President Mauricio Funes of El Salvador interviewed by Al Jazeera

As usual, the excellent Tim's El Salvador Blog brings us a headsup to good content about his subject of choice. Here's a great interview with President Mauricio Funes by Al Jazeera (the news media we've extolled at IKN for years due to its strong regional coverage).

Take 24 minutes out and watch this one. Well worth it.

El Salvador, Funes, the election

Just a short note and nod to yesterday's vote, as I continue to bow to the real experts on the country.

Congratulations to Mauricio Funes and the FMLN party. Do a good job for your country, man. That out the way, personally speaking the most important thing to note is the free and fair nature of yesterday's elections. There were a few incidents reported on either side but for the most part things were as a democratic vote should be. Also kudos to the loser, Avila, who recognized defeat in a mature way and vowed to be a 'constructive opposition'.

All this is good in a land of infamously chequered modern political history and if memory serves the highest murder rates per capita out there (though I'll gladly hear corrections on that one).

El Salvador: The Presidential election

Avila and Funes
(photo shamelessly stolen from TESB)

16:10 San Salvador time, just fifty minutes left before polls close. The excellent, knowledgeable and objective Tim's El Salvador Blog has been liveblogging events all day and is sure to be right on the ball with exit polls, results etc as they happen. So go there, don't stay here. Here's his link again.

El Salvador's Presidential Election, March 15th 2009

Next weekend sees the presidential election showdown in El Salvador between the right-leaning Rodrigo Ávila of the ARENA party and the left-leaning Mauricio Funes of the FMLN party.

If the subject interests you, don't get your bias from that awful O'Grady woman and don't get it from the more respectable but still clearly biased UpsideDownWorld, either. As far as I'm concerned about the best place to watch proceedings is via an independent and experienced voice on El Salvador who follows the country's politics closely and has such a good reputation there that he's been an invited neutral observer on previous country elections.

So Tim's El Salvador Blog is the place for me. He's been blogging regularly already (the campaigns, the reactions, the collection of widely different opinion polls etc) and we're bound to get plenty more insight from Tim in the lead-up and the aftermath to March 15th. A highly recommended source of information. Here's the link to his blog again just to make sure.