Asier Vera
Updated Friday, February 9, 2024-16:08
El Salvador Inside Bukele's megaprison against gang members: "This is hell on earth; there is no way to escape here"
Nayib Bukele, candidate of Nuevas Ideas, is already the winner of last Sunday's elections in El Salvador, after obtaining
2.6 million votes
, which represents the
support of 82% of the voters
who participated (3.2 million) , according to data from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal. 98.7% of the minutes have already been counted and it is expected that in the next few hours his victory can be officially proclaimed. On this occasion, the TSE has announced that it will be "convenient" to open each of the ballot boxes that remain to be processed.
At the moment, Bukele
is more than 10 times ahead of his main rival
,
Manuel 'El Chino' Flores
, of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), who has only achieved 201,705 votes, followed by Joel Sánchez, of the Nationalist Republican Alliance. (Arena), with 175,588, Luis Parada, from Nuestro Tiempo, with 63,962, José Javier Renderos, from Fuerza Solidaria, with 23,097 and Marina Murillo, from Fraternidad Patriota Salvadoreña, with 19,016. Thus, the opposition as a whole has only gathered 18% of the votes.
In this way, the victory of Bukele is confirmed, who will hold the Presidency for
a second five-year term starting next June 1
, despite the fact that several articles of the Constitution prevent re-election, although the judges of the Chamber of the Constitutional Court of the Supreme Court of Justice, elected by the Legislative Assembly in which their party has a majority, paved the way with a new interpretation of the Magna Carta.
Bukele already proclaimed himself last Sunday as the winner of the elections, when only 31% of the minutes had been counted and he went so far as to assure that he had obtained the support of 85% of the voters, while Nuevas Ideas had achieved "at least "58 of the 60 deputies in the Legislative Assembly.
It should be remembered that it was only possible to count 70.25% of the 8,562 minutes in the presidential election and 5% in the legislative election. This Friday,
the TSE will begin to count "ballot by ballot"
in the case only of the elections to
elect deputies
, after anomalies were detected in the counting system, which has delayed the officialization of the results in both elections.
Initially, as the presiding magistrate of the TSE, Dora Esmeralda Martínez de Barahona, had announced, 2,547 of the 8,562 ballot boxes in the presidential election were also going to be opened, although the idea of counting vote by vote was finally discarded, except for the small percentage that still needs to be counted this Friday that will not change the final results at all.
TSE magistrate Noel Orellana explained on Thursday that in the end it was not necessary to open 30% of pending ballot boxes, given that the Attorney General's Office had copies of each of the minutes that had been transcribed manually. For this reason, he considered it "convenient" not to count each ballot, taking into account that "the
population is waiting to know the results
and, for this purpose, came on Sunday to express his will." In this sense, he insisted that the five regular magistrates and the five substitutes agreed on the convenience of "incorporating and validating those minutes that have met all the requirements."
For its part, this Friday 300 tables will be installed, with the possibility of establishing 100 more, on the beach soccer fields near the Jorge 'El Mágico' González National Stadium to count each of the ballots issued in the 8,562 Receiving Boards of Votes from the legislative elections.
Orellana considered that the media will play an "important role" to "verify and make the population aware of the transparency with which this process will be handled." Likewise, he recalled that all organizations that are required by law to have direct participation are invited, such as the Surveillance Board, the watchdogs of the different parties, the Attorney General's Office of the Republic, the Attorney General's Office for the Defense of Rights. Human Rights and Attorney General's Office.
At the same time, he announced that an invitation will be made to the different diplomatic headquarters accredited in the Central American country and to some observers who have expressed their interest in participating, while he revealed that the TSE is also going to install cameras "so that "the population can verify the transparency with which this event is going to take place."
"Let's show our faces"
The magistrate made self-criticism, given that "we would be wrong not to deny that
some situations did not occur within the provisions of these legal frameworks
." Along these lines, he stressed that "as TSE we are going to show our face and accept situations that, obviously, must be improved" in the face of the next municipal and Central American Parliament elections on March 3, in which 44 mayors and their respective Municipal Councils and 20 deputies.
"I think there were some failures, but these processes are complex and complicated and first world countries have had problems with technology," he said, while advancing that "at some point the investigation will be done and the deduct responsibilities if they exist".
However, he estimated that "this is not the time for that, but our main objective is to give the population the result they are waiting for because
we cannot be creating uncertainty
, since they want to know who their president, vice president and deputies are going to be." Looking ahead to the March 3 elections, he promised to "work hard so that these situations are not repeated."
Regarding
participation
, it stood at
52.14%, after 3.2 of the 6.2 million people
who had the right to do so voted. It represents a percentage slightly higher than 2019, when it represented 51.88%, which, in the opinion of the TSE magistrate, reflects a "sample of the patriotism and commitment of Salvadorans."