San Salvador, November 9 (teleSUR-RHC)-- The governing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) concluded its first congress on Sunday with a strong commitment to advance its struggles against inequality, exclusion, and neo-liberalism.

The President of El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly, and FMLN leader, Lorena Pena told Prensa Latina that the party, now in power, needed to update its objectives.  The FMLN used to have a grassroots revolutionary war strategy until signing peace agreements in 1992.  It then turned to electoral political activities, which a focus on the ballot box.

“Now that we are in government, we have to greatly transform things and guarantee a complete change in the correlation of forces and of people’s consciousness … and defeat neo-liberal ideology that causes so much damage to the country,” Lorena Pena said.

The party’s congress got underway on Friday, some 35 years after it was founded.  Over 1,800 delegates participated.  In July, the party held 303 assemblies nationwide, with 10,627 participants, as the first in a series of debates leading up to the congress.

Mauricio Funes of the FMLN was elected president in 2009, after defeating two decades of right-wing rule.  Long time leader of the FMLN, Salvador Sanchez then won the 2014 elections.