In his first years in office, he partly delivered on his promises, providing school supplies and uniforms, building hospitals and reducing the price of medicine. He made conciliatory speeches, apologizing for the right-wing government’s massacres of civilians during the civil war and, in 2010, for the assassination in 1980 of Archbishop Óscar Romero, a fierce critic of that regime.
But Mr. Funes soon fell victim to the vice that habitually afflicts his country’s leaders, according to El Salvador’s prosecutors: corruption. In one month, his credit card spending equaled what he had previously earned in a year, $41,000, according to El Faro. And whatever negotiations he conducted with gangs were ineffectual. By 2015, killings had reached a rate of 100 per 100,000 people, the highest in Central America.
Carlos Mauricio Funes Cartagena was born in San Salvador, the capital, on Oct. 18, 1959, a son of Roberto Funes, an accountant, and Maria Mirna Cartagena, a secretary. He attended secondary school at the Colegio Externado San José in San Salvador, where he later became a teacher, and studied at the Universidad Centroamericana Jose Simeon Canas, also in the capital, but did not graduate.
Mr. Funes became a television reporter for El Salvador’s educational channel in 1986. A year later, he went to work for the private Canal 12, where he covered politics, earning a reputation for his interviews with leftist leaders and crusading investigative journalism. A wide following helped attract the attention of FMLN officials.
His marriage to Vanda Pignato ended in divorce in 2014. His survivors include his sons, Carlos, Diego and Gabriel; and a brother, Guillermo Funes Cartagena.
Mr. Funes’s fall from grace perplexed many of those who knew him.
“Over the years I have spoken to some of his closest officials,” the Salvadoran political journalist Oscar Martinez wrote after Mr. Funes’s death, “and when I explored the question of what happened to the great political promise of the postwar period, the answer was as disappointing as the plunder: he was blinded by luxury, vice and waste.”
