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Nayib Bukele is preparing for a second term as president of El Salvador after the election.
The most important information about the “coolest dictator in the world”.
SAN SALVADOR - Nayib Bukele, the 42-year-old president of El Salvador, has been re-elected in a landslide.
He then boasted that the Central American country had established a one-party system using democratic means.
“The entire opposition has been crushed,” he said on Sunday evening.
Nayib Bukele celebrates his election victory.
© Camilo Freedman/Imago
The vote count was marred by internet outages and other irregularities;
the authorities eventually resorted to manual counting.
With 70 percent of polling stations counted, Bukele had about 1.6 million votes - more than 10 times as many as his nearest rival, leftist Manuel Flores.
An election day poll conducted by CID Gallup showed that Bukele had received around 87 percent of the vote.
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El Salvador elections: If Bukele is so popular, why is the election so controversial?
Bukele, who has jokingly described himself as the "coolest dictator in the world," ran despite the constitution's ban on re-electing a president.
His critics fear that the poor Central American country is on the way to becoming an authoritarian one-party state, along the lines of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.
Proponents have a very different vision: They see a leader who defeated the country's murderous gangs with an iron fist.
Bukele is often compared to former US President Donald Trump - another charismatic politician willing to defy traditional democratic norms.
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Who is Nayib Bukele?
Bukele is one of the most popular politicians in the world.
Opinion surveys regularly give him approval ratings of over 80 percent.
The millennial of Palestinian descent, who often appears in jeans and a baseball cap, worked as a marketing executive before serving as mayor of San Salvador from 2015 to 2018.
He won the presidency in 2019, becoming Latin America's youngest leader and shattering the two-party system that had existed since the 1979-1992 war between the left-wing guerrillas and the conservative government.
El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele attends a news conference in San Salvador on July 28.
© Fred Ramos/The Washington Post
Like Trump, Bukele is something of a showman who stunned Salvadorans by adopting Bitcoin as an official currency, hosting the Miss Universe pageant and building a "mega-prison" for 40,000 gang members.
His greatest success is breaking up the gangs.
As Latin America becomes increasingly concerned about organized crime, other politicians have used Bukele's tactics as a model.
Bukele broke up the gangs - what's wrong with that?
Nothing, say its supporters.
MS-13 and the 18th Street gangs had killed tens of thousands of people, extorted businesses, and divided the country into rival zones controlled by brute force and terror.
But the Bukele government has used emergency powers to crack down, suspending various rights and procedural guarantees.
It has imprisoned more than 75,000 suspects - making the country with around 6 million inhabitants the highest incarceration rate in the world.
(The government has now released about 7,000 people.)
Many people were arbitrarily detained, according to human rights groups that have documented the torture and deaths of scores of prisoners.
Bukele's vice presidential candidate, Félix Ulloa, recently told the Associated Press that mistakes were made in the anti-gang offensive, but "there is no police state."
The government plans to hold mass trials against up to 900 people.
All of this raises a nagging question: Is the government's success due to its tough policies - or did it negotiate with the gangs?
The Bukele government has vowed to show no mercy to criminals, and yet in 2021 it secretly released a top MS-13 leader named Crook from prison, according to investigative news agency El Faro.
Bukele's government then made a deal with another gang member who promised to recapture Crook before Sunday's elections by working with Mexico's Jalisco cartel, according to El Faro.
(Crook was eventually arrested by Mexican authorities and transferred to the United States to stand trial.)
Bukele's government has denied negotiating with the gangs.
What is at stake in El Salvador's elections?
Pro-democracy activists fear that a second term for Bukele will lead to ever greater concentration of power.
Eduardo Escobar, head of the civil initiative Acción Ciudadana, predicts that the country will have “a hegemonic party” and opposition parties “that will become an ornament.”
Before the election, Bukele's New Ideas party held about two-thirds of the seats in the 84-member Congress;
their allies had several more.
However, an electoral law reform passed last year will shrink the body to 60 seats.
Thanks to a measure described by critics as gerrymandering, Bukele's party could end up controlling almost all of the seats.
Bukele memorabilia is sold at a market in downtown San Salvador.
© Fred Ramos/The Washington Post
Bukele's party has already used its majority to fire Supreme Court judges and purge the judiciary.
Lawmakers declared a month-long state of emergency in March 2022 after a flare-up in gang violence.
They extended it 22 times.
Critics say there will be even fewer checks and balances in a country where authorities have harassed journalists, opposition leaders and human rights activists and the government has tightened access to information such as crime statistics.
Bukele notes that citizens overwhelmingly approve of his policies.
Óscar Picardo, director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Innovation at Francisco Gavidia University, said he feared the rise of a dictatorship like that in neighboring Nicaragua.
“I think Nicaragua is a good mirror in which we can see ourselves in the future,” he said.
How could Bukele run again if the constitution does not allow re-election?
In 2021, Supreme Court justices appointed by pro-Bukele lawmakers ruled that a president can seek a second consecutive five-year term as long as he was not in office "in the immediately preceding period."
Bukele took a leave of absence in December to comply with the ruling.
Many Latin American countries prohibit the immediate re-election of a president because it often happens in the region that heads of state become entrenched in office and become authoritarian.
The Biden administration called the court's 2021 re-election ruling unconstitutional and said it undermined democracy.
What is the relationship between Bukele and the United States?
It's complicated.
Washington has had close ties with the Central American country since the 1980s, when the US government supported the fight against the insurgents with billions of dollars.
More than a quarter of Salvadorans have moved to the United States, and irregular migration is a top U.S. concern.
Bukele had a good relationship with Trump, calling him “very nice and cool” during a 2019 visit to the White House.
Relations became strained after President Biden took office.
His administration frequently accused the Bukele government of democratic backsliding and imposed sanctions on three of his key aides for alleged corruption and secret negotiations with gangs.
In recent months, the government has apparently held back from public criticism.
In October, a senior State Department official, Brian Nichols, met with Bukele.
When asked about the leader's re-election, Nichols said "Salvadoran voters can decide whether or not they agree with this process."
Former U.S. officials and analysts say the Biden administration has changed its approach in response to the Salvadoran leader's popularity and almost certain re-election.
U.S. officials say they have continued to privately express concerns about human rights.
About the author
Mary Beth Sheridan
is Mexico and Central America correspondent for The Washington Post.
Previously she worked in Rome, Bogota, Colombia and in Mexico for five years in the 1990s.
She has also covered immigration, homeland security and diplomacy for the Post and was deputy foreign editor from 2016 to 2018.
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on February 5, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.