Caribbean & Central America - December 2011 (ISSN 1741-4458)

President Mauricio Funes appointed retired General David Munguía Payés as the new justice and public security minister on 23 November. Funes’ decision to move Munguía from the defence ministry was highly controversial. Civil society groups argued that not only did it violate the spirit of the 1992 Peace Accords which ended El Salvador’s civil war but it also confirmed their suspicions that Funes was determined to militarise public security. The new defence minister will be General José Atilio Benítez, who had served as Munguía’s deputy. Benítez commanded the Salvadorean contingent of troops sent to Iraq after the US-led invasion of the country until 2008.

President Funes is under huge pressure to address insecurity and violence in El Salvador. Indeed, earlier in November, El Salvador won the unwanted tag of “most violent country in the world”, just ahead of Iraq, in the second edition of the “Armed Violence and Development” report by the Secretariat from the Geneva Declaration on Violence and Development, with 60 deaths per 100,000 people. In fairness, the report covered the period from 2004 to 2009, the year Funes took office, but there has been no tangible improvement since then.

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