A former Marxist guerrilla leader is in a strong position to win El Salvador's presidential election in a run-off against his right-wing rival after falling just shy of an outright win in the first round of voting on Sunday.
Salvador Sanchez Ceren, a top leader of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) rebel army during El Salvador's civil war, won 48.9 percent of votes in the first round, just short of 50 percent needed to avoid a run-off.
He will now face off on March 9 against Norman Quijano, the conservative former mayor of San Salvador, who won 38.95 percent of the vote and wants to deploy the army to fight powerful street gangs.
The FMLN turned into a political party at the end of El Salvador's 12-year civil war in 1992, and it won power at the last election in 2009. Sanchez Ceren was vice-president in the government and his campaign was helped by its popular welfare policies, including pensions and free school supplies.
"We won the first round ... we are sure that in the second round we will win by more than 10 points," the 69-year-old Sanchez Ceren told cheering supporters on Sunday night.
"We are going to work in the coming days to further unite," he added. "We are going to build new understandings, new alliances."
Sanchez Ceren appears to be in a very strong position ahead of the run-off.
Source: Reuters
