By Tom Gibb BBC News, San Salvador

Up to 100,000 turned out for Schafik Handal's burial

Mr Handal, a former top commander of El Salvador's left-wing FMLN guerrillas, died on Tuesday of a heart attack.

Delegations came from across Latin America for the funeral.

The crowd, perhaps the largest gathering in El Salvador in 25 years, chanted revolutionary slogans as they followed Mr Handal's coffin.

The red shirts of the former guerrillas filled San Salvador's central square where the funeral mass was held, as well as the surrounding streets.

Schafik Handal was the main leader of the political party formed by El Salvador's left-wing guerrillas at the end of the civil war in 1992.

During the war he was a top guerrilla top commander, for 12 years defying the largest US-led counter-insurgency effort since Vietnam.

Before that he was a veteran of decades of clandestine struggle against one of Latin America's most brutal military dictatorships, suffering imprisonment and exile.

This, San Salvador's deputy archbishop Monsignor Rosa Chavez told the crowd, was his most important contribution.

He said Mr Handal had himself wanted to be remembered as a fighter for democracy in his country, whose struggle to get the people of El Salvador the right to choose for themselves.