Former El Salvador president Mauricio Funes, who spent the final years of his life in Nicaragua to avoid various criminal sentences, has died aged 65.
Nicaragua’s Health Ministry said Mr Funes had died of a serious chronic illness.
He governed El Salvador from 2009 to 2014. He lived his final nine years under the protection of Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega, whose government had given him citizenship, allowing him to avoid extradition.
The former president had pending sentences in El Salvador for corruption and making deals with the country’s powerful street gangs that amounted to more than 26 years, but he never set foot in prison.
The journalist-turned-politician came to power with the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), the leftist party born of El Salvador’s civil war and a powerful national political force for three decades that was left with no seats in the Congress after last year’s election.
Mr Funes was born in San Salvador on October 18 1959. He worked as a teacher in Catholic schools, but later made his name as a war reporter and hosted a highly popular interview show that took on controversial topics.
He interviewed multiple heads of state, worked at two television stations and was a correspondent for CNN from 1991 to 2007, winning multiple awards.
Then the FMLN came calling, offering to make him their candidate and he won the 2009 elections, defeating Rodrigo Avila of the conservative National Republican Alliance, better known as Arena, that had governed the country since 1989.
Mr Funes was a fresh face, not someone directly involved in the civil war as the party tried to remake itself with a less bellicose image.
At the time, Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chavez praised Mr Funes as “tenacious” and someone who would not shy away from El Salvador’s problems.
But by the time he left office, Mr Funes was hounded by accusations of corruption.
In 2016, he fled the country. He always denied the accusations and said his troubles were all part of political persecution.
But he was tried in absentia six times and convicted in each one.