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He was a popular TV journalist when elected as El Salvador’s first modern-day leftist leader in 2009, but he went into exile hounded by corruption charges.
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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.
