SAN SALVADOR: El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele is all but guaranteed a resounding victory in elections on Sunday, with his no-holds-barred war on gangs having earned him approval ratings hovering around 90 percent.Despite concerns about rights violations, authoritarianism and the economy, 42-year-old Bukele enjoys widespread support for slashing the country’s homicide rate and restoring a semblance of normalcy to a population sick of violence.”Everything has changed,” Uber driver Alberto Serrano, 40, told AFP in the capital San Salvador, where large groups of armed soldiers patrolled the streets in the days leading up to the vote.”I could not see my mother for seven years because she lived in an area under the control of a different gang than where I lived. If I went there, I would not leave again,” he said.”Danger was everywhere. You could not have a tattoo, even an artistic one, because they would think you belonged to another gang. Now… you can move freely anywhere you like. Without fear.”Taking the war to the gangs — which had extorted protection money and fought bloody street battles that claimed many innocent lives — Bukele’s government introduced a state of emergency in March 2022 that suspended many basic rights.It remains in place today and has seen authorities round up more than 75,000 suspected gangsters, many held in a brand-new prison — the largest in the Americas — that the president had built in a matter of months.About 7,000 have since been freed for a lack of evidence, but activists say many innocents — including minors — remain behind bars in inhumane conditions, even subjected to torture.Nevertheless, a Latinobarometro poll last year found Bukele to be the most popular president in Latin America, with 90 percent of respondents giving him the thumbs up.”The only suspense may be… just how high a vote he gets,” analyst Michael Shifter, of the Inter-American Dialogue think tank in Washington, told AFP.This week, the social media-savvy, millennial president published a video on X urging citizens to vote en masse to show the world that “Salvadorans ratify this path.””Our country has changed, nobody can deny it. Our job this Sunday is to ensure that these changes are forever,” he said.
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