El Salvador’s Bukele claims ‘record’ reelection victory

Fireworks erupted in El Salvador’s capital on Sunday as President Nayib Bukele claimed a massive first-round reelection victory on the back of a “war” on gangs credited with slashing homicide rates in the violenceweary country.

Bukele, 42, claimed to have won more than 85 percent of the presidential vote and his party Nuevas Ideas clinched 58 of the 60 seats in parliament.

In a victory speech delivered to cheering, flag-waving crowds from a balcony of the National Palace before final official results were announced, Bukele claimed his win represented “the biggest difference between first place and second place in the history” of democratic presidential elections anywhere.

And he said El Salvador would be the first country with “a oneparty system in a democracy.”

As Bukele was speaking, partial results released by the Supreme

Electoral Tribunal on Sunday night showed that nearly 83 percent of votes cast were for the president, streaks ahead of five competitors.

Bukele had already claimed a “record” victory on X, formerly Twitter, hours before, as supporters set off fireworks in several areas of the capital San Salvador, and hundreds gathered on a central square chanted “Nayib! Nayib!”

He polls as Latin America’s most popular leader, mainly for his roundup of more than 75,000 presumed gangsters under a state of emergency that entered into force nearly two years ago.

El Salvador’s fearsome gangs had taken some 120,000 civilian lives in three decades, said the government, which added that criminal groups controlled 80 percent of the country when Bukele took power in 2019.

Last year, the country that was once one of the most dangerous in the world, saw the murder rate plummet to its lowest level in three decades — far below the global average.

‘Cancer of gangs’

Shortly after voting on Sunday, Bukele batted away criticism of his rights record and boasted he had cured the Central American country of a “cancer” of gangs.

“Why do we have the biggest incarceration rate in the world? Because we ... changed the murder capital of the world, the world’s most dangerous country, into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere,” he told reporters in English.

“The only way to do that is to arrest all the murderers,” he said.

Activists say many innocents, including minors, have been caught up in the dragnet, locked up in inhumane conditions and even subjected to torture.

Thousands are held in a brand-new prison — plugged as the largest in the Americas — which the president had built in a matter of months.

“We did surgery, we are in radiotherapy, and we will leave healthy without the cancer of gangs,” insisted Bukele, who has ironically adopted the moniker “dictator” sometimes used to describe him.

He added that “our police made a couple of mistakes. Of course they did, that’s why our judicial system has been freeing innocent people” — some 7,000 to date.

In December, an Amnesty International report raised alarm over the “gradual replacement of gang violence with state violence,” pointing to arbitrary arrests.

But for most Salvadorans, this seems to be a not-too-pressing issue.

“Things were ugly before,” Sandra Burgos, 68, told Agence FrancePresse (AFP) in La Campanera, a once-notoriously violent neighborhood of San Salvador which, in the time of gang rule, was divided into numerous no-go areas.

“Now we are fine. We can move around ... before it was not possible,” she said.