Their candidate is a veteran TV broadcaster and morning talk show host, Mauricio Funes, whose Facebook page lists his political views as "other." Funes, 49, a former correspondent for CNN en Espanol, was recently recruited by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), the revolutionary group-turned-mainstream political party that is favored by polls to win the presidency in a vote scheduled for March 15.

Though the FMLN standard-bearers traditionally campaign dressed in fiery red, Funes favors a white Panama shirt, hip bluejeans and designer glasses. And while some of his FMLN stalwarts still favor rhetoric that evokes Cuba's Castro brothers, Funes considers himself to be El Salvador's Barack Obama - an agent of change in a country beset by the highest murder rate in Latin America and an economy in free fall.

The comparison is overt: Funes and the FMLN use images of Obama in their ads (despite objections by the U.S. State Department), saying both candidates were smeared by their opponents as allies of extremists. The FMLN television spots complete the link by employing the Obama slogan in English and Spanish, vowing "Yes, we can!"

"During the entire history of El Salvador, the left has never had such opportunity to win as it does now," said Jose  Raymundo Calderon Moran, a historian and dean of the University of El Salvador. "The people see a possibility for change, because one way or the other, they are demanding something different, no matter who wins."