Facing “chronic illness,” former Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes has died in a dictatorship. He made his name decades ago as a famous television journalist, characterized by incisive and uncomfortable interviews of politicians, and went on to win the presidency under the red banner of the ex-guerrilla in 2009, breaking the right-wing hegemony of the country’s post-war period. After a five-year term characterized by personal scandals, looting of public coffers to bankroll an opulent lifestyle, and a pact with gangs to reduce homicides, Funes fled to the Nicaragua of dictator Daniel Ortega, who in 2016 granted him asylum and, in 2019, citizenship.
Funes never acknowledged his crimes, always claiming that he was the target of political persecution — despite the fact that when he fled the country his own party held the presidency. From abroad, he received payments from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Nicaraguan tyranny and had a penchant for giving airy political opinions on social media. Turned into taboo by his own party, with a disastrous public image in El Salvador, under abundant evidence of having plundered the state coffers for his personal interest and that of his family, the politician who inaugurated ideological pluralism in the Salvadoran presidency, and who at his inauguration said: “we have no right to make a mistake”, has died under the protection of Daniel Ortega, a dictatorship still hoisting the insignia of a Left from last century, one that has imprisoned, assassinated, expelled, and banished thousands of Nicaraguans.
According to a press release from the Nicaraguan Ministry of Health, Carlos Mauricio Funes Cartagena died at the age of 65 in a Nicaraguan public hospital of a “serious chronic ailment” at 9:35 p.m. on Jan. 21, 2025, after being assisted at the request of his relatives “with the sacrament of extreme unction”, performed by Father Antonio Castro Granados. Sources close to the former president confirmed to El Faro that Funes suffered a heart attack and had been hospitalized since January 8. He is survived in Nicaragua by his sons Carlos and Diego Funes, who have also received asylum and are implicated in two judicial cases. His ex-partner, Michelle Guzmán, mother of the last of his children, still a minor, accompanied him during his hospitalization. In El Salvador he leaves behind a son and a daughter.
A Fleeting and Historic Step
Funes became president after a prodigious and long career of 21 years in journalism. He won the oldest distinction in the profession, and one of the most prestigious in the world, the Maria Moors Cabot Award in 1994, given by Columbia University. He scathingly interviewed every president of El Salvador’s nascent democracy. He was a national television interviewer on Channel 12 and a CNN correspondent, covered the Salvadoran civil war for state-owned Channel 10 and YSUCA radio, and during his television years at Channel 12 interviewed political figures such as Lula Da Silva, César Gaviria, Hugo Chávez, and Fidel Castro.
In a 2004 interview with El Faro, Funes revealed his interest in entering politics to seek the presidential candidacy of the country’s main leftist party, the FMLN.
His work at Channel 12 ended in February 2005 when management, in the hands of the Mexican company As Media, interrupted the transmission of his interview and opinion program Al Día as Funes denounced the dismissal of five of his employees. He was then fired. Two years earlier, in 2003, on Funes’ program Sin Censura on the same channel, he had been taken off the air due to his strong criticism of the conservative administration after the earthquakes of 2001. It would later be demonstrated that the right-wing government of Francisco Flores diverted millions of dollars of aid for the victims to the coffers of the Arena party. The international press condemned the censorship against Funes. After those turbulent years, Funes launched his own political project.
At this point in his life, Funes paid his bank debts for vehicles and housing like any middle-class Salvadoran: in long installments and with a direct discount order to his salary.
In 2007, he finally realized his political aspirations and began his presidential campaign as the candidate of a coalition of leftist parties led by the FMLN. He focused his campaign on promises to combat the entrenched corruption of 20 years of Arena governments, preaching an ethical revolution.
Locked in a power struggle with the historic leadership of the party, he created around himseld a new sui generis influence group that called itself “Los Amigos de Mauricio” (Mauricio's Friends): Businessman and coffee grower Miguel Menéndez, better known as Mecafé; brothers Gerardo and Carlos Cáceres, businessman and banker, respectively; his nephew Francisco, also a coffee grower; economist Álex Segovia; then-Colonel David Munguía Payés; and a conservative politician from the eighties, Luis Lagos. A good part of this group is in prison or accused of crimes linked to embezzlement or pacts with gangs during the Funes administration.
In 2009, with 52 percent of the vote, Funes became the first leftist president in the history of El Salvador. He won a close election against Arena candidate Rodrigo Avila, a former director of the National Civil Police. In a country accustomed to political polarization, Funes’ first words as president-elect were of national unity: He spoke of “a new peace agreement”, of the “reconciliation of the country”, and of leaving aside “confrontation and revanchism”. The national and international media recorded the effervescence of part of society that night in March: there were tears of joy from former combatants, chants, and historic slogans like “when the people fight, they triumph”.
His government implemented social programs such as the provision of school supplies and uniforms to students in the public school system and the decentralization of health services. A study by Fusades, a right-wing think tank, highlights that the health reform covered 62 percent of municipalities and the construction of five hospitals. During his administration, the Law of Medicines was approved, reducing the cost of medicine by implementing a price cap. The Law of Access to Public Information was also approved, creating an Institute of Access to Information that allowed for the scrutiny of past governments of the Right but also of the Left itself, despite government attempts to hide, for example, advertising expenditures. In 2012, Funes asked for forgiveness on behalf of the state to the victims of the El Mozote massacre, and his government began to comply with reparation measures ordered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in October of that year.
But that figure of the conciliatory president open to dialogue was short-lived. Surrounded by his trusted advisors, Funes inherited the vices that he promised to eradicate: ghost salaries, secret slush funds, and political operations by shady agents such as Herbert Saca, whom he sardonically came to call “The Friend”.
Funes, the politician, tarnished his reputation months into his term, after concentrating his government's advertising contracts in the agency of his campaign advisor, Joao Santana.
The presidency drastically changed his lifestyle: He billed to his credit card in one month ($41,000) what he used to earn in a year, without counting the large expenses whose records became known when he left the Presidency. He became a high-end collector: 15 vehicles were found in his name; 92 weapons; and dozens of watches from high-end brands such as Rolex, Patek Philippe, and Cartier. He amassed and squandered millions of dollars of public funds on travel, shopping, and living expenses for his partners or mistresses. In 2018, thanks to 1,810 original documents obtained from Funes’ secret discretionary budget, El Faro verified the former president’s looting: jewelry, clothing, vacations to Disney World, thousands of dollars in payments of personal debts, a children's party for his son, and trips in private jets.
In the fourth year of his presidency, El Faro revealed a chain of favors that benefited his last partner, Ada Michelle Guzmán, with whom he had one of his six children, with a spa worth almost one million dollars.
Of the Funes who shook the country with his television interviews, or who excited millions of Salvadorans, not even respect for the independent press remained. Funes constantly attacked and insulted journalists who unveiled his corruption. He did it from his social media and, when he was still president, from his weekly radio program.
He fled to Nicaragua in August 2016, when at least two of the judicial processes against him began in El Salvador: one for illicit enrichment and the other for money laundering in a case involving $350 million from the secret fund that his government administered. He was also convicted in absentia for two crimes: tax fraud (six years in prison) and illicit associations (14 years in prison).
The latter case, known as The Truce, relating to his gang negotiations, involved the transfer of more than 30 leaders of all the gangs from maximum security prisons to common prisons, in order to facilitate the control of their structures and reduce homicides. In 2009, Funes took the reins of a country that, after the failed Super Mano Dura plan of former President Antonio Saca, was the most violent in the world, with 72 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Former Security Minister David Munguía Payés, now in prison, coordinated the plan and admitted that he had Funes’ approval. They granted prison benefits to criminal leaders, ranging from cell phones to parties with women and alcohol. Funes denied his government’s involvement in the truce every chance he got, but the evidence was overwhelming. The truce devolved into its most vulgar version when political parties began offering gang members money in exchange for influencing elections. The process began to languish in 2013, under the presidential candidacy of then-Vice President Salvador Sánchez Cerén.
In Nicaragua, Funes lived as a second-ranking official. At the end of his career, he received a salary from the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry of 90,080.46 córdobas per month (about $2,739 at the official exchange rate), according to a spreadsheet of that institution revealed by Confidencial in May 2019.
The former president claimed that he lived off his consulting and advisory work for the Ortega dictatorship. “I am not hiding in Nicaragua. I lead a public life like anyone else who works legally and openly in a state institution. Nor am I a fugitive, since I am not evading justice despite the fact that it is a selective and fraudulent justice,” he said in an interview on Oct. 29, 2024 with Raúl Palacios, a content creator who has interviewed him frequently in recent years, and who claims that Michelle Guzmán, the Salvadoran's ex-partner, told him that Funes was admitted to the hospital in a coma around January 8.
Without any remaining influence in Salvadoran politics, at 65 years of age, the former president who marked the most important milestone in Salvadoran post-war politics —the transition between right and left— has died. His failed administration was still enough for a slim electoral triumph in 2014 of his vice-president, former guerrilla commander Salvador Sánchez Cerén, also thanks to Funes’ strategy, who allied with part of the most corrupt right wing of the country, represented by the Gana party, syphoning strength from Arena.
The Left governed El Salvador until 2019, when by dint of failures the cycle of the post-war parties was broken and the country was left in the hands of Nayib Bukele and his authoritarian project.
