El Salvador's softened rebels see chance of power

By Catherine Bremer

SUCHITOTO, El Salvador (Reuters) - Belky Hernandez was three days old when U.S.-backed government troops shot dead her mother, a Marxist guerrilla, in a forest in war-ravaged El Salvador. Her father, also a rebel, was already dead.

Seventeen years later, she runs a stall selling civil war memorabilia and mementos of Cold War revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Alongside them, she now sells campaign T-shirts for Mauricio Funes, the man she hopes will heal old wounds by bringing a party of softened former rebels to power for the first time in presidential elections in March.

Funes, a bespectacled former TV journalist is the first presidential candidate fielded by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front who is not himself a former guerrilla. An eloquent centre-leftist, he reported on El Salvador's 12-year civil war but never fought in it.

Leading in opinion polls, Funes promises to pursue market-friendly policies and get on well with Washington if he wins. He appeals to pro-U.S. voters who never before supported the FMLN, while maintaining strong support from long-time loyalists like Hernandez.

"We remember what they fought for. Before, the war was in the streets and now it's inside us," Hernandez said in the former FMLN rebel stronghold town of Suchitoto, ringed by forest where her parents and hundreds of others died.

Since the war ended with 1992 peace accords, the FMLN has lost three presidential elections to the right-wing and pro-U.S. Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA.

Yet as it has moved closer to the political centre, the FMLN has become the largest party in the national assembly and some voters more concerned about poverty than ideology feel it is time to give it a chance in power.

"You feel you can trust Funes because he's a civilian and he was never in politics until now," said 83-year-old building site labourer Jose Amaya at a Funes rally in San Salvador.