2019 El Salvador Presidential Election Sunday Feb 03,2019

 Nearly a quarter of all Salvadorans live in the United States, and those expatriates send back more than $5 billion a year in remittances—around 18 % of El Salvador’s economy.

 As Salvadorans continue to flee north towards the United States, the policies of a new government could have implications for migration patterns and the overall security and economic stability of the region

El Salvador ended 2018 with a homicide rate of 50 for every 100,000 thousand people, the highest homicide rate in Central America, higher than both Guatemala and Honduras.

Although the country’s civil war—which pitted a right-wing government and its death squads against the left-wing guerillas of the parties and organizations that united under the banner of the FMLN—ended 27 years ago, many of the same problems that drove the violence then remain latent today

The country also faces extreme levels of inequality.

Only four in 10 schoolchildren reach the equivalent of high school, and only two of those 10 kids will go on to college. There remain in the country more than 600,000 citizens who don’t have access to potable water. Abortion is completely criminalized, LGBTQ rights are unrecognized

Presidential Candidates

The presidential candidate for the Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional, GANA, Nayib Bukele, right, along with his running mate Felix Ulloa

Results from 10 different polling firms say the 37-year-old Bukele leads Carlos Calleja of the conservative New Country coalition and Hugo Martinez of the party formed by El Salvador’s former FMLN guerrillas.

Nayib Bukele, a businessman who distributes Yamaha motorcycles and owns nightclubs, represents the Grand National Alliance for Unity.

Why do Salvadorans migrate?” Nayib Bukele, the front-runner in the upcoming Salvadoran presidential elections recently asked. “They migrate because of lack of hope. We see it in the caravans. It’s hope that moves the Salvadorans.”

Both hopeful and despairing Salvadorans head to the polls on February 03,2019 and a political shakeup of the small Central American country is expected.

After ten years in power, the left-leaning Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) seems likely to be unseated by the young, wealthy, shapeshifting former mayor of San Salvador, Nayib
 Bukele, who recently took the mantle of the young Great National Alliance (GANA).

But Nayib Bukele’s compromises to old-guard conservatives and his easy embrace of the right-wing GANA—despite the fact that as recently as 2017 he was a member of FMLN—makes it hard to judge which way he would take the country if elected.

If no candidate wins a majority of votes, a runoff between the top two candidates would take place March 10,2019