LatinNews Daily Report - 20 September 2012

ECONOMY | Funes serious about joining Petrocaribe. On 19 September El Salvador’s economy minister, Armando Flores, said he had been instructed by President Mauricio Funes to begin talks with Venezuela’s energy & oil minister, Rafael Ramírez Carreño, regarding the possibility of El Salvador joining President Hugo Chávez’s subsidised oil scheme, Petrocaribe, in a bid to reduce petrol costs. Funes mentioned the possibility of joining the initiative in April, although he was clear that this would not extend to signing up to Chávez’s radical left-wing regional integration movement, the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Alba). This has long been a demand of the left-wing ruling Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberaciόn Nacional (FMLN), which brought Funes to power in 2009, and is one of the various points of contention between the ruling party and Funes – who has aligned himself with moderate leftists in the mould of Brazil's former President Lula da Silva (2003-2011) rather than Chávez. El Salvador does, however, receive Venezuelan oil indirectly through Alba Petróleos, a joint venture set up in 2006 between Enepasa (a distribution company formed by FMLN mayors) and PDV Caribe, a subsidiary of the Venezuelan State-owned oil company, PDVSA.

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