Milagro Navas, the Salvadoran mayor who defeated Bukele's allies in the elections

Three hours after the polls closed on March 3 in El Salvador, Zoila Milagro Navas was once again consecrated as mayor of the Antiguo Cuscatlán district.

Navas was the only female activist from a party not allied to the ruling party who managed to win the municipal race.

“I am David against a Goliath,” said the Salvadoran mayor who has been governing the district of Antiguo Cuscatlán for 36 years.

Navas won against Michelle Sol, who had the support of President Nayib Bukele, who was re-elected in the presidential elections with 84% of the valid votes.

Nuevas Ideas, Bukele's party, promoted voting in municipal elections for “The N of Nayib” and “The N for New Ideas”. With 78.2% of the minutes processed until noon on March 13, Nuevas Ideas had won 26 of 44 mayoralties.

Bukele said on the night of the elections in his Villanueva, Huizúcar, Zaragoza, Antiguo Cuscatlán and Nuevo Cuscatlán.

Navas answered to the message: “There are not 43, we will be 44 mayors that will seek the well-being of all Salvadorans.”

El Salvador was in civil war when Milagro Navas was elected mayor for the first time, in 1988, with the Nationalist Republican Alliance party (ARENA), a traditional right-wing party that was the opposition in those years.

ARENA governed El Salvador for 20 years, and Navas remained mayor. Then, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) governed for 10 years, and Navas continued to lead Antiguo Cuscatlán.

In 2012, Bukele entered El Salvador politics as mayor of the Nuevo Cuscatlán district, territorially smaller than Antiguo Cuscatlán, but with important economic indicators, and left Michelle Sol, considered his political heir, at the head of Nuevo Cuscatlán.

Bukele won San Salvador in 2015 and subsequently the presidency in 2019. With his political career on the rise, ARENA and the FMLN lost their power. The results of the recent elections gave ARENA only two of the 60 seats in Congress. The FMLN did not obtain any. For the mayoralties, ARENA won one, with Navas, and the FMLN none.

Sol is the current Minister of Housing and the wife of the president of the Assembly, Ernesto Castro, part of Bukele's trusted circle.

“Michelle Sol has a direct line with the president,” acknowledged the head of the Nuevas Ideas bench, Christian Guevara, to local media.

Navas challenged Sol to a debate about the needs of the five districts in contention, but Sol refused to debate, justifying that this was “the old way of doing politics.”

Sol lost the La Libertad Este mayoralty with 8,736 votes compared to the 17,512 that Navas obtained.

Some of the reasons why Navas continues to be re-elected, according to residents of that district, are security, the economy and services, such as electric lighting, street paving and waste collection, which have not failed in her years of service. municipal government.

According to social and economic indicators, this is one of the most prosperous districts in El Salvador. Its literacy rate is 98% and only three out of every 10 inhabitants are considered poor, according to the results of the Quality of Life Survey 2022 prepared by “El Salvador como Vamos”, with support from the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

In addition, 89% of citizens feel safe in Antiguo Cuscatlán and 91% are satisfied with the home they live in.

In comparison, in San Salvador before the emergency regime imposed by Bukele, only three out of every 10 inhabitants in the Salvadoran capital felt safe.

After San Salvador, Antiguo Cuscatlán is the district that generates the most income, according to the Salvadoran media The printing press.

“Experience guarantees success” was the motto of Navas' political campaign.

Forgetting the colors of his party, red, blue and white, Navas chose to campaign using the color pink.

Three of the four former presidents who governed with ARENA were linked to corruption cases, something that did not generate political returns for Navas. The night of his victory, he said he “was shedding his partisan colors.”

Another campaign strategy was not to confront Bukele. The mayor told Bukele that she needed to work with the central government to carry out works that benefit the municipality.

“One swallow doesn't make a summer,” she exclaimed in front of a crowd of supporters the night she was declared the winner.

His new municipal mandate will cover the districts of Antiguo Cuscatlán, Nuevo Cuscatlán, Huizúcar, San José Villanueva and Zaragoza, due to the new municipal composition approved by the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly, in which legislators reduced the municipalities from 262 to 44.

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