El Salvador

Father Antonio Rodriguez keeps the image on his cellphone. A 12-year-old boy. Headless. His killers probably boys not a whole lot older than him. When Josue went missing, his frantic grandmother sought the priest's help. Rodriguez went looking for him and found the body. The crime chilled and disgusted him. Somehow, he needed to document the loss of another young life in a dizzying spin of daily, casual death.

Nancy Zuniga knew her mother would be upset if she found out about her trip to El Salvador. Three decades after escaping the civil war, her mother was still haunted by scenes of student activists gunned down during political rallies. And here was Zuniga, a 24-year-old UCLA senior born and raised in Venice, flying back with other Salvadoran American students to press the government about human rights and the upcoming presidential election.

Mauricio Funes, a television journalist whose party once fought a bloody guerrilla war in El Salvador, on Monday became the country's first leftist president amid emotional symbols of landmark change. Funes, a 49-year-old moderate elected under the banner of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, cast himself as a motor of change for El Salvador, in the mold of President Obama and President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil.

Back in the 1990s, when he was a television reporter who relished tweaking the government, Mauricio Funes accepted an invitation from the president to dine at his home and receive an award. Funes asked if he could tape the ceremony for his mother. The president, Armando Calderon Sol, consented. Then, at the moment of the toast, Funes launched into a scathing rebuke of Calderon and what Funes considered to be government abuse and corruption.

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 fatal car accident in Virginia early Tuesday might impact U.S. hopes of achieving anything significant at soccer's 2010 World Cup in South Africa. American forward Charlie Davies, among the team's most promising players in the past year, was severely injured in the 3:15 a.m. crash on the George Washington Memorial Parkway near Washington. Another passenger, Ashley J. Roberta, 22, of Phoenix, Md., was killed in the crash. Police said the driver, whom they did not identify, apparently lost control of the vehicle, which hit a guard rail and split in half.

The day before he was killed this week, Christian Poveda, veteran photojournalist and documentary filmmaker, said he was worried. The Salvadoran street gangs whose lives Poveda had chronicled in recent years were turning uglier than ever. A brief glimmer of hope -- gang leaders speaking of a truce and ending the daily, deadly violence that has terrorized the tiny Central American country for years -- had vanished. A new crop of leaders was emerging who seemed more vicious and less inclined to negotiate or moderate their criminal actions, including extortion, carjacking and killing.

Soccer question of the day: What do you do when a swarm of bees takes refuge inside a goal mouth? At Azteca Stadium on Sunday, a World Cup qualifier between Mexico and El Salvador was interrupted for about six minutes as officials used fire extinguishers to drive away the insects that had invaded the El Salvador goal. Once the bees were cleared, the match resumed -- and the only things invading the El Salvador goal from that point on were soccer balls. Mexico won the match, 4-1, and clinched a spot in the 2010 World Cup finals in South Africa.

Like a prizefighter nearing the ring, Mauricio Funes strides through a gantlet of feverish fans. Booming speakers blare an old left-wing political anthem while a fluttering canopy of red campaign banners lends a celebratory air to this sweltering farm town. It is an intoxicating moment for Funes, a presidential candidate, and his flag-waving backers from the Salvadoran left. In what would be an improbable turn, Funes could be the next leader of this famously conservative country.

It looms solemnly over the shady corner of a city park, an incongruous emblem of pain amid a happy clamor of picnicking families and children chasing scuffed soccer balls. A granite echo of the Vietnam memorial in Washington, the 300-foot-long lead-colored monument serves as a kind of giant gravestone for the civil war that ripped El Salvador apart in the 1980s.