Mauricio Funes, El Salvador's president, vows to end poverty

Officially, 40 percent of El Salvador's 5.7 million people live in poverty, while 8 percent are unemployed and 43 percent are underemployed, mainly surviving as street vendors.

At his inaugural ceremony, the first-ever left-wing president of El Salvador, Mauricio Funes, said his main goal is to “beat poverty, political backwardness, the marginalization of broad sections of society, desperation, and the lack of future prospects for our young people.”

His insurgency-turned-political party Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) will invest $474 million over the next 18 months to directly generate 100,000 jobs, the new president announced.

President Funes received a two-minute standing ovation when he arrived at the convention center where his June 1 swearing-in ceremony was held, attended by 72 foreign delegations and 4,000 special guests, including Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The veteran TV broadcaster who took 52 percent of the vote in the March elections said the right-wing ARENA, which had ruled El Salvador since 1989, “governed for the few” and had been “complacent towards corruption, due to fear of—and complicity with—organized crime.”

“I guarantee that the new government will not be about family privileges, cronyism or shady patronage,” said President Funes, who had 82 percent support in the latest survey carried out in late May by the University Institute of Public Opinion at the Central American University in San Salvador.

Mr. Funes, considered a moderate leftist, was joined by 12 Latin American heads of state and other international leaders and personalities.

He also pledged to improve infrastructure and basic services, build and repair 25,000 low-income housing units in urban areas, and implement a plan to fight malnutrition, targeting 85,000 children under the age of three.

Mr. Funes was accompanied in El Salvador by his wife Vanda Pignato, a Brazilian-born lawyer who once represented the leftist Workers' Party of Brazilian President Lula—a friend of the new president and the first lady.

El Salvador's 1980-1992 civil war between the FMLN, then a militia coalition, and government forces had left 75,000 mainly civilians dead, 8,000 “disappeared,” or missing, and 40,000 disabled, at the hands of the military and far-right death squads that had U.S. support.

Major Roberto D'Aubuisson, who founded ARENA, was the leader of the death squads since the late 1970s.

The FMLN had failed in its previous three attempts at the presidency since it became a political party following the 1992 peace agreement that put an end to the 12-year war.

Mr. Funes is taking over a country in crisis, with a budget deficit of at least $500 million, which could balloon by the end of this year to $1.2 billion, equivalent to one-third of the national budget of $3.6 billion.

Officially, 40 percent of El Salvador's 5.7 million people live in poverty, while 8 percent are unemployed and 43 percent are underemployed, mainly surviving as street vendors.

This Central American nation is also the most violent in Latin America, with a homicide rate of 61 per 100,000 people—one of the highest in the world, according to the latest official figures.

Source: IPS 19/06/2009

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