El Salvador Perspectives

El Salvador's president-elect, Mauricio Funes, testified emotionally today in the trial for the murder of his son Alejandro in October 2007. The BBC reports : The president-elect of El Salvador has made an emotional statement at a trial for his son's murder in Paris. "I am a man who is not seeking vengeance... only the truth," said Mauricio Funes. He wept in court. Alejandro Funes, 27, a photography student in France, died in October 2007 from stab wounds on a pedestrian bridge near the Louvre Museum. Mohamed Amor, the main suspect, has asked the family for forgiveness. The motive of the attack is unclear.... President-elect Funes's brother was shot dead at the beginning of El Salvador's civil war in 1980 and safety had been a factor in Alejandro leaving the country, plagued by gang violence, to study in France. "We thought he would be safer here.. I would never have imagined that he would be beaten to death here," said Mr Funes, unable to stop hims...

A video essay about Mauricio Funes' victory in El Salvador is worth watching as a discussion starter. The video states that the victory of Funes and the left should be "understood as the culmination of decades of struggle against neoliberal economics and government repression." The essay starts with the inspiration of Oscar Romero and continues to portray a fairly binary view of the good forces of the left struggling against the dark forces of ARENA on the right. Ultimately it is too simplistic, and loses credibility in places, such as when the narrator seems to imply that the murder of the son of Mauricio Funes in Paris was part of political violence in El Salvador.

The comments on my recent post about the Millennium Challenge Account spun off into questions about El Salvador's health care system. These questions are important as Mauricio Funes comes into office saying he is going to increase the amount of spending on healthcare, particularly for the poor and alter the way healthcare resources are distributed. To assist in the discussion, here are some of the most recent statistics from the World Health Organization : Statistic El Salvador Americas Avg. % children dying before age 5 2.4% 1.9% Measles immunization 98% 93% Maternal mortality per 100,000 170 99 Access to improved drinking water 84% 94% Access to improved sanitation 86% 87% Life expectancy in El Salvador: 1990 - 58 years for men, 69 years for women 2000 - 67 years for men, 74 years for women 2007 - 68 years for men, 75 years for women In 2007, the average life expectancy for men in the Americas was 73 years and 78 for women. Health expenditures in El Salvador were 6.0% of gross ...

During the presidency of Tony Saca, El Salvador qualified for more than $400 million from the US Millennium Challenge Account. The funds are designated for poverty reduction in the northern zone in the country. Probably the most prominent part of the Millennium Account project is a highway improvement project running east-west through that zone: The overall project will be to rehabilitate, expand, rebuild and maintain 648km of highway, 331km of which correspond to the Longitudinal del Norte highway, which runs from the country's La Virgen border with Guatemala to its La Concepción border with Honduras, plus a total of 317km of intersecting routes. The works will be funded with US$233mn of a US$461mn donation from the US Millennium Challenge Corporation, approved for the country in June 2006 to reduce poverty in the northern zone. According to an article in the Nica Times , the Millennium project will continue in El Salvador under Funes: The MCC compact with El Salvador focuses...

Mauricio Funes paid a courtesy call on Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela today. Chavez spoke of Funes' election as a victory for the Salvadoran people. Funes thanked Chavez for Venezuela's support of El Salvador. It's worth noting that Funes visited Brazil's president Lula, whom Funes regularly cites as a model, in the first week after his election, but is only now visiting Chavez, the iconoclastic left-wing leader of Venezuela. UPDATE: There is a fuller description of Funes' trip to Venezuela in English at this link .

The US State Department has announced that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will attend the June 1 presidential inauguration of Mauricio Funes in San Salvador. Obviously her presence shows how silly were the right wing campaign ads which suggested that a Funes/FMLN victory would harm the country's relations with the US. In case you were wondering, U.S. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans and Florida Governor Jeb Bush attended the 2004 inauguration of Tony Saca.

An article from the Los Angeles Times titled El Salvador Grapples with Rising Bloodshed brings home graphically the toll of murderous violence that continues to wrack El Salvador: Whoever is doing the killing, youths are disproportionately affected. Half of homicides last year were committed by people 18 to 30, according to the National Civil Police, and 70% of victims were between the ages of 15 and 39. Nearly two decades after El Salvador's civil war, a new generation is experiencing what [Father Antonio] Rodriguez calls a naturalization of death. He says he's seen the change in his own spiritual evolution since arriving here from Spain in 2000. "Death has become natural to me. Ten years ago, this kind of thing was an inconceivable scandal to me. Now I live with death in a very natural way. If it happens to me, imagine those born into this culture. "Death made natural." Through the end of April, 1395 Salvadorans had been murdered in 2009, an average of 12 pe...