El Salvador votes for president as the country seeks a new way to deal with gangs

SAN SALVADOR — Salvadorans went to the polls Sunday after a hard-fought presidential campaign featuring three main candidates. But voters are most worried about a political force that won’t be on the ballot: the gangs blamed for horrific bloodshed in this Central American nation.

El Salvador is one of the most violent countries in the world, with more than 3,300 homicides last year in a nation of roughly 6.5 million residents. Although murder rates have been decreasing from a peak in 2015, about 57 percent of Salvadorans see insecurity as the country’s biggest problem, according to a recent survey by the polling institute at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas. The presidential candidates have pledged to find new ways to reduce the violence, offering crime-prevention programs instead of an iron-fisted approach. But they have provided few details.

Three pre-election polls indicated that more than half of possible voters support Nayib Bukele, a businessman and former mayor of San Salvador, who is running for the center-right party GANA, which stands for Grand Alliance for National Unity. The right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, known as ARENA, finished first in legislative elections last year, but its candidate, supermarket mogul Carlos Calleja, is running second in the polls. Hugo Martínez, the former foreign minister and a member of the left-wing Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN, is predicted to receive less than 20 percent of the vote. President Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the FMLN is limited to one term.

Since the end of El Salvador’s 12-year civil war in 1992, two parties have dominated the country’s political system: ARENA and the FMLN. But Salvadorans are looking for a new option after major corruption scandals and what many voters see as a lack of progress in tackling crime.