Bukele assures that he healed El Salvador from the “cancer” of gangs

The president of The SaviorNayib Bukele, a great favorite for re-election in the elections that were held this Sunday, assured that he healed his country from the “cancer” of gangs and advocated maintaining the state of exception in force for almost two years.

Minutes before the presidential and legislative elections concluded at 23:00 GMT, Nayib Bukele He rejected criticism from human rights organizations of the emergency regime, pointing out the detention of thousands of innocent people as “errors.”

”We changed the murder capital of the world, the most dangerous country in the world into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere and the only way to do it is to stop all the murderers,” he said at a press conference, after voting.

The president defended that El Salvador has the highest incarceration rate on the planet and affirmed that all police forces make mistakes.

After a bloody weekend with 87 deaths, Bukele imposed a state of exception that totals almost 76,000 detainees and reduced murders to historic lows (officially 2.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2023) in what was previously the country with the highest rate. of criminal violence in the world.

“El Salvador had metastases, but we performed surgery, we are undergoing radiotherapy, and we are going to come out healthy without the gang cancer,” said the president, wearing a white cap, jeans and light blue shirt, the color of his New Ideas party.

But organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch denounce arbitrary arrests, torture and deaths in prison. Some 7,000 innocent people were freed, but many remain imprisoned without being able to contact their families.

Bukele, a 42-year-old former publicist who enjoys an overwhelming popularity of 90%, has no major adversaries who threaten his second term, so he asked for more than votes for him, for the 60-seat Congress, where he hopes to maintain the qualified supermajority.

”It is important that we vote to guarantee that we have a Legislative Assembly that can continue approving the emergency regime,” he said.

Some 6.2 million Salvadorans (740,000 abroad) were called to vote in these elections monitored by thousands of soldiers and police, and for the first time under a state of emergency since the civil war ended in 1992.

– First time that the country has “democracy” –

Nayib Bukeleof Palestinian descent and who mocks his critics who call him a “dictator”, controls, in addition to parliament, justice and the rest of the state apparatus.

“We are not replacing democracy, because El Salvador never had democracy, for the first time in history that El Salvador has democracy, and I’m not saying it, the people are saying it,” he said.

Magistrates renewed by that Congress interpreted the Constitution in his favor and, despite re-election being prohibited, allowed him to run again, which analysts and opponents consider unconstitutional.

”I don’t think electoral reform is necessary,” says Bukele, Latin America’s most popular president according to a regional survey, about his re-election and eventual third term.

The opposition is in serious trouble. Its five candidates barely appear in the polls, including the leftist Farabundo Martí Front (FMLN), Manuel Flores, and the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), Joel Sánchez. ”It will have enough time to consolidate a hegemonic party dynamic,” commented political scientist Álvaro Artiga, from the Central American University (UCA).

– “Prosperity” is coming –

This millennial regular on social media, who wears jeans and a sweater, with a well-groomed beard and gelled hair, came to power in 2019 with 53% of the votes promising “change” to a population fed up with the Arena-FMLN bipartisanship that did not resolve the issues. problems of insecurity and poverty.

”Now is our time to move forward. Now what is coming for El Salvador is a period of prosperity because there is no longer a brake on starting a business, there is no longer a brake on studying, there is no longer a brake on working, there is no longer a brake on tourism,” the president said in Press conference.

29% of the 6.5 million Salvadorans living in the country are poor, according to ECLAC, and many continue to emigrate to the United States in search of work. Some 3 million live abroad and send remittances worth 8 billion dollars annually, vital for the local population.

Even with everything and his popularity, the president did not manage to get Salvadorans to use the bitcoin that in 2021 he imposed as legal tender in a dollarized economy, according to him, to energize it. With between five and seven million followers on the X networks, Tiktok, Instagram and Facebook, Bukele, father of two girls, also promotes megaprojects and tourism in “the safest country in Latin America.”