News stories by Edgardo Ayala, page 15

Two years into his term, El Salvador's first-ever leftwing president, Mauricio Funes, finds himself more and more distanced from the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) that brought him to power and from the promises of change that got him elected, analysts say.

The mere rumour that El Salvador's Supreme Court (CSJ) might be thinking of repealing the amnesty law was enough to trigger an institutional crisis in this country, showing how fragile its recovery is from the wounds left by the 1980-1992 civil war.

Activists and experts on education flatly reject a proposal by the leftwing government of Mauricio Funes to bring back compulsory military service, for young people at risk of being recruited by youth gangs and organised crime.

Manuel Navarrete fiddles with the buttons and adjusts the volume on the control panel at the Radio Victoria community radio station in northern El Salvador, while he reads over the microphone the latest communiqué in which social organisations express their solidarity with the station's journalists, who have received death threats.

Zigzagging along the streets of the Salvadoran capital in his bus, José Nuila is much more worried about avoiding an attack by youth gang members than about making his way through the complicated tangle of traffic.

Salvadorans who were transferred to Honduran jurisdiction following an international court decision in 1992, which settled a long-running border dispute between the two countries, are still calling for implementation of social and economic development projects needed to conquer poverty.

For the third time in 10 years, small-scale fishers in El Salvador are trying to get Congress to modify the country's fishing law, to create a five-mile exclusion zone along the coast where the industrial fleet would be banned from fishing.

Juan Antonio Gallegos sells Mexican tortillas in Cuscatlán Park in the capital of El Salvador. Like other street vendors who work in the area, he has one thing on his mind these days: how to resist the imminent eviction that forms part of the city's government's urban renewal plan.

Every night at 1:00 AM, Julio César Amaya gets up to turn on the faucet, because it is the only time that there is piped water in his neighbourhood - the poor district of San José, in the city of Soyapango, one hour east of the capital of El Salvador.

Two initiatives of the administration of President Mauricio Funes in El Salvador, aimed at increasing competition in the pharmaceutical industry in order to bring down the cost of medicines, are being fought by the opposition in Congress.