EL SALVADOR: MAURICIO FUNES CHARTS INDEPENDENT COURSE DURING FIRST YEAR AS PRESIDENT.
By Benjamin Witte-Lebhar
Expecting to end his first year on the job with a celebratory bash, Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes instead marked the milestone in full crisis mode, declaring a state of emergency on May 30 as Tropical Storm Agatha lashed the Central America isthmus.
The first named storm of the season, Agatha killed 10 in El Salvador, provoked some 140 landslides, and forced the evacuation of approximately 11,000 people, Salvadoran officials reported. The deluge was far deadlier in neighboring Guatemala, where it left some 250 dead or missing (see other article in this edition of NotiCen). Lives and property were lost in Honduras as well.
The storm marked a dramatic and certainly unexpected end to Funes' inaugural year. Not only did it rain on his proverbial parade (Funes had planned to hold a music-filled anniversary rally in El Salvador), but it also left the president with an estimated US$20 million in infrastructure damage to contend with. Still, observers say that, while the Salvadoran president's first year may have ended on a damp note, it was hardly a wash.
The presidency began with a bang. Funes, a former television journalist, made history in March 2009 by narrowly winning the presidency for the leftist Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), a party that originated during El Salvador's 1980-1992 civil war as a coalition of revolutionary guerilla organizations (see NotiCen, 2009-03-19). He was sworn in less than three months later, becoming El Salvador's first leftist president and unseating the conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) party, which had dominated Salvadoran politics for two decades (see NotiCen, 2009-06-04).
A full year into his presidency, the 50-year-old Funes remains a popular figure. Respondents in a recent poll by the Universidad Centroamericana's Instituto Universitario de Opinión Pública (IUDOP) gave the president a grade of 6.8 out of 10, down somewhat from the 7.16 score he earned last September but still a sign of continued support. Figures released in April by the polling firm Mitofsky put Funes' approval rating at 83%, the highest of any Latin America leader.
Analysts like Peter Hakim of the Washington, DC-based think tank Inter-American Dialogue suggest Funes owes his continued popularity--both in and outside El Salvador--to his independent "style" of politics. Despite running on an FMLN ticket, Funes has distanced himself from El Salvador's far left, instead pursuing moderate policies that place him between the country's political extremes.
