El Salvador: Obama visit dispels fears over ties
by Marcos Aleman

The Associated Press    Translate This Article
19 March 2011

SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) - President Mauricio Funes said Saturday he is gratified that Barack Obama is including his small country in a tour of Latin America, saying the visit dispels fears relations would suffer under El Salvador's first leftist government.

Funes was elected in 2009 with the support of a party of former Marxist guerrillas that fought to overthrow U.S.-backed governments in the 1980s. His rise to power unseated two decades of conservative governments that made El Salvador among the staunchest U.S. allies in Latin America.

Opponents had warned those ties would decline, but Funes said Obama's planned visit Tuesday proves them wrong.

'We have won the battle against disinformation,' Funes said at a news conference with foreign reporters. 'We have dispelled the fear that relations would deteriorate.'

Funes has charted a moderate course in El Salvador, restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba but also making ties with Washington a priority. His policies have at times caused friction with hard-liners in his party, known as the FMLN.

Funes expressed pride that his small Central American country is one of three stops on Obama's tour. The other two are Brazil, a rising economic power, and Chile, long a beacon of stability and relative prosperity in the region.

'He chose El Salvador and put us on the same level (of importance),' Funes said.

El Salvador's economy is highly dependent on the United States, which is home to 2.8 million Salvadoran immigrants who sent home $3.5 billion last year.

Funes said he would discuss immigration with Obama, but security was likely to be the main topic.

U.S.-supported crackdowns in Mexico and Colombia have pushed drug traffickers into Central America, fueling violence in a region that already had some of the world's highest murder rates. Central American governments have repeatedly asked for more U.S. help.

With other Central American countries expressing disappointment that Obama is only visiting El Salvador, Funes promised he would raise the security issue in regional terms.

'Security cannot be seen as exclusively an issue in El Salvador, or Guatemala or Nicaragua,' he said. 'Central American countries all suffer from the same problems.'

Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Every day Global Good News documents the rise of a better quality of life dawning in the world from good news reported by the press; and highlights the need for introducing Natural Law based-Total Knowledge based-programmes to bring the support of Nature to every individual, raise the quality of life of every society, and create a lasting state of world peace.



Translation software is not perfect; however if you would like to try it, you can translate this page using:

(Google) Select a language English to Afrikaans English to Albanian English to Arabic English to Belarusian English to Bulgarian English to Catalan English to Chinese (Simplified) English to Chinese (Traditional) English to Croatian English to Czech English to Danish English to Dutch English to Estonian English to Filipino English to Finnish English to French English to Galician English to German English to Greek English to Hebrew English to Hindi English to Hungarian English to Icelandic English to Indonesian English to Irish English to Italian English to Japanese English to Korean English to Latvian English to Lithuanian English to Macedonian English to Malay English to Maltese English to Norwegian English to Persian English to Polish English to Portuguese English to Romanian English to Russian English to Serbian English to Slovak English to Slovenian English to Spanish English to Swahili English to Swedish English to Thai English to Turkish English to Ukrainian English to Vietnamese English to Welsh English to Yiddish

(Altavista babelfish) Select a languageEnglish to Chinese-simpEnglish to Chinese-tradEnglish to DutchEnglish to PortugueseEnglish to FrenchEnglish to GermanEnglish to GreekEnglish to ItalianEnglish to JapaneseEnglish to KoreanEnglish to RussianEnglish to Spanish

Send Good News to Global Good News.

Your comments.