EL SALVADOR: Funes to Take Over Country in Deep Crisis

[Judi Lynn]

EL SALVADOR: Funes to Take Over Country in Deep Crisis
By Raúl Gutiérrez

SAN SALVADOR, May 28 (IPS) - President-elect Mauricio Funes of El Salvador is about to take over a country in recession, with an expanding budget deficit, growing unemployment, and soaring poverty rate.

Social organisations are calling on Funes, of the leftwing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), to implement a model of sustainable development capable of improving the living standards of the people of this impoverished Central American nation.

Funes, who in the Mar. 15 elections beat the candidate of the rightwing ARENA party that has governed El Salvador since 1989, will become the country’s first leftist president when he is sworn in on Jun. 1.

"There is a 500 million dollar fiscal deficit," one of Funes’s chief advisers, Alexander Segovia, told IPS, pointing out that the economic situation "will be a huge challenge" for the new government.

Segovia blamed the loss of 40,000 jobs since October – after the international economic crisis broke out – on the 21 percent drop in exports from February 2008 to February this year, mainly to the United States, which absorbs 57 percent of this country’s total sales abroad.

That in turn drove the official unemployment rate – which does not include those working in the informal sector of the economy – up from 6.7 to 8.0 percent between October and April.

And if the current trend continues, by the end of the year, 50,000 more Salvadorans will join the 2.8 million people already living in poverty, the economist predicted.

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