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| - Prosecutors on Tuesday raided the offices of El Salvador's opposition-dominated congress in a probe into alleged corruption just weeks after President Nayib Bukele's allies won a parliamentary election. The public prosecutor's office tweeted that its officers were executing a search warrant to look for alleged phantom congress employees -- people who earn a salary without doing any work. Until May 1, when a new congress will be sworn in, the legislature remains in the hands of Bukele's political rivals. He fulfilled his objective in the February 28 elections of winning an absolute majority in parliament, giving him more power over crucial decisions and lawmaking. The New Ideas party Bukele founded and the Grand Alliance for National Unity, through which he came to power, jointly received well over half the votes. Bukele will now have his hands untied after a frustrating two years of blockages by an opposition-controlled parliament. A labor union recently claimed there were as many as 1,000 phantom workers in congress. Bukele, 39, is accused by his detractors of authoritarianism. Last February, in a bid to intimidate MPs into approving a loan to finance an anti-crime plan, the president ordered heavily armed police and soldiers to storm parliament. This move led to lawmakers calling this month for a congressional committee to declare Bukele "mentally incapable" of governing -- a move he denounced as an "attempted parliamentary coup." Since the signing of a peace deal in 1992 to end more than a decade of civil war, no party has won an absolute majority in Parliament, forcing opposing political groupings into dialogue and compromise. ob/mav/gma/mlr/caw
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