SAN SALVADOR AND MEXICO CITY — Salvadorans voted Sunday in elections that many believe will set the stage for the country's left wing to come to power for the first time -- a milestone in a nation still polarized after a civil war that ended nearly two decades ago.
Most preelection surveys gave the overall advantage to leftist candidates in races to choose 84 legislators and 262 mayors. However, early returns indicated that the left would lose the major prize, the mayoralty it has held in San Salvador, the capital.
A big showing by the left now would stoke momentum for a widely expected victory by El Salvador's former guerrilla movement in presidential elections in March.
That victory would represent a remarkable transformation by this country, where leftist rebels fought a U.S.-backed right-wing government throughout the Cold War 1980s. And it would link El Salvador to a shift across Latin America toward the political left.
"El Salvador needs a change," Ester Borja, a 42-year-old widowed housekeeper, said Sunday after casting her ballot at a school in the capital's San Jacinto neighborhood. "We've had 20 years of the same old thing, 20 years of living in poverty and we want something new."
Bloody past
Salvadorans make up the second-largest Latino immigrant group in Southern California, after Mexicans. Many fled there during the decade-long civil war that claimed about 75,000 lives and wiped out much anti-right dissent.
A U.N.-brokered peace agreement ended the war in January 1992, after the two sides fought to a stalemate. The right-wing Arena party, some of whose members were associated with vicious death squads that killed priests and union leaders, won elections in 1989 and has retained the presidency since.
But Salvadorans now are preparing for a historic political change -- and the violence that such transformation could bring from a rejected elite or a suspicious military. The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, the former guerrilla coalition that became a political party after the war, led polls for many of Sunday's races, and it holds a double-digit lead in the upcoming presidential vote.
Two FMLN activists, a father and son, were killed this month by heavily armed men in the eastern state of Morazan. But political violence overall has remained at a low level.
