SAN SALVADOR, Feb 5, 2024 (BSS/AFP) - Fireworks erupted in El Salvador's

capital Sunday as gang-busting President Nayib Bukele claimed to have won
reelection with more than 85 percent of votes cast: "a record in the entire
democratic history of the world."

Bukele, 42, polls as Latin America's most popular leader, possibly the world,
on the back of a war on gangs that has slashed homicide rates in the
violence-weary country.

"According to our numbers we have won the presidential election with more
than 85 percent of votes," he said on X, formerly Twitter, two hours after
polls closed but before official results were announced.

As fireworks went off in different parts of San Salvador, hundreds of people
gathered on a central square cheering and blowing whistles in celebration.

"We are more than happy with this victory: we will have Bukele for five more
years," Lorena Escobar, a 38-year-old nurse, told AFP.

El Salvador's fearsome gangs took some 120,000 civilian lives in three
decades, according to the government, which says criminal groups controlled
80 percent of the country when Bukele took power in 2019.

Under a state of emergency introduced in March 2022, his government has
rounded up more than 75,000 gangsters -- real and suspected.

And last year, the country that was once one of the most dangerous in the
world, saw the murder rate plummet to its lowest level in three decades --
far below the global average.

Bukele also claimed his Nuevas Ideas party had won 58 of the 60 seats in the
legislative assembly, according to the president's X post, which closed with:
"God bless El Salvador."

- 'Cancer of gangs' -

Shortly after voting Sunday, Bukele batted away criticism of his rights
record and boasted he had cured the Central American country of a "cancer" of
gangs.

"Why do we have the biggest incarceration rate in the world? Because we...
changed the murder capital of the world, the world's most dangerous country,
into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere," he said.

"The only way to do that is to arrest all the murderers."

Activists say many innocents -- including minors -- have been caught up in
the dragnet, locked up in inhumane conditions and even subjected to torture.

Thousands are held in a brand-new prison -- plugged as the largest in the
Americas -- which the president had built in a matter of months.

"We did surgery, we are in radiotherapy, and we will leave healthy without
the cancer of gangs," insisted Bukele, accusing Westerners of seeking to
impose their "liberal ideas of what a democracy should be" on El Salvador.

- 'Dictator' -

Bukele's very candidacy is controversial, having been made possible by a
loyalist Supreme Court ruling allowing him to bypass a constitutional ban on
successive terms.

On Sunday, asked whether he would change the law to seek a third term, the
president replied: "I don't think constitutional reform is necessary."

He did not make it clear what his future plans were.

Bukele, who has ironically adopted the monicker "dictator" sometimes used to
describe him, had urged Salvadorans to vote en masse "so that we have a
legislative assembly that can continue approving the state of emergency."

In December, an Amnesty International report raised alarm over the "gradual
replacement of gang violence with state violence," pointing to arbitrary
arrests.

But for most Salvadorans, this seems to be a not-too-pressing issue.

"Things were ugly before," said Sandra Burgos, 68, who recently opened a
small bookstore in La Campanera -- a once notoriously violent neighborhood of
San Salvador which in the time of gang rule was divided into numerous no-go
areas.

"Now we are fine. We can move around... before it was not possible."

- 'State violence' -

Centralization of power is another concern, with the Bukele-aligned
legislature having replaced top judges and the attorney general -- both
institutions he had clashed with.

There are also worries about worsening antagonism towards critics and
independent media, and of opaque public accounting.

El Salvador's ailing economy will be a major challenge for Bukele's second
term, with high public debt and the president's investment of taxpayer money
in bitcoin widely seen as a failed gambit.

Nearly 30 percent of Salvadorans lived in poverty in 2022, according to the
UN's Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Voting in El Salvador is not compulsory, and turnout was just over 50 percent
in 2019, when Bukele won in the first round with 53 percent of the vote.