Clinton at events in Latin America

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is trying to ease long-standing resentment of U.S. policies in Latin America by showing up this week for events that highlight Washington’s awkward history with the region.

Clinton attended the inauguration of El Salvador’s first leftist president Monday. The new leader comes from a party of a former Marxist rebel group that fought a 12-year war against successive conservative governments and a military supported by billions of dollars in aid from Washington.

On Tuesday in Honduras, Clinton planned to be at a top-level meeting of the Organization of American States that will test the Obama administration’s new openness toward Cuba.

In two days of events in El Salvador, Clinton stressed that she and President Barack Obama were committed to a “new approach to the region,” one that emphasized engagement and co- operation and not ideological battles.

“We have to build a more positive relationship,” she told employees at the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador after new Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes was sworn in.

“We have to recognize that our country is not perfect either, that some of the difficulties that we had historically in forging strong and lasting relationships in our hemisphere are a result of us perhaps not listening, perhaps not paying enough attention,” Clinton said.

Funes is a one-time journalist and member of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, which fought U.S.-backed Salvadoran regimes from 1980 to 1992. His inauguration marked the country’s first peaceful transition of power from right to left since the end of the war.

“By putting aside old conflicts and coming together in a peaceful transition of power, you have affirmed the strength and durability of your democracy,” Clinton said in a brief statement on a local radio station.

She pledged a commitment to renewed U.S. cooperation in the region.

“In El Salvador and throughout the region, we are focused not on old battles but on new partnerships that improve lives, advance democratic principles and promote the common good,” she told a meeting of regional trade and foreign ministers Sunday.