Mauricio Funes

Mauricio Funes (born October 18, 1959, San Salvador, El Salvador) Salvadoran television journalist who served as president of El Salvador (2009–14).

Early life and movement from journalism to politics

Funes was educated in Roman Catholic elementary and secondary schools before majoring in communications at the Jesuit Central American University of José Simeón Cañas (UCA). There he was greatly influenced by sociology professor Francis Miguel (“Hato”) Hasbún, a leftist activist. The violent death of Funes’s older brother, who was killed by police during a student protest in August 1980, induced Funes to leave the university before completing his degree. Yet, despite his leftist leanings, he did not join a political party or participate in the country’s ongoing guerrilla warfare. Instead, he taught literature in Catholic schools, where he emphasized audiovisual methods of communication.

In 1986 Funes became a reporter for the state educational channel, launching a highly successful career in television journalism. In 1987 he moved to Channel 12, a privately operated channel known for its news coverage, where his analytic coverage of Salvadoran politics appealed to the country’s leftist and working-class interests. He interviewed leaders of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional; FMLN)—a Salvadoran rebel group composed of Marxist guerrillas, which became an official political party in 1992—and other leftist parties, as well as leftist leaders from abroad. In 1991 Funes assisted Hasbún in developing an audiovisual centre and radio station at the UCA. Funes also was a longtime correspondent for Cable News Network (CNN) Spanish-language telecasts.

Funes’s investigative reporting for Channel 12 won him several awards, including the prestigious Maria Moors Cabot Prize for inter-American journalism in 1994. He was promoted to news director at Channel 12 in 1997, but his harsh criticism of the right-wing National Republican Alliance (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista; ARENA) government led to censorship and death threats, and in 2005 Channel 12 fired him and several other journalists. Funes continued to appear on other channels, however, and remained a national celebrity among leftists.

With Hasbún as his adviser, Funes exploited his popularity to become the FMLN candidate for the presidency in September 2007. He was the first FMLN presidential candidate who had not been a guerrilla fighter in the 1980s. In the long electoral campaign, Funes accused ARENA of doing nothing for the Salvadoran people in its nearly 20-year reign. He promised social justice, economic reform, improved standards of living, universal health care, and better access to education, housing, and pensions, as well as policies to stem rising crime and gang violence. In the election on March 15, 2009, Funes won 51.3 percent of the vote, defeating ARENA candidate Rodrigo Ávila.

Presidency

Funes began a five-year term on June 1, 2009. As president, he took a pragmatic and conciliatory tone toward the opposition. He emphasized that he was not a Marxist or even a socialist, promised that he had no interest in imposing such ideologies as systems of government in El Salvador, and pledged not to align the country’s foreign relations too closely with either Venezuela or the United States. Shortly after his inauguration, however, Funes signed a document that provided for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Cuba, which had been severed 50 years earlier. Another of Funes’s first acts as president was to announce a $600 million national emergency plan to assist poor Salvadorans; several social reforms were included in the plan.

Early in his term Funes, who was the first Salvadoran president to acknowledge the crimes against humanity committed by the government during the civil war, also sought to accelerate the process of national reconciliation by calling for investigations and arrests of military personnel suspected of having violated human rights during the war. In 2010 he formally apologized for human rights abuses committed by the state during the 1980–92 civil war and for the 1980 murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero. In 2012 he apologized for the 1981 massacre at El Mozote, in which 936 civilians were killed during an army counterinsurgency campaign.

Funes called on the army to assist police in working to reduce the crime and violence that had become endemic in El Salvador with the growth of illegal drug trafficking and street gangs (maras). In 2010 he and Mexican Pres. Felipe Calderón formed a commission to develop a strategy against drug gangs, which were believed to be primarily responsible for violence directed at Salvadorans migrating across Mexico to the United States. In 2011 Funes proposed a new tax to fund increased law enforcement as well as a controversial plan for military conscription of 5,000 potential gang members, youths between the ages of 16 and 18.

During his five-year term, Funes oversaw health care reform and initiated social welfare policies that were more moderate than those generally favoured by his party but that buoyed his popularity with the lower and middle classes. At the same time, he managed to maintain good relations with both the Salvadoran business community and the United States. A truce between the country’s two main street gangs that was brokered by Roman Catholic clerics in 2012 resulted in a significant decline in the homicide rate. In elections in March of that year, however, the FMLN lost its plurality in the 84-seat legislature, without which Funes struggled to enact programs he had promised. In 2013, as the truce between the gangs began to collapse, large numbers of Salvadorans continued to flee the violence and poverty that plagued much of the country, trekking at great peril to the United States. Funes was constitutionally prohibited from running for another term in the 2014 presidential election, which was won by Vice Pres. Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the FMLN.

Legal difficulties

In subsequent years Funes faced various scandals and legal difficulties. In early 2016 he was ordered to stand trial on civil charges relating to unexplained money in his bank account. Funes alleged political persecution, and later that year he went to Nicaragua, where he was granted asylum. In 2017 he was convicted of illicit enrichment, and the following year Salvadoran authorities issued an arrest warrant for Funes, accusing him of embezzling $292 million from the country’s mortgage bank. The former president continued to deny any wrongdoing.

During this time Funes was also implicated in a scandal concerning the 2012–13 gang truce. Officials in his government as well as others were accused of colluding with gang members and providing them with various benefits—such as transferring imprisoned gang leaders to lower-security facilities. Funes denied his administration’s involvement in the negotiations, and a 2017 trial ended in an acquittal for those charged.