judgments about people's political opinions. My town (and my department), actually voted overwhelmingly for the right wing Arena candidate. Even though my municipality is one of the poorest in the country, people here are still very loathe to vote for the left wing due to how much they suffered at the hand of the rebels. Though I am a left wing supporter in the U.S., I understand that the left here is quite different.
Above are some pictures of the ubiquitous election propaganda, which cover every lamp post, street barrier and house. These are actually my brother's pictures (you may recognize them from his blog!) since I haven't gotten around to taking any lately. Also, I uploaded a picture of the new president for you to enjoy.