El Salvador: 3 Presidential Candidates Attend Debate, 1 Evades

Three out of four presidential candidates for the 2019 elections in El Salvador participated in a debate Sunday organized by the University of El Salvador (UES).

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The participants included candidates from various parties. Josue Alvarado represented the newly-established VAMOS party, billing itself as "the only party without a dark past;" Hugo Martinez of the leftist Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN); and Carlos Calleja representing a coalition of right-wing nationalist groups like the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), the Nationalist Coalition Party (PCN), PDC and Democracia Salvadoreña (DS).

The presidential candidate for the Great Alliance for National Unity (GANA), Nayib Bukele declined to participate considering the debate to be a trap.

"It is obvious that the authorities of the UES ... are responding to the FMLN leadership. This is a marriage between ARENA and the leadership of the FMLN," he said in a message transmitted through Facebook."Of course, we were not going to fall into his trap," he added.

The UES identified three topics for the debate, namely, education, the economy, and security with a focus on human rights.

The main issue that came up while debating on the economy was the pension system. Martinez of FMLN proposed the revival of the public pension system and combating tax avoidance.

Calleja from ARENA said that the important thing to do is to seek profit and sufficiency.

The issue of pension has been a battleground for decades in the country. In 1998, the right-wing ARENA party partially privatized the pension system as part of the United States-pushed neo-liberal reforms.

This resulted in an imbalance as the private sector profited while the government accumulated a huge debt in order to pay out pensions in the public system.

On education, all the three candidates agreed upon increasing the education budget and focusing on early childhood education.  

The presidential election will take place in February 2019.