With a government that is released in the power, a weak economy and a fragile democracy, the Salvadoran president Mauricio Funes has space small for mistakes.

Last week must have been very strange for Mauricio Funes. For 20 years it worked like journalist in El Salvador. With critical eye SAND covered the armed conflict, the process of peace and five consecutive governments of the divided right-wing. It had reputation of being hard, direct and implacable with his interviewees. But now it has him to be of another side. It has just finished his first week as president of El Salvador and it is him who now is under the scrutiny of the press.

During an interview in El Salvador, a pair of weeks before it should assume the charge, I asked him what is what more would change his everyday life. I surprised his answer. “I will have to allow reading the newspapers and see the newscasters as it was doing it in the past and will have to be satisfied with an informative synthesis that my private secretary prepares for me”. What irony, will a critical journalist now have to happen for a filter to find out about what he says his press.

Undoubtedly, Mauricio Funes will be under the magnifying glass. The eyes of the world will be hanging of in the direction of the one that leads to his country. And the fact is that Funes did history the first day of June on having taken an oath, not only for happening from journalist to president but because he is the first left president in the history of El Salvador. Also it is the first time that the Front Farabundo Marti for the National Liberation, the FMLN, comes to the presidency since it happened of being a guerrilla group to a political party soon that was finishing the bloody civil war that I leave almost 75 thousand dead persons and more than 7 thousand missing persons.

But it is necessary to be very careful in not falling down in the simplistic appreciations that they presume that another Latin-American country goes away to the left. Funes was never a militant of the FMLN and most of the analysts in El Salvador coincide with that the FMLN had not gained the elections with another candidate who was not Funes, and Funes had not come to the presidency without the structure of an official party that the FMLN offered him. It is possible to be said that it was an expediency union.

Nevertheless, the forced question is which of the leftist slopes Funes will be still of: Latin America the pragmatic left headed by the president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula gives Miscellany, or the radical left represented by the Venezuelan Hugo Chávez. Funes insists on without wanting to be classified in none of the two.: “The one whom you remove that as well as one speaks about an axis of Lula or about an axis Chávez there could exist in Central America an axis Funes, which implies a left that is sensible, pragmatic, but that at the same time is radical opposite to problems before which it is not going to give truce in his combat”.

And serious problems are those that Mauricio Funes inherits. A country plunged in the extreme poverty, with high unemployment rates, with one of the levels of delinquency more high places of the world, the expansion of the dangerous juvenile bands, the increase of the Salvadorans' deportations from the United States and the reduction in the remittances.

As if it was small, Funes also will have to look for ways of curing the wounds of the civil war, which remain opened since the peace agreement was signed and with him a new amnesty law. Although he lived in proper meat through the ravages of the war – when his older brother was murdered by the police at the beginning of ‘80-, he says that he does not believe necessarily to repeal the amnesty law. “I exactly who gave the order to murder my brother, with the time have learned to excuse”. Funes makes sure that the relatives of the victims have the right to know in what circumstances his dear beings died, therefore it does not discard that new investigations are opened. Of being like that, Funes would be in a predicament, since his vice-president Salvador Sánchez Ceren, ancient guerrilla leader, several crimes assume during the war.

In his inaugural speech, the new chief of El Salvador said that his government will not be able to have the right to be wrong, and it has reason great. There is greatly in game. With a raw government that is released in the power, a weak economy and a fragile democracy, there is little space for mistakes. The journalist covers with stars of El Salvador turned into president now he will know what is to be of another side of the power.

(c) 2008 by Maria Helen Salinas.