EL SALVADOR:LIKE A prizefighter nearing the ring, presidential candidate Mauricio Funes strides through feverish fans.
Booming speakers blare an old left-wing political anthem while red campaign banners lend a celebratory air to this sweltering farm town.
It is an intoxicating moment for Funes 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.
A 48-year-old television journalist and a newcomer to politics, Funes has jolted El Salvador by grabbing a sizeable early lead in the race as the representative of a left-wing group that fought a guerrilla war in the country two decades ago.
A victory for Funes would represent a historic breakthrough for his party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), and for a nation where memories of past conflict still burn.
Funes, a journalist during the war, hopes to position himself as leader of a postwar generation by reaching out to some 350,000 young Salvadorans who will vote for the first time. Many were not born when FMLN fighters battled troops in the hills around places such as El Paraiso, which housed a key army base in the north.
He also has been buoyed by discontent over rising food and petrol prices, and over the right-wing government's decision seven years ago to adopt the US dollar as the country's currency.
The election is nine months away, an aeon in campaign terms. But various polls show Funes running solidly ahead of the Nationalist Republican Alliance, or Arena, which has ruled the country of seven million since 1989.
A major reason is that voters are in a foul mood over El Salvador's deepening economic woes and alarming violence - much of it by street gangs - that has killed more than 14,000 people during the four-year term of President Tony Saca. "I want to see change. That's the key point - change," said Fanny Beatriz Romero (34), a merchant who said she voted for Arena.
A Funes triumph would add El Salvador to the swelling ranks of Latin American nations that have elected left-wing presidents. The country, whose civil war claimed 75,000 lives before ending with a peace accord in 1992, has long been a fervent US ally.
Funes, a talk-show host, is admired by many ordinary Salvadorans for his tough questions and for sharply criticising the Arena government on his daily public affairs programme, The Interview.
Recent polls give him leads as large as 21 percentage points over Arena's candidate, former national police chief Rodrigo Avila.
Funes portrays Arena as a bastion of out-of-touch fat cats who have enriched themselves while much of the country is in distress. During a stump speech, Funes attacked as "immoral" a new four-cent-a-minute tax on international phone calls. The issue is sensitive. More than 800,000 Salvadorans have migrated to the US but keep ties to family members back home.
Funes has tread cautiously to avoid being tagged a dogmatic left-winger in a country still deeply polarised since the war.
He says it would be financially "irresponsible" to dump the dollar, and asserts that the time is not right to seek any changes in the regional free-trade agreement with the United States.
"El Salvador needs a democratic, realistic and responsible left," Funes said during an interview in San Salvador, the capital.
Funes is more likely to model himself on Brazil's president, Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, than old guard members of the FMLN or Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez. His wife, Vanda Pignato, who is Brazilian, is a founding member of Lula's Workers' Party.
Arena supporters lump Funes with Chávez, former Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Nicaragua's president, Daniel Ortega. Conservatives say that despite Funes's moderate image, he could end up controlled by FMLN hardliners with a radical economic agenda.
"What worries me is that [the FMLN] wants to change the system: nationalise businesses, take over private businesses," said Hugo Barrera, a businessman and co-founder of Arena.
But many on the left say Funes's candidacy is itself evidence of how much the FMLN has changed since combatants traded guns for positions in the Salvadoran government. "Mauricio is an expression of the transition," said Gerson Martinez, a one-time FMLN fighter who is now a legislator.
Maria Teresa Tobar (58), who is raising an 11-year-old daughter alone, says she is considering voting for the FMLN for the first time because she cannot make ends meet on earnings from a small plot of corn and occasional work ironing clothes.
She said Arena governments have abandoned her, although she sent two sons to fight for the army during the war. "I don't trust the FMLN, but I feel alone," she said, standing at the edge of the Funes rally. "I gave my two sons to the government, and now I have nothing." - (Los Angeles Times/Washington Post service)