President Nayib Bukele on February 4 secured a thumping victory in El Salvador's elections after voters cast aside concerns about erosion of democracy to reward him for a fierce gang crackdown that transformed security in the Central American country.
Provisional results on February 5 show Bukele winning 83 percent support with just over 70 percent of the ballots counted. Bukele declared himself the winner before official results were announced, claiming to have attained more than 85 percent of the vote.
Wildly popular, Bukele has campaigned on the success of his security strategy under which authorities suspended civil liberties to arrest more than 75,000 Salvadorans without charges. The detentions led to a sharp decline in nationwide murder rates and fundamentally altered a country of 6.3 million people that was once among the world's most dangerous.
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