Obama to host Salvadoran President Funes in March

Feb 26, 2010, 22:54 GMT

   Washington - US President Barack Obama is to host Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes on March 8, the US State Department confirmed Friday.

Arturo Valenzuela, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, confirmed Funes' visit to the White House at a press conference in Washington. The Salvadoran Embassy in the US capital did not immediately confirm the trip.

Three days before the meeting with Obama, Funes is set to meet with US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Guatemala, in the last stage of Clinton's Latin American tour. That meeting is expected to include as many Central American leaders as possible, Valenzuela noted.

Clinton attended last year the historic inauguration of Funes as El Salvador's president.

While he was not himself active in the guerrillas, the leftist Funes won the election as the presidential candidate of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a former rebel group active in El Salvador's civil war of 1980-92, that claimed about 75,000.

Funes had intended to visit Washington in late 2009, but Obama's tight agenda made a meeting impossible.

There are believed to be close to 1.4 million people of Salvadoran origin in the United States.