As I try to gain my footing in this country which is beginning to be renovated by good, unlikely, groundbreaking election news, everything familiar seems a little... changed. Because the political reality, which underlies everything here, still registers as unreal. The front desk person at our San Salvador guest house, America, is ecstatic, still running out into the street to congratulate friends and acquaintances about the left´s victory. I'm not sure how to understand it all yet - everything, everything - the orange-grey-pink sky, the birds singing, the dogs putting their heads out of gates - it all seems part of the general excitement. Maybe in some secret way it really is. I'm not sure I have ever seen so many adults eating chocobananos after work, like kids coming home from school. It may be that optimism is making me giddy, but everything seems charmed.
I have encountered a few supporters of the other party, who say rather quietly, it was a good election.... but we lost. All in all, things seem to have gone peacefully, although the evidence of election fraud is still all over the streets. Literally - on every major artery, one can see blue lines painted on the road in one direction, and green in the other - these are guides for foreign buses carrying Hondurans and Nicaraguans with fake DUI cards to the polls. Unbelievable but true - from above, one can read the map of corruption and what Mauricio´s friend charmingly called calumny, all over the major cities. In the smaller towns, groups of voters, not just efemelenistas, surrounded and held strangers with fake identity cards until the election oversight committees came to confiscate their documents. One town closed its own polls, seeing the lines of foreign voters outside the doors, until the foreign voters had been chased away. The margin between the candidates closed from around 20% a fre months ago to just 2.1% on voting day. But now the papers are full of the face of the new president, and the transition is already starting. People are cheered by the fact that Obama sent the deputy secretary of state yesterday to congratulate Funes. The mood is good here in the capital.
