EL SALVADOR
Bullets and Suitcases
Murders in El Salvador, one of the most dangerous countries in the world, declined by half between 2015 and 2018.
That’s the good news.
Still, in the first 20 days of this year, authorities recorded more than 200 homicides, a big spike compared to the recent trend.
What’s happening? Perhaps the killings are related to conflicts arising between police-led death squads and gangs as El Salvador moves closer to presidential elections slated for Feb. 3, suggestedInSite Crime, a foundation that researches violence in Latin America.
A shift in the political landscape could explain why tensions are high.
Ineligible to run for re-election for a consecutive term, President Salvador Sánchez Cerén has an approval rating of around 26 percent, according to the Americas Society/Council of the Americas. His political party, the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, lost ground in legislative and local elections last year. The party’s presidential nominee is in third place in the polls.
The FMLN’s failure to curb crime is a key factor in the party’s dismal prospects. Around 2,700 Salvadorans have joined migrant caravans in hopes of finding a better life in the US, Reutersreported.
The ex-mayor of the capital of San Salvador, Nayib Bukele, a former FMLN member, is the front-runner in the race to succeed Sánchez Cerén. Bukele formed a new opposition party, the Grand Alliance for National Unity, after the FMLN kicked him out for only half-heartedly embracing socialism. Bukele has appealed to the urban middle class with a tight campaign using social media.
In second place is Carlos Calleja of the Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA, the traditional alternative to the FMLN.
The alliance has been tarred by probes that recently revealed widespread corruption in former ARENA administrations. Ex-President Antonio Saca, an ARENA leader who served from 2004 to 2009, confessed last summer to illegally misappropriating more than $300 million, for example, noted Global Americans, a news website run by Columbia University professor Christopher Sabatini.
It’s no wonder that voters are interested in change.
But Bukele, an entrepreneur, and Calleja, a supermarket chain owner, are two of the richest men in the country. They already are fixtures in a power structure that hasn’t helped Salvadorans much,argued the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, a left-wing US-based activist group with alleged ties to the FMLN.
It quoted an analysis by Hilary Goodfriend, a writer for the now-defunct news site Upside Down World, who wrote that Bukele and Calleja are both “capitalists who, no longer content behind the scenes, are elbowing out the middlemen and jockeying to take the reins themselves.”
Still, some say that when bullets are flying and an exodus of citizens is underway, at least someone is stepping forward.
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