SAN SALVADOR — For nearly three decades, Nestor Bonilla was a loyal soldier in the Salvadoran army. Trained by U.S. military advisors, he rose to the rank of colonel. He fought in the civil war as a commander of El Salvador's elite and feared special forces.
Today he is stomping the campaign trail in behalf of the guerrilla movement he once battled. "It is time for a change," he says in what can only be called an understatement.
El Salvador elects a new president Sunday, and for the first time in the nation's history, the left has a real chance of victory. The vote is a test of whether El Salvador has changed significantly in the 17 years since the war ended and can open up beyond the single-party system that has governed it since, or whether the stubborn, locked-in-the-past elements on both the right and left will once again prevail and seal the status quo.
The campaign has revived frightening wartime rhetoric but also offered startling, unheard-of political alliances -- such as Bonilla and his new best friend, Gerson Martinez, a former commander of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN. Bonilla and Martinez have become a fixture on the FMLN campaign circuit, rallying mostly rural crowds in behalf of Mauricio Funes, the politically moderate presidential candidate heading the FMLN ticket.
When the two compactly built men in their 50s take the stage before a sea of red FMLN flags, they like to tell a somewhat symbolic story.
"We used to be in these hills around here, shooting at each other, me on one side, him on the other," the former military man will say.
"I'd duck, he'd duck. The important thing is we survived to be here today."
"I tell my brothers in the FMLN that we both came from the pueblo," Martinez adds.
The story isn't literal; Bonilla and Martinez fought in different regions of the Salvadoran battlefield, though their comrades were certainly killing one another. But the political message is clear: If two staunch enemies can reconcile for what they believe to be the good of the country, then so can voters.
Does it work?
It's a real crowd pleaser among the FMLN sympathizers, who are apparently surprised at the sight of the two men allied, and they eventually erupt into applause and laughter.
But not everyone.
Marina Morales de la Cruz, a shopkeeper, believes what she has heard about the FMLN -- that it's made up of violence-prone atheists who wouldn't know how to govern.
