This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 9, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Elections in El Salvador next week will carry with them high stakes.

Voters may elect a government with great admiration for the policies

of Hugo Chavez that would turn Al Salvador away from market-based reforms.

Juan Carlos Idongo is Project Coordinator for Latin America at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

Since the end of the Civil War in 1992, a very bloody civil war between the government and Marsis guerrillas that

cost of the life of 70,000 Salvadorans.

The Sabador has been very successful in his adoption of democracy and in terms of stability.

Since 1990, the party party the country has been governed by a party arena, a right-wing party that has implemented a very comprehensive set of free market reforms, perhaps the most liberalizing reforms in Latin

America after Chile. They privatize Social Security, they reprivatize

the financial sector that have been nationalized during the war. They liberalize key

sectors of the economy like telecommunications, fuel, energy.

They adopted the US dollar as the official currency and they also liberalized trade and one of the main prizes of the trade agenda has been a kaffa which actually turned three years old in Salvador this month.

So the country has, since the end of the Civil War,

thanks to these market reforms experience,

very dramatic improvements in social indicators.

Poverty went down from 60% in 1991 to 34% in 2007.

People with access to drinking water has been,

I mean without access to drinking water has been half, enrollment rates in schools have increased dramatically.

So the country has been quite a success story of market reforms in a trouble area like Central America.

The party that is leading the polls has not renounced its Marxist ties and has spoken openly

about trying to emulate what's going on in Venezuela, a country that has unprivatized

...