Salvadorans began voting this Sunday in presidential and legislative elections in which the President Nayib Bukele He is considered the big favorite for re-election.
Voting centers opened at 7:00 a.m. local time (1300 GMT) and would close 10 hours later, on a day when 6.2 million voters were called to cast their ballots, the party said Supreme Electoral Court.
Bukele, a 42-year-old former publicist, is almost guaranteed a second five-year term with an overwhelming 90% popularity rating and no major opponents and could even crush the opposition in the new 60-seat Congress, which he already comfortably controls.
“We will be an example of civility,” said the president of the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE), Dora Martínez, opening the vote at an event in the historic center of San Salvador.
Relieved by the calm that reigned in their neighborhoods previously occupied by the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs, Salvadorans welcome the policies of “Iron Hand“by Bukele, even at the expense of some freedoms.
I had to pay “rent” (blackmail), they told me they would kill my wife and mother. They came to my work with weapons. Now everything has improved,” Nelson García, 39, who runs a grocery store in the capital, told AFP.
After a bloody weekend with 87 deathsBukele In March 2022, it imposed a state of emergency that included a total of almost 76,000 detainees and reduced murders to a historic low, officially 2.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023, in what had previously been the most violent criminal country in the world.
But organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch They denounce arbitrary arrests, torture and deaths in prison. Some 7,000 innocent people were releasedbut many remain in prison without due process or the opportunity to communicate with their families.
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