Presidential election in El Salvador: Nayib Bukele, outgoing and controversial president, arch-favorite
This Sunday, February 4, 2024, the presidential election takes place in El Salvador at the same time as the legislative and municipal elections. President Nayib Bukele is the clear favorite following the two years of “
war against the pandillas
”, the armed bands in El Salvador. The opposition fails to make itself heard.
The President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, on June 1, 2023 in San Salvador. © MARVIN RECINOS / AFP
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The Salvadoran Constitution prohibits a president from serving two successive terms. But in 2021 the judges of the new Constitutional Court, appointed by Nayib Bukele, authorized him to run again if power was assumed by someone else
for his last six months of presidency
- he handed it to a of his loved ones. An interpretation of the Constitution that the population accepted all the better since a year later, in 2022, the president launched his war against armed bands, the Pandillas, imprisoning around 75,000 people and decreeing state exceptional. As a result, crime has fallen considerably. The homicide rate has collapsed, going from 106.3 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2015, then one of the highest in the world outside of periods of conflict, to 2.4 in 2023.
And the Salvadorans are always grateful to him, even if this state of exception suspended many of their freedoms, and even if the president, focusing on repression, did not address the causes of the existence of the Pandillas. Today it enjoys unparalleled popularity, estimated at 90% of the population, according to Latinbarometro.
“
At the beginning, when I started my activity, there was a young person who came and to whom I had to give money. And you had to pay, otherwise you risked your life: they threatened you, that kind of thing,
tells Gustavo, a 30-year-old hotelier on El Zonte beach, to our special correspondent in El Salvador,
Carlos Herranz
.
I stopped paying when the pandemic hit, when all the businesses stopped operating, because they said that since we were no longer making money, they weren't going to ask me for any more. After the pandemic, when everything started again, the pandilleros
[gang members, editor's note]
told me that I was going to have to start paying again. But thank God, then there was the emergency regime, they started putting all the pandilleros in prison, and they stopped asking me to pay.
»
But for Salvadoran economist and criminologist Carlos Carcach, it is worrying that the population does not react to the loss of freedom and the concentration of power in the hands of Bukele: “
The majority of the population, which has not a very high level of education, does not understand the magnitude of what is happening
. She believes that the president is resolving the security problem, and that she is calmer. She does not realize that as the president concentrates more power, democracy will disappear. And that we are going to move towards an authoritarian government.
»
A pact with the gangs
The fight against the Pandillas is also being fought using illegal means. The Salvadoran newspaper
El Faro
,
which had to go into exile in
neighboring Costa Rica in the face of government pressure, revealed that the government had made a deal with Salvadoran gangs. “
Nayib Bukele is immersed up to his neck in this question of
negotiations with the gangs
,”
says Gabriel Labrador, journalist at
El Faro
, interviewed by our special correspondent,
Carlos Herranz
. It is a government strategy to keep homicide and murder statistics at an acceptable level. Instead of adopting a security policy close to citizens or strengthening the police, he concluded a dark pact with the gangs. An investigation by
El Faro
shows that this pact is very real.
»
For its part, the country's economy is still in poor condition. The president's attempts to make bitcoin legal tender and attract tourists and foreign investment have not been successful. A study by the University of Central America (UCA) found that bitcoin will have almost no use in 2023.
So many subjects which should have opened up avenues for the opposition for the presidential election. But it is inaudible, specialists believe, discredited by the corruption which accompanied his time in power, a point on which Nayib Bukele never fails to insist. “
Nayib Bukele will win, and with a very good score: he has such significant political capital... I don't think that the two main opposition parties, the Arena and the FMLN, can achieve even 15% of the votes
,
”
estimates economist and criminologist Carlos Carcach even before the vote.
Read alsoIn El Salvador, dissident voices silenced by the state of exception
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