Database Encoding Issues

Sorry if this question has been already answered, I searched for a similar thread but to no avail.
I’m currently making a custom theme based on Twenty Ten. My main page shows a slideshow with the 5 latest posts of a certain category. To do that, I simply used php code to query the wordpress database. So far so good. However, the page is in spanish, and I’m having trouble with certain characters which aren’t shown properly. Examples are any accented letter (á, é, í, etc.) and ñ or Ñ. I suspected an encoding problem: the encoding field in the database says utf8_general_ci … I tried changing the charset in the meta tag in the header but nothing. Then it hit me: WordPress uses the same database and has no problem with said characters (the posts are displayed fine, the problem arises when I query the database and try to print any field)! So my question is: how does wordpress handle these special characters, and how can I mimic this “handling” so they are properly shown?

Here is an code example:

<?php
$link = mysql_connect("localhost", "my_db_name","my_password");
mysql_select_db("darugby_wpress", $link);
$sql = " SELECT p.post_title as title, p.guid as hlink, p.post_date as pdate, p.post_content as content\n"
    . "FROM wp_posts as p INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships as l ON p.ID = l.object_id\n"
    . "WHERE p.post_type = \"post\" AND (l.term_taxonomy_id = 1 OR l.term_taxonomy_id = 4 )\n"
    . "ORDER BY pdate Desc LIMIT 0, 5 ";
$result = mysql_query($sql);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)){

echo $row["title"];

}
?>

The output of this code will show the last titles corresponding to categories 1 or 4, however any of the problematic characters will be shown wrong.

Thanks in advance!