People of my nation,

It is a tremendous honor to receive this presidential sash. I do so with humility, aware of the responsibilities involved and the commitments that I must fulfill. I will be faithful to the oath that I have made, guiding myself by the nation's interests and by the desire to serve, especially the most disadvantaged of the population.

The people of El Salvador asked for a change. And the change starts now. The change does not start with the individual will of a president. It starts in the hands of the nation that knows that this is a great moment in building its future. And that is aware that this can only happen with the union of all.

I assume the presidency extending the call for national unity that I made before, during and after the campaign. A unity that is fruit of the pacification of the spirits, of creative and productive optimism, of the democratic harmonization of differences and of collective commitment to building a new nation without hate and without resentment. Unity in the project of national development that is based on social inclusion, expanding opportunities, enhancing the value of production and of labor, the modernization of the institutions and the guarantee of full democratic freedom. Union of free men and women who believe in themselves and in their homeland and that want to build a new nation. To my happiness, this call is becoming increasingly more heard, supported and understood by my loved compatriots.

It is happiness tempered with realism and responsibility. But, also, with a strong dose of courage and optimism. It is because we are not afraid of this responsibility, and do not fear this challenge, that I proclaim out loud for myself, for my companions, and for the entire nation: we don’t have the right to make mistakes. I repeat: we, definitively, don’t have the right to make mistakes.

A long road has been traveled by the Salvadoran people to reach this day. No effort or sacrifice was futile. It is time to begin a new path, one of living fully in democracy. We do not, therefore, have the right to betray our dreams or to stray from our path.

My friends,

To err is human, but ability to avoid error is, equally, also an attribute of all men and all women. And avoiding error begins with not doing what some people have done wrong in this country: to govern for the few, be complacent with corruption, fear and be accomplice to organized crime, to prevent all forms of expression.

We, Salvadorans, know what we want, what we can do and what we need. We want social reconstruction, economic reconstruction and we want the institutional reconstruction of our nation. That means we need to not only reconstruct our country but also to reinvent it. Reinvent our country does not mean abandoning what is good and everlasting. It means improving what is good and doing what was never done. It means creating a national model of development that rescues the best of what we have, reduces internal inequalities and promotes a dynamic and intelligent reinsertion in the regional and international arenas.

I repeat: reinventing our country will be a new national project that, at the same time, will recover the large social debt and accelerate our human and technological progress. The main arms that we have for this are faith, hope, joy and the strength of compelling new ideas. And the main challenges we must overcome are defeating poverty, political and technological backwardness, marginalization of broad sectors of society and, principally, the despair and lack of vision offered to our youth. We emphasize, above all, that we must integrate and transform this small country that became a giant of inequality. And reveal for ourselves, and for the whole world, the immense creative, productive and modernizing capacity that we have hidden within us. We need, above all, to recover the lost time.

So our biggest challenge is to make the next five years worth at least a decade. And it is possible to do this.

To read the rest of the speech, please go to
http://www.presidencia.gob.sv/traspaso/discurso/2009/06/disc0101.html