EL SALVADOR: A right-wing businessman squared off against a former guerrilla leader in yesterday's presidential elections in El Salvador, where 3.4 million voters took to the polls after a campaign marked by insult and injury.
Schafik Handal, candidate for the Farabundi Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), has gained steadily on front-runner Antonio Saca, representing the National Republican Party (Arena), which has governed since 1989.
If neither candidate wins an outright majority, then a run-off vote will be held on May 2nd.
Mr Handal has pledged to bring home Salvadoran troops currently serving in Iraq, restore the national currency abandoned in favour of the US dollar and renegotiate a free trade accord signed with the United States.
Mr Saca has vowed to continue the administration's free-market policies which have seen the privatisation of state assets and a reliance on the export industry to stimulate job creation.
Mr Handal and Mr Saca represent rival political forces that fought a civil war in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving 75,000 people dead and millions more in exile as death squads and army massacres traumatised the country. Arena's campaign publicity featured violent images of insurgents from the civil war period while the FMLN responded with images of government-sponsored death squads.
Voters are concerned about unemployment, poverty and spiralling social violence which has left the country with a higher body count under democratic rule than that suffered during the civil war.
Mr Saca (39) rose to prominence as a soccer commentator before launching a network of radio stations which provided a platform for his political ambitions. Mr Handal (73) is a veteran Communist Party leader, who spent three decades on the run, suffering imprisonment and exile before returning to the country to sign a rebel-government peace accord in 1992.