Voting underway in El Salvador, where strongman president’s victory is all but assured

Polls are open Sunday in El Salvador, where the strongman president Nayib Bukele is expected to easily win a second term amid a dramatic turnaround in the country’s once-sky high levels of violence.

Polls are open in El Salvador, where the strongman president Nayib Bukele is expected to easily win a second term amid a dramatic turnaround in the country’s once-sky high levels of violence. Bukele, 42, faced little in the way of organized opposition and enjoys one of the highest favorability ratings in the region, regularly polling above 70% in independent surveys. His supporters trumpet a crackdown on criminal gangs in the country that resulted in a dramatic fall in the murder rate, once the highest in the world. But the mass arrests – El Salvador now has the world’s highest incarceration rate – have also triggered outcry from human rights groups, who allege Bukele’s government has detained innocent people and subjected prisoners to dehumanizing conditions behind bars, including torture. The dissonance has elevated the election in this small Central American state to a broader referendum on the extent that voters are willing to relinquish basic liberties in exchange for relative peace and safety. “I know it’s not perfect, maybe of a thousand they detained, a hundred were innocent,” Jackelyne Zelaya, whose niece was a bystander killed in a 2017 gang shootout, told CNN earlier this week. “Then I look at my sons, I have two aged 16 and 23, and seeing them being able to go out at night, go to play ball down the road with their friends without fearing they could be killed or recruited for something bad, that has no price.”