Leftist Salvador Sanchez Ceren wins El Salvador presidential race

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador – El Salvador’s electoral court on Thursday declared leftist candidate Salvador Sanchez Ceren the winner of the tight presidential election, making him the first former rebel commander to win the presidency of a nation where 76,000 died in a civil war.

With all the votes counted, the electoral court announced on its website that Sanchez Ceren, candidate of the ruling Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the FMLN, got 50.1 percent of the votes. Norman Quijano, of the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance party, known as ARENA, got 49.9 percent.

With about 3 million ballots cast in Sunday’s runoff election, Sanchez Ceren won by less than 7,000 votes, and Quijano’s party vowed to challenge the results unless authorities agree to a vote-by-vote recount.

Outgoing President Mauricio Funes was a journalist who was sympathetic to the FMLN rebels during the 1980-1992 civil war but was never a guerrilla, unlike Sanchez Ceren, who most recently served as Funes’ vice president.

A scare campaign comparing El Salvador’s left to Venezuela’s brought Quijano from far behind in the polls to near tie. But Sanchez Ceren has sought to distance himself from Venezuela’s crises. “El Salvador is not and cannot be Venezuela,” Sanchez Ceren said during the campaign.

Instead, he said his role model is Uruguayan President Jose Mujica, who spent 14 years in prison during Uruguay’s dictatorship. A flower-farming former guerrilla, Mujica gives away 90 percent of his salary, doesn’t have a bank account, drives a 41-year-old Volkswagen and never wears a tie.

“Mujica is the example to follow, because he works on two main fronts: development, and social investment,” Sanchez Ceren said.

He has promised to maintain good relations with the United States, where hundreds of thousands of Salvadoran migrants live.