El Salvador Perspectives

Almost 100 US State Department cables from the US Embassy in San Salvador have now been  published on the website of El Faro.   The collection of cables from WikiLeaks offers a behind-the-scenes look at US diplomacy and assessment of its tiny ally in Central America.   Most of the cables come from the time of the administration of Tony Saca, but there are some more recent cables during the Funes administration.

WikiLeaks has provided some 942 US diplomatic cables related to El Salvador to the online periodical El Faro . The cables cover the time period from 2003 through 2008 under the Bush administration in Washington and the Flores and Saca administrations in El Salvador. El Faro has now started to make those cables available online on its website . The leaked cables provide an inside look at the US-El Salvador relationship, and highlight a US administration which believed it had found a very close ally in the ARENA led governments of those years. I'll highlight some of the individual cables in future posts. The WikiLeaks project represents yet another coup for the independent journalists at El Faro . Other cables from the US Embassy in El Salvador dated in 2009 and 2010 were released several months ago.

As US State Department cables continue to come into the public domain via WikiLeaks , five cables have recently been published by the Spanish paper El Pais coming from the US Embassy in San Salvador.  The cables are reports back to Washington on current events and the political environment in El Salvador in 2009 and 2010. The cables are all written by Robert Blau , who as Charge d'Affaires was the senior US official in the Embassy prior to the arrival of current US ambassador Aponte. His clearly-written cables give an insight, not usually available, into the issues the US finds of importance in El Salvador. Robert Blau and Mauricio Funes with their wives on the night  of Funes' election as president of El Salvador A regular theme is the tension between president Mauricio Funes and the FMLN.  The first cable disclosed came only a few months into the presidency of Funes, and describes a conversation with someone close to Funes expressing concerns about security an...