Congressional polls begin in El Salvador

People in El Salvador have gone to the polls in congressional elections to elect new legislators as well as mayors.

The Sunday elections are a tight contest between the ruling left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) of President Salvador Sanchez Ceren and the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA).

Salvadorans are to elect 262 mayors, some 3,000 municipal council members, and 20 country representatives for the Central American country’s parliament.

Polls will close in the early evening, and the first results are expected to be announced at around 0400 GMT on Monday.

From civil war to political rivalry

The FMLN and ARENA fought each other in a civil war from 1980 to 1992, and their rivalry has now entered politics.

Sanchez Ceren (pictured above), who took office in June 2014, has voiced determinations to tackle gang violence in the country.

El Salvador is in the grasp of dreadful violence carried out by rival drug gangs, including Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) and Barrio 18.

Across the country, criminal groups, with an estimated 50,000 members on the streets and another 10,000 in prisons, control whole neighborhoods and run drug trafficking as well as extortion rackets.

The gangs, or “maras,” emerged in the Latino areas of Los Angeles in the 1980s and arrived in El Salvador after the United States deported scores of immigrants who had fled north to escape the civil war between 1979 and 1992.

Having the fourth-highest homicide rate in the world, 41.2 a year per 100,000 inhabitants, El Salvador is also facing a mounting government debt burden of USD 2.1-billion and a high poverty rate that stands at more than 40 percent of the population.

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