Nicaragua’s Health Ministry declared in a statement the death of the former president due to a serious chronic illness.
Former El Salvador President Mauricio Funes, who governed El Salvador from 2009 to 2014 and spent the final years of his life in Nicaragua to avoid various criminal sentences, died late Tuesday at age 65. He lived his final nine years under the protection of Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega, whose government had given him citizenship, allowing him to avoid extradition.
Nicaragua’s Foreign Affairs Ministry said that Funes’ family had decided to bury in his lands.
The former president had pending sentences in El Salvador for corruption and making deals with the country’s powerful street gangs that amounted to 28 years, but he never set foot in prison.
On Wednesday, his party said in a statement that “Mauricio Funes as an investigative journalist and incisive generator of public opinion, as well as in his time as president of the republic, enjoyed broad acceptance and support from the Salvadoran people and the international community.”
Current Labor Minister Rolando Castro said via X that Funes’ “skills and contributions to the country as a journalist are undeniable, just as his mistakes in public office.”
Funes was born in San Salvador on Oct. 18, 1959. He worked as a teacher in Catholic schools, but later made his name as a war reporter and hosted a highly popular interview show that took on controversial topics. He interviewed multiple heads of state, worked at two television stations and was a correspondent for CNN from 1991 to 2007, winning multiple awards.
Then the FMLN came calling, offering to make him their candidate and he won the 2009 elections, defeating Rodrigo Ávila of the conservative National Republican Alliance, better known as Arena, that had governed the country since 1989.
