In June 2009, Mauricio Funes took office as El Salvador’s first leftist president. With more than 51% of the popular vote, Funes won the election as the candidate of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the political party that was once a federation of guerrilla armies that fought the Salvadoran state to a bitter stalemate in the 1980s. María’s Story, a documentary filmed 20 years before Funes’s historic election, records a nationwide military and political offensive undertaken by the FMLN in late 1988 and 1989. The documentary continues to inspire audiences to discuss U.S. foreign policy, the reality of war, gender politics, and shared values of what constitutes justice and basic human rights.

This article originally appeared in the September/October 2010 edition of NACLA Report on the Americas.