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At exactly 8:05 Sunday morning, Jorge Alvarenga cast the first vote in Tenancingo for president of El Salvador. At the moment he marked his ballot, a guerrilla bomb shook the town, and Roman Catholics attending Palm Sunday Mass across the square began singing, "We are the children of God."
It may have appeared a chaotic time, but the 67-year-old peasant was not deterred from his duty.
Casting his vote, he said, was what he had to do to keep "something bad from happening."
End to Violence, Terror
That "something" is the return of the violence and terror that have left this town's 1,000 residents fearful of the guerrillas and resentful of the Salvadoran military.
Tenancingo sits in a valley at the end of a rutted dirt road eight miles from the nearest other settlement and in the center of an area that has been the site of almost constant fighting since the country's civil war broke out nine years ago.
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