The Salvadoran opposition leader, who will probably the next president.

SAN SALVADOR - The signs. The slogans. The incessent TV commercials. It could be any other election in any other raging democracy. But take a closer look, and the similarities to the recently concluded American elections get too obvious to ignore.

For the last couple of decades, power in El Salvador has been held by the right wing ARENA party. But they’ve sunk to new lows of unpopularity, and the leftist opposition smells blood.

Mauricio Funes, the presidential candidate for the leftist FMLN party, is crushing ARENA’s Rodrigo Ávila in the polls. He seems to have enthusiasm and young people on his side.

Ávila, like McCain, evidently realizes he’s in trouble, because he’s running commercials on the theme of, wait for it, change! Apparently, the new party line is that only ARENA can clean up the mess that ARENA made.

But did he have to parrot the McCain camp to the point of accusing their opponents of palling around with terrorists? There it was last night: A commercial featuring a picture of Mauricio and rebel insurgents from the civil war. Then the obligatory shots of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. McCain ran an anti-Obama ad with Chávez as well. Ávila doesn’t even have much hair to speak of.

All we need here is a controversial religious figure saying bizzare things.

As for Funes, the words “hope” and “change” are also his two favorites, and figure prominently on the FMLN Web site. One political infomercial interposes the faces of Funes and Obama, saying that the Americans already have their dream president, and we can too.

But if Ávila is McCain, it’s not clear that Funes is Obama. The other day I talked to a tour guide organizer who had nothing good to say about the current government. Normally, he would be an easy opposition vote, but he was pretty wary of the leftists as well. It’s a sentiment I’ve heard from others who fear they’re just going to trade one bad government for another.

And while one physics teacher I spoke with assured me that Funes is more moderate that your typical nutjob Latin American leftist president, it’s easy to see why people in this neighborhood would be fearful. Leftists in this region have a reputation for helping the common people with programs (Cuba’s high literacy rate, Venezuela’s excellent health care access) but also for closing up their countries in ways that hurt everyone. Abandoning free market principles, doing dictatorial things and pissing off that big rich cantankerous country north of Mexico - it plays well to the base, but it doesn’t help attract badly needed hard currency or intellectual capital.

Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, for instance, has made sure that American tourists have to go through the same ownerous and expensive entry visa requirements as Bolivians trying to enter the United States. Fair is fair, but try telling that to the people who work in the Bolivian tourist industry. Or rather, used to work.

Complicating matters immensely is that El Salvador concluded a bloody civil war not even 20 years ago. Today, the ARENA and FLMN are basically the political manifestations of the two sides in that war.

Memories are long, wounds are probably not healed, and when you have a political shakeup in this sort of environment, there’s reason to be nervous, and to put Jimmy Carter on your speed-dial.