July 30, 2010  Print Email | US diplomat Tom Shannon visits El Salvador
To strengthen bilateral ties
Posted by Agencies at 05:47 AM GMT on Mar 19, 2009 | SAN SALVADOR (AFP): America's top diplomat for Latin America, Tom Shannon, arrived in El Salvador on Wednesday, just days after leftist Mauricio Funes, leader of an ex-rebel party, was elected president of the Central American nation.
 Before his victory, former TV journalist Funes said El Salvador, which in the past sent troops to Iraq, would remain a staunch ally of the US, where some 2.5 million Salvadorans reside.
Shannon was due to meet with outgoing president Antonio Saca before meeting with Funes in the tiny, crime-plagued nation, officials said.
US President Barack Obama on Wednesday telephoned Funes to congratulate him on his victory and said he was ready to strengthen bilateral ties, the Salvadoran president-elect said in a first post-election news conference.
Some US lawmakers had warned that a Funes victory would jeopardize US national security interests in the region, while the Salvadoran opposition said a leftist victory would turn the country into a satellite of Venezuela.
The United States has been a close ally since El Salvador's 1980-1992 civil war in which more than 70,000 people died, many of them at the hands of a repressive US-backed military.
Funes overturned almost 20 years of right-wing rule when he and his ex-rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) party beat Rodrigo Avila of the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) on Sunday.
The National Electoral Tribunal on Wednesday officially declared Funes president-elect with 51.32 per cent of the vote, compared with 48.68 per cent for Avila.
Participation was 62 per cent of the country's 4.3 million eligible voters, the tribunal said.
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