EL SALVADOR: President’s ‘Path to Peace’ Award Draws Outcry

[Judi Lynn]

EL SALVADOR: President’s ‘Path to Peace’ Award Draws Outcry
By Raúl Gutiérrez

SAN SALVADOR, Jun 10 (IPS) - The decision by a Catholic foundation with links to the Vatican to award its highest distinction to Salvadoran President Antonio Saca drew a wave of protests from local analysts and representatives of civil society in this Central American country.

The Path to Peace Foundation, which describes its mission as "spreading the Catholic Church’s message of peace," is bestowing its annual Path to Peace Award in recognition of Saca’s work towards consolidating peace and strengthening democracy in El Salvador, government sources said.

The president of the Foundation, which was created in 1991, is Archbishop Celestino Migliore, the Apostolic Nuncio and Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations.

The award was presented to President Saca at a gala dinner in New York Tuesday.

Saca "introduced reforms aimed at reducing delinquency, and has traced out ‘the map of poverty’ that identities the areas of extreme poverty in order to work towards eradicating it," the Path to Peace Foundation says in its citation.

Several Salvadoran Catholic organisations said they "regretted" the foundation’s decision, in a letter to the Apostolic Nunciature in El Salvador.

Saca, of the rightwing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), became president in 2004. Since then, "inequalities, exclusion and poverty" have worsened among Salvadorans, while "insecurity and impunity have become widespread," the letter says.

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Saca, _Bush's pocket puppet.