San Salvador – El Salvador’s largest opposition party, the leftist FMLN, announced the death of its long-time leader – Schafik Handal – on Tuesday evening after he suffered a fatal heart attack earlier in the day.
The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front’s general coordinator, Medardo Gonzalez, almost overcome with emotion, told a press conference that Handal had died about 4:30 p.m. (2230 GMT) after being stricken at the Comapala international airport here upon his return from Bolivia, where on Sunday he and other FMLN leaders had attended the inauguration of President Evo Morales.
The 75-year-old legislator was transported from the airport – which is located about 50 kilometers (31 miles) from San Salvador – by police helicopter to the Sheraton Presidente hotel’s landing site and from there in a police ambulance to the Hospital de la Mujer, where his death was confirmed about 5:00 p.m. (2300 GMT) by FMLN officials.
Lawmaker Salvador Sanchez Ceren said that the FMLN had decreed three days of morning for Handal, whom he called “a tireless fighter.”
A large number of FMLN and other political parties’ leaders came to the hospital upon receiving word of Handal’s illness and subsequent death. Among those in attendance was the presidential commissioner for governability, Gloria Salguero, and other members of the Salvadoran government.
Salguero said that her rapid arrival at the hospital was due to the fact that Handal was one of the country’s leading political figures and represented a show of the government’s solidarity with the FMLN in a democratic society.
Handal lost the 2004 presidential election to the ruling conservative ARENA party’s Tony Saca by a margin of 58 percent to 36 percent. About 15 of the 84 members of Congress here are former members of the FMLN, which waged a 12-year guerrilla war ended by the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords.
The son of Palestinian immigrants, between 1959 and 1994, Handal was the general secretary of the Salvadoran Communist Party. As a guerrilla leader in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was a member of the group that brought five opposition forces together to found the FMLN, currently the country’s largest opposition party.
Following the signing of the peace pact, the FMLN converted itself from a guerrilla army into a political party, and Handal served as its general coordinator. In 1997, he was elected to the National Assembly, serving as the leader of the FMLN’s party bloc in the legislature.
In April 2005, the U.S. government revoked Handal’s visa.
