Mauricio Funes, a former president of El Salvador and a one-time television journalist who fled to Nicaragua to escape corruption investigations, died there on Jan. 21, in Managua. He was 65.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by Nicaragua’s health ministry, which attributed his death only to “a grave chronic illness.” El Faro, a Costa Rica-based, El Salvador-centered news website, said Mr. Funes had been hospitalized after a heart attack on Jan. 8.
Mr. Funes was considered a fresh start for his war-battered country when, pledging to tackle endemic crime and poverty, he was elected as El Salvador’s first modern-day leftist president in 2009.
But by the time he fled for Nicaragua in 2016, two years after leaving office, Salvadoran prosecutors were looking into the embezzlement of some $351 million in state funds on his watch.
In May 2023, he was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 14 years in prison for allowing the country’s criminal gangs, the so-called Maras, to “strengthen their financial and territorial grip, in exchange for a reduction in the murder rate,” according to El Salvador’s public prosecutor. Shortly afterward, Mr. Funes was sentenced to six more years for evading $85,000 in taxes.
A year later, in June 2024, he was given an additional eight-year prison sentence for awarding a construction contract for a bridge to a Guatemalan company in exchange for a private plane. He was under five different investigations at his death.
The stolen money fueled a lavish lifestyle: a fleet of 15 vehicles, 92 firearms and “dozens of watches from high-end brands such as Rolex, Patek Philippe and Cartier,” El Faro reported, adding that it had also verified purchases of jewelry, clothing and vacations to Disney World.
“The evidence is massive regarding his behavior,” Ludovico Feoli, director of the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research at Tulane University, said in an interview. “It’s sort of tragic. The moral of the story is that he had the potential to really make a difference. He showed that the left could be as corrupt as the right.”
Mr. Funes insisted that his flight to Nicaragua, and the subsequent granting of citizenship to him by its president, Daniel Ortega, in 2019, did not constitute an evasion of justice. He considered himself a victim of a “selective and fraudulent justice,” he told an interviewer in October.
His exile had nonetheless been a steep fall for Mr. Funes, who had been a star of El Salvador’s media and had used his television celebrity to vault to his troubled country’s presidency. As a broadcast journalist, he angered the country’s far-right, U.S.-supported government with his sharp coverage of the Salvadoran civil war, which lasted from 1979 to 1992 and killed some 70,000 people.
The government was supported by the country’s oligarchs in its fight against leftist rebels, a conflict fueled by El Salvador’s longstanding economic inequality. Mr. Funes was sympathetic to the left. A United Nations-backed commission later found that 85 percent of the violence was committed by government forces.
Mr. Funes’s downfall “contributed to the discredit of the political parties” in El Salvador, Mr. Feoli, of Tulane, said.
“If you look at what’s happened since, it’s hard not to draw a line between that behavior and the rise of Bukele,” he added, referring Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s current, far-right populist president who is admired by President Trump. Mr. Bukele has imprisoned tens of thousands of Salvadorans, most without trial.
Mr. Funes was a correspondent for CNN in El Salvador from 1991 to 2007. In 1994, he was awarded Columbia University’s Maria Moors Cabot Prize for journalism. Fired by the Mexican-owned Canal 12 station in 2005 for his independent style of reporting, he began preparing for a career in politics two years later, becoming the candidate in 2007 of a leftist coalition that included the historic revolutionary party the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN).
He won the 2009 election for a five-year term with nearly 52 percent of the vote, defeating the far-right party Arena after its two decades in power and promising reconciliation.
But by 2011, on the occasion of a visit by President Barack Obama, the country was still beset by gang violence, including killings. “The answer is not the prison state, but the social state, whose benefits will reach all sectors of society, ” he told the Paris newspaper Le Monde. Speaking of the gangs, he added, “Repression, yes, but also and above all prevention.”
In a country where remittances from citizens abroad made up a substantial share of the national economy, he told Le Monde, the “obligation of the Salvadoran state was to insure education and health for all, offering possibilities for people to stay here.”
In his first years in office, he partly delivered on his promises, providing school supplies and uniforms, building hospitals and reducing the price of medicine. He made conciliatory speeches, apologizing for the right-wing government’s massacres of civilians during the civil war and, in 2010, for the assassination in 1980 of Archbishop Óscar Romero, a fierce critic of that regime.
But Mr. Funes soon fell victim to the vice that habitually afflicts his country’s leaders, according to El Salvador’s prosecutors: corruption. In one month, his credit card spending equaled what he had previously earned in a year, $41,000, according to El Faro. And whatever negotiations he conducted with gangs were ineffectual. By 2015, killings had reached a rate of 100 per 100,000 people, the highest in Central America.
Carlos Mauricio Funes Cartagena was born in San Salvador, the capital, on Oct. 18, 1959, a son of Roberto Funes, an accountant, and Maria Mirna Cartagena, a secretary. He attended secondary school at the Colegio Externado San José in San Salvador, where he later became a teacher, and studied at the Universidad Centroamericana Jose Simeon Canas, also in the capital, but did not graduate.
Mr. Funes became a television reporter for El Salvador’s educational channel in 1986. A year later, he went to work for the private Canal 12, where he covered politics, earning a reputation for his interviews with leftist leaders and crusading investigative journalism. A wide following helped attract the attention of FMLN officials.
His marriage to Vanda Pignato ended in divorce in 2014. His survivors include his sons, Carlos, Diego and Gabriel; and a brother, Guillermo Funes Cartagena.
Mr. Funes’s fall from grace perplexed many of those who knew him.
“Over the years I have spoken to some of his closest officials,” the Salvadoran political journalist Oscar Martinez wrote after Mr. Funes’s death, “and when I explored the question of what happened to the great political promise of the postwar period, the answer was as disappointing as the plunder: he was blinded by luxury, vice and waste.”
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