In El Salvador, self-styled ‘world’s coolest dictator’ Nayib Bukele heads for re-election amid human rights concerns

When Jocelyn Zelaya was caught in a hail of gunfire on the streets of San Salvador in 2017, the young mother was simply “in the wrong place, at the wrong time,” says her aunt Jackelyne.

When Jocelyn Zelaya was caught in a hail of gunfire on the streets of San Salvador in 2017, the young mother was simply “in the wrong place, at the wrong time,” says her aunt Jackelyne. A group of gunmen armed with automatic weapons had opened fire to assassinate a member of a rival gang on the other side of the road. Zelaya, then 20, was caught in the line of fire. She was hit by eight bullets, her aunt told CNN. “But she didn’t die then, they took her to hospital,” Jackelyne Zelaya recalls, struggling to contain her tears. “The attack was at about six in the afternoon, and when I got to the hospital at ten, she had just died. Her body was still warm.” Jocelyn’s death, which deprived one-year-old Marcela of her mother, was just one of thousands of killings that year in El Salvador, a period when the tiny Central American nation of six million people had the highest murder rates in the world according to the World Bank. Many of the dead, like Jocelyn, were innocent bystanders caught in a turf war between two enormous criminal gangs, the Mara Salvatrucha and the Barrio 18. To this day Zelaya doesn’t know which gang was responsible for killing her niece. “We were left alone in our pain. We buried her and raised her daughter having to explain to her why her mom isn’t here,” she says.