The FMLN ticket is headed by Mauricio Funes, left, a onetime television reporter who has compared himself to Barack Obama as an agent of change. The governing Arena's candidate, Rodrigo Avila, is a former police commander who warns that a leftist victory would align El Salvador perilously with Cuba and Venezuela.

Either the right-wing government will retain power or a leftist will rule for the first time in the nation's history.

By Tracy Wilkinson

REPORTING FROM SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR — Salvadorans voted in large numbers today in a tense election that will either retain the right-wing party that has ruled for two decades or put a leftist in the presidency for the first time in this nation's history.

Seventeen years after peace accords ended El Salvador's fratricidal civil war, former guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (or FMLN) were posing their most successful challenge yet to conservative rule. But the governing Arena party enjoys the backing of major media and big business, and in its closing days the race was too close to call.

Turnout was heavy early today. Walking, riding in dark-windowed SUVs or piled in the back of pickup trucks, Salvadorans were surging to polling stations. Buses festooned with the flags of one party or another clogged streets here in the capital in noisy but relatively calm voting.

Arena's candidate, Rodrigo Avila, is a former police commander who warns that a leftist victory would align El Salvador perilously with Cuba and Venezuela.

The FMLN ticket is headed by Mauricio Funes, a onetime television reporter who has compared himself to Barack Obama as an agent of change. A political moderate, Funes has enabled the erstwhile guerrilla coalition to expand its support significantly beyond its traditional militant base.

Thousands of Salvadorans returned to their homeland from the United States to vote, including Tere Torres and her two adult sons from Los Angeles, who flew into town Saturday and were up at dawn to head to the fairgrounds to vote.

"It was worth making the trip so that we don't forget why people like us left in the first place," said William Torres, 24, who works in graphic design in Los Angeles. "The economic situation is really bad and people need to know they have opportunity based not just on privilege and what party you belong to."

His mother, who left El Salvador while the war raged and who cleans houses in Culver City, said the election this year was too important to skip. "It could be that the change we wanted for so long is possible this time," she said.

El Salvador remains a country divided by great social and economic inequity, with a vast poor underclass struggling to afford basic food and medicine.

But dramatic change is exactly what scares other voters.

"What do we need a revolution for?" asked Alex Aviles, 18, a first-time voter and law student, dressed in a red-white-and-blue Arena T-shirt. "People don't have money because they don't work."

Maria del Rosario Martinez, who owns a small seafood business, said she feared an FMLN government would pattern itself after Venezuela under Hugo Chavez. She had come to vote accompanied by her daughter, son and 3-year-old grandson.

"I voted for Arena, obviously, because we want to keep living in liberty," she said.

wilkinson@latimes.com