Funes! Funes! Funes!

Presidential elections have come and gone, and the left is in power in El Salvador for the first time...ever.

The winner was announced Sunday night, while most of my community was outside my house running from young men wearing fake bulls made out of something -- chicken wire? -- and throwing firecrackers everywhere, including on my porch. So I guess you could say I experienced election day violence.

But really, I was surprised at how calm everything was. At first I thought that was just because my site is mostly right-wing and very tranquilo, and nothing crazy would happen there. The only (rather hilarious) demonstration I saw was late Sunday night, when all was quiet and I was brushing my teeth, and a pickup sped by with one solitary man in the bed screaming "Funes! Funes! Funes!" at the top of his lungs.

I've learned there weren't big problems pretty much anywhere, and I'm very glad that a country most foreigners know as the site of a brutal civil war can keep its cool when "the party of the guerillas" finally wins the presidency.

I'm not allowed to express a political preference, and honestly, I don't know enough about Salvadoran politics to have one. But I will say that, for me, a lot about this election is pleasantly surprising. The right-wing party completely controls the media and ran attack ads on TV and the radio literally four times a minute ever since I got here in September. In the face of that, I didn't think there's any way the FMLN, the liberals, could win, whether they deserved to or not. Especially because we tend to think of Salvadorans as not politically sophisticated, and they, especially the ones in my site, seemed to take attack ads at face value.

Maybe Mauricio Funes really is bad for El Salvador. But I'm glad that the Salvadorans who support him proved me wrong and didn't succumb to a media blitz. And I'm happy that, for once, the party that has all the money and controls all the media didn't win. Because that doesn't even happen in the USA, the supposed model for every good democracy.

The right-wingers in my site are nervous because the FMLN has never governed and they don't know what will happen. I see the sense in that. I guess we'll all just have to wait and see.

In other news, the dance my youth group wanted to have is going on after all, and it's tonight. The group decided this at 2 a.m. Saturday night and didn't inform me until Monday night. Which basically gave us a day to prepare. This is apparently standard Salvadoran practice. Now we'll see how many people show up. I myself am taking tickets at the door so I don't have to dance to cumbia music, which bores me, especially since I'm terrible at the steps.

So times are still interesting. Paz y amor.