San Salvador, El Salvador  - Mauricio Funes, the leftist presidential candidate in Sunday's El Salvadoran presidential election, knows he will be facing the "myths and fears" about leftist governments in the war-torn Central American country.

In what opinion polls frame as a very close election, Funes seeks to defeat the ruling-party candidate, Rodrigo Avila, in an effort to put an end to a 20-year rule by the right-wing party ARENA.

In an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa, Funes, 49, a former television journalist, insisted that he is politically closer to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva than to firebrand Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

"(Lula) has managed to destroy the myths and fears of businessmen towards the left, and he is turning Brazil into one of the most dynamic and competitive economies on the continent, and he is substantially reducing poverty and the social gap," Funes said.

Likewise, Funes ruled out confrontation with Washington - a centrepiece of Chavez's foreign policies - and instead advocated a "policy of mutual understanding and of alliances" with new US President Barack Obama, himself a centre-left politician.

"I have to be sensible and realistic. The United States is of crucial importance for the fate of El Salvador," Funes said. "It would be foolish on my part to think that I am going to have a policy against President Obama."

The United States buys 60 per cent of El Salvador's exports. Some 2.3 million Salvadorans - nearly 27 per cent of the population of El Salvador - live in the US, many working illegally and in constant jeopardy of deportation.

Funes plans to ask Obama to guarantee "the stability of migrants," because El Salvador is not in a position to give work to those who are deported.

"We cannot receive them from one day to the next," Funes said.

At home, the candidate of the former guerrilla Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN) says he seeks no revolution.

"I am not advocating an interventionist state but a regulating state that ensures competition in the country, respect for institutions, respect for private property, guarantees for legal security and above all physical safety" he said.

"Foreign investors do not have to fear confiscations of assets or a reversal of privatization processes or an end to dollarization or to the trade agreements that have been signed so far. We have to send out a message of certainty."

The former CNN correspondent is the first FMLN presidential candidate without a past in the guerrilla forces that fought in the 1980-92 civil war, which claimed 75,000 lives.

"Whoever keeps saying that the FMLN is a party of the extreme left does not know the historic evolution it has undergone," Funes said.

Change is vital for the country's future, too, he said, calling a leftist government "a historic need" in El Salvador.

"If a right-wing government persists, the country is heading for disaster," Funes said.

"Nothing bad is going to happen. A sensible government team is going to arrive and is going to start doing what the right has not done over the course of these 20 years." (dpa)