San Salvador [El Salvador], February 4 : As the voting is underway in the El Salvador polls on Sunday, strongman president Nayib Bukele is expected to easily win a second term, CNN reported.
This comes as 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 per cent in independent surveys.
His supporters laud the 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 of detaining innocent people and subjecting prisoners to dehumanizing conditions behind bars, including torture, according to CNN.
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 the thousand they detained, a hundred were innocent," Jackelyne Zelaya, whose niece was a bystander killed in a 2017 gang shootout, told CNN.
"Then I look at my sons; I have two aged 16 and 23, and seeing them being able to go out at night and 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."
Polls close at 6 pm (local time) eastern time, with results expected to be announced within hours.
A lopsided win for Bukele would likely give the young leader more leeway to reform El Salvador in his heavy-handed vision.
Bukele has not shied away from comparisons to autocrats - once setting his Twitter biography to read "world's coolest dictator" - and his government has said they are "eliminating" democracy in the country, CNN reported.
Notably, his being able to run for a second term is a clear example of the effort.
El Salvador's constitution bars presidents from seeking re-election. But the country's Congress in 2021 replaced the top judges on the Supreme Court with a new class willing to grant him the power.
The leaders in the region are paying close attention to the polls.
The so-called "Bukele method" has fast become the Latin American security policy au courant, with the presidents of Honduras and Ecuador both clearing the way for mass arrests in their own countries to disrupt spiralling gang violence, as reported by CNN.
According to a 2023 poll by Latinobarometro, in at least 13 countries in Latin America, most of the population "wouldn't mind an undemocratic government rising to power if it resolved problems".
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