IT'S POSSIBLE to view the outcome of El Salvador's presidential election on Sunday as another lamentable victory for the Latin American leftist populism represented by Hugo Chávez. Mr. Chávez himself was quick to do so, and with some reason: His Venezuelan government has been a financial backer of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, the former guerrilla movement whose candidate, Mauricio Funes, won a narrow victory. But El Salvador's election was also a triumph for a system that Mr. Chávez has disregarded: liberal democracy. Seventeen years after the United Nations brokered a peace accord between the country's left and right -- and after four consecutive election victories by the rightist Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) -- democracy produced an inevitable and necessary alternation of power
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