El Salvador ? 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, Mauricio Funes, on 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.

Today 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 repeatedly stressed that she and President Barack Obama were committed to a “new approach to the region,” one that emphasized engagement and cooperation and not ideological battles.

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.