More than 6 million Salvadorans are expected to go to the polls this Sunday (4) to participate in the presidential and legislative elections that will define whether the authoritarian model adopted by the current president and candidate for re-election, Nayib Bukele, will continue for another four years or whether the Executive will be renewed. The alternatives, however, do not appear well placed in the polls and defeating the current president at the polls may not be an easy task.
According to a study published at the end of January by the University Institute of Public Opinion (Iudop) at the José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA), Bukele has an impressive 81.9% of voting intentions and is a strong favorite. Second place is Manuel Flores Cornejo, known as “Chino” Flores, from the left-wing party Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). However, the candidate appears with just 4.2%, followed by the right-wing José Humberto Sánchez, from the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena) party, who has 3.4% of voting intentions.
The enormous advantage presented by Bukele in the survey is a demonstration in numbers of the change in political hegemony that has occurred in El Salvador in recent years, since the country’s presidency was in the hands of Arena for consecutive terms between 1994 and 2009, and the FMLN between 2009 and 2019, when the current president took office.
But despite the unfavorable scenario in the polls, the Salvadoran left says it is optimistic about this Sunday’s election and arrives at the vote “with a lot of hope”. That’s what I told the Brazil in fact FMLN deputy Anabel Belloso, who has been traveling the country in search of votes for re-election and says she does not believe that the polls reflect what voters actually think.
“In the last elections, many people unfortunately fell into a campaign full of lies and hatred, but today it is no longer like that, there is disapproval of Bukele’s party and this creates an opportunity for us to regain our credibility and be an alternative”, he said.
A parliamentarian for two consecutive periods, Belloso watched from inside Parliament as the FMLN bench shrank from 31 to 23 deputies in 2018, and from 23 to just 4 in 2021, when Bukele’s party finally took control of the Legislature and the president began to govern practically without parliamentary opposition. “We are there because it is important to occupy the spaces, but none of our proposals are even debated”, he denounces.
This parliamentary context is an example of the expanded process of institutional deterioration that El Salvador has been going through since the current president came to power. Presented as an outsider of the political system, Bukele accuses FMLN and Arena of representing a “political oligarchy” that is outdated and must be “combated” by his party and its supporters.
To this end, the president who has already classified himself as a “cool dictator (slang for cool, in free translation)” used authoritarian measures, going so far as to authorize the invasion of Congress by the Armed Forces in 2020 and the removal of judges from the Supreme Court in 2021.
For the elections, the climate remains the same and left-wing parties denounce an atmosphere of intimidation on the part of the government. “It’s an electoral scenario that we haven’t seen since the military dictatorship, with a level of repression that has been increasing in recent months,” said Belloso.
‘Success’ in security, fear in the population
One of the elements that helps this perception of brutality and authoritarianism is the growing militarization of the country. The president has a strict security plan to combat organized crime groups and which, according to data from the Salvadoran government itself, has good results, reducing the homicide rate and violence rates.
The “war on crime” project was facilitated by the state of exception that the country has been experiencing since 2022 and which, despite being an emergency measure, has been constantly renewed. “Of course, a criminal must pay in court, but there are laws for that in our country, we cannot risk innocent people being arrested, there are many innocent people in jail”, says the deputy.
Critical of Bukele’s decisions, the parliamentarian says that the FMLN seeks a firm response against crime in the country, but that human rights and institutions that allow transparency and internal audits must be respected. “We cannot accept that, instead of establishing a true security policy, the innocent and the population pay,” she says.
Poverty and repression: the movements speak
It is not only at the party level that the government’s authoritarian measures are felt. Salvadoran popular movements also denounce a worsening of workers’ living conditions and an increase in arrests and persecution of activists and militants.
To the Brazil in factMarisela Ramírez, from the Popular Resistance and Rebellion Bloc, states that since the peace agreements between the State and the then FMLN guerrilla were signed in 1992 “there has been no political prisoner in the country, until now”.
“So there is a democratic framework that was being reduced little by little, while power was concentrated in this character [Bukele]supported by the richest sectors of El Salvador, a business clan linked to the traditional oligarchy that, in addition, has the support of North American imperialism”, he said.
The activist also states that the movements are building a “very strong campaign for the elections so that representatives from other countries can see the series of human rights violations, disappearances carried out by the military and police, torture in prisons, political persecution, etc. is committing.”
“Very little is heard about this, the persecution, the social setbacks, the wives of people in extreme poverty, the thousands of migrants. These are indicators that show that there are no decent living conditions for the population,” she says.
Editing: Rodrigo Durão Coelho