President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s governing National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party and its allies are hoping to head off an opposition challenge and keep their majority in the lower house of Congress.

But in recent weeks, Mexican media have been running daily stories of threats, kidnappings, attacks and murders committed against candidates, campaign aides and election officials, that have mostly been blamed on the country’s powerful drug cartels and crime groups that permeate local politics.

The cartels – or the “party of organised crime” as government officials call them – have been using bribery and violence to try to influence many of the election races, seeking to lever in candidates favourable to their interests.

Some observers conservatively report an election campaign toll of nearly 90 killed, but others say the number of election-related homicides is closer to 150.

“The election is 6 June, but [organised] crime has already voted,” commentator Paola Rojas wrote in leading Mexican daily El Universal on 31 May.

On the political front, Sunday’s elections are being viewed as a referendum on the leftist rule of 67-year-old López Obrador, who is popularly known by his initials, Amlo.

The Mexican leader is half way through his six-year term, and the vote will test popular support for his so-called 4T (Fourth Transformation) reformist government project aimed at ending the privileges and corruption of Mexican elites and improving the lot of ordinary citizens.

Despite maintaining high approval ratings compared to many of his Latin American peers, Mr López Obrador and his administration have faced increasing criticism for their handling of the Covid-19 pandemic – Mexico remains a regional hotspot – and also for their failure to curb the power of the drug cartels and the crime and violence they inflict on Mexican society.

Some critics say the government has surrendered to the cartels, while others chastise the president for prioritising prestige infrastructure projects, such as his Maya Train railway plan, while coronavirus deaths and cases have continued to rise.

The Mexican leader has also faced media scrutiny at home for his sensitivity to criticism, which some detractors say reveals an authoritarian streak. Relations with northern neighbour the United States have been troubled by concerns over intelligence co-operation in fighting the cartels.

Despite this, Mr López Obrador’s Morena party and its allies are aiming to try to hold on to their majority in the lower house of Congress they gained in the 2018 elections, so they can continue to push through legislation in support of the president’s agenda.

Mexico’s main opposition parties have formed an electoral and legislative alliance, and are seeking to overturn the government’s dominance in the legislature.

Recent opinion polls suggest the governing Morena coalition could still come close to retaining its lower house super-majority – 334 seats are required for this – but the battle could be hard fought.

With more than 21,000 elected posts at stake, including 500 federal legislators seats, 15 of the 32 state governorships, members of 30 state congresses and nearly 2,000 mayors’ positions, the election is being described by observers as the largest and most competitive in Mexico’s history.

And although the electoral violence of recent weeks has been depressingly familiar, one brighter spot has been signs of greater diversity in the thousands of candidates running for office.

Daily Excelsior reported on 6 April that there were 43 LGBTQ candidates – a new record for this group – 57 immigrants, 57 individuals with disabilities, 28 from the Afro-Mexican community and 98 members of indigenous communities participating in the elections.

If his plan is backed by congress, the Central American country would be first in the world to formally adopt the digital currency.

It would be used alongside the US dollar, El Salvador’s official currency.

President Nayib Bukele says Bitcoin will make it easier for Salvadorans living abroad to send payments home.

“In the short term, this will generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy,” Mr Bukele told a Bitcoin conference in Florida, adding that it could also boost investment to the country.

He said he would send the legislation to congress next week.

Should it pass, the move would open up financial services to the 70% of Salvadorans who do not have bank accounts, the president said.

El Salvador’s economy relies heavily on remittances, or money sent home from abroad, which make up around 20% of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP).

More than two million Salvadorans live outside the country, but they continue to keep close ties to their place of birth, sending back more than $4bn (£2.9bn) each year.

Current services can charge fees for such transfers, which can take days to arrive and sometimes need to be picked up in person, according to the announcement.

“This will improve lives and the future of millions,” Mr Bukele said.

He did not give more details about how the policy would work.

Bitcoin, a virtual asset with no direct connection to the real economy, has seen large fluctuations in value over the years.

Most of the world’s central banks are looking into the possibility of creating their own digital currencies. In April, the Bank of England announced it was looking into creating a digital money that would exist alongside cash and bank deposits.

BBC-The plan announced by President Nayib Bukele would make the small Central American nation the first in the world to adopt the digital currency, Bitcoin, as legal tender alongside the dollar.

It would be a unique and bold step, the first by a sovereign country, and that may well be part of the attraction for Mr Bukele, a young, media-savvy and very popular leader who worries Washington over his increasingly autocratic tendencies.

There are still many questions over how the digital currency would become the country’s legal tender – a major overhaul of El Salvador’s financial infrastructure would be needed with Bitcoin at its heart.

But, in essence, it appears that is what Mr Bukele is proposing.

Much of El Salvador’s developing economy is based on remittances from abroad and the move to a digital currency may allow family members to avoid the costly fees involved in sending money home each month.

Either way, it is a move which is likely to bolster Bitcoin’s image as the “currency of the future” and President Bukele’s standing among his supporters as an innovator.

Roger Ver, from the website Bitcoin.com, told BBC News that other crypto-currencies would do a better job than Bitcoin.

“This is fantastic news for all crypto-currencies in general, but what most of the world doesn’t realise is that Bitcoin doesn’t work as a currency anymore.

“Now other currencies, like Bitcoin Cash, or Monero or ZCash do a far, far better job of working as a currency.

“Bitcoin can only process around three transactions per second – there is no way a network that can handle three transactions per second can ever be money for the entire world.”

Other cryptocurrencies were better when it came to transferring remittances, too, as they charged much less than Bitcoin, Mr Ver said.

Freddie Figgers was given his first computer at the age of nine. It was old and didn’t work but it was the start of a love affair with technology that turned him into an inventor, entrepreneur and telecoms millionaire – a future that few would have predicted after his tough start in life.

“Don’t let your circumstances define who you are.”

Just one piece of advice 31-year-old entrepreneur Freddie Figgers would like to pass on to others.

When he was eight years old, he asked his father, Nathan, about the circumstances of his birth, and the reply was unforgettable.

“He said, ‘Listen I’m going to shoot it to you straight, Fred. Your biological mother, she threw you away, and me and Betty Mae, we didn’t want to send you through foster care and we adopted you, and you’re my son.’”

Freddie had been found abandoned as a newborn baby next to a dumpster (a large rubbish container) in rural Florida.

“When he told me that, I was like, ‘OK I’m trash,’ and I felt unwanted. But he grabbed my shoulder and he said, ‘Listen, don’t you ever let that bother you.’”

Nathan Figgers was a maintenance worker and handyman and Betty Mae Figgers, a farm worker. They lived in Quincy, a rural community of about 8,000 people in North Florida, and were in their 50s when Freddie was born in 1989.

They had already fostered many children, but decided to take Freddie in when he was two days old, and adopt him as their own son. Freddie says they gave him all the love he could ever want – but other children in Quincy could be brutal.

“Kids used to bully me and call me, ‘Dumpster baby,’ ‘Trash can boy,’ ‘Nobody wants you,’ ‘You’re dirty,’” he says.

“I remember getting off the school bus sometimes and kids used to just come behind and grab me and throw me in a trash can and laugh at me.”

It reached a point where his father would wait for him at the bus stop and walk him home, but the children mocked Nathan too, Freddie remembers, “saying, ‘Ha ha, look at the old man with the cane.’”

So far as Freddie was concerned, Nathan and Betty Mae were heroes, and great role models.

“I saw my father always helping people, stopping on the side of the road helping strangers, feeding the homeless,” he says. “He was an incredible man, and for them to take me in and raise me, that’s the man I want to be like.”

At weekends Freddie and Nathan would drive around “dumpster diving” – looking for useful things that had been thrown away by their owners. Freddie particularly had his eye out for a computer.

“It’s an old saying, ‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure,’” says Freddie, “and I was always fascinated by computers. I always wanted a Gateway computer, but at that time we couldn’t afford one.”

Finally, one day when Freddie was nine, they went to a second-hand shop called Goodwill, where they came across a broken Macintosh computer.

“We persuaded the sales associate,” says Freddie, “and he said, ‘Hey, I’ll give it to you for $24,’ (£17), so we took the computer home and I was just so ecstatic.

He was already fond of tinkering with the collection of radios, alarm clocks or VCRs that Nathan had accumulated, and the broken Mac now became the focus of his attention.

“When I got it home and it wouldn’t come on, I took the computer apart,” says Freddie.

“As I was looking in it I saw capacitors that were broken. I had soldering guns there and I had radios and alarm clocks, so I took parts out of my father’s radio alarm clock and I soldered them into the circuit board.”

After about 50 attempts, he says, the computer finally switched on – and at this moment Freddie says he knew that he wanted to spend his life working with technology.

“That computer took away all of the pain of getting bullied,” he says.

Whenever he was being picked on at school, he says he was always thinking, “I can’t wait to get home to play with my computer.”

He was 12 when his skills became noticed by others. At an after-school club, while other children were playing in the playground, Freddie set to work repairing broken computers in the school’s computer lab.

“If the hard drive was corrupt I would swap it out. If it needed more memory I would add more RAM. If it needed a power supply, I would switch it out,” he says.

The director of the after-school programme was Quincy’s mayor and when she saw that he was bringing broken computers back to life, she asked him to come to the city hall with his parents.

“When we get to city hall, she shows me all of these computers in the back, oh gosh, maybe 100 of them stacked up, and she says, ‘I need these computers repaired.’”

From then on, Freddie spent time every day after school mending this pile of computers, for $12 (£9) an hour.

“It wasn’t even really about the money,” he says. “I had an opportunity to do something that I loved to do and it was just so fun to me.”

A couple of years later, a coding opportunity arose. Quincy needed a system to check the city’s water pressure gauges, and a company had quoted $600,000 (£432,500) to develop a computer program.

Freddie remembers that the city manager called out, “Hey, Freddie’s a computer dork, he could probably help with this.”

“So I said, ‘Sir, listen, if you give me an opportunity, I could build the same program. So he gave me that opportunity and I built that program exactly to the specifications that they needed. I didn’t get paid $600,000, I got my regular pay cheque and went home.”

It was a crucial turning point in Freddie’s life. He was only 15, but he now decided to leave school and start up his own computing business – much to his parent’s dismay.

“They believed in education, work, retirement, and I wanted to break that chain, I wanted to do something different,” he says.

Freddie’s business was going from strength to strength when a couple of years later, Nathan started rapidly developing Alzheimer’s disease.

One disturbing symptom was that he would wake up in the night and re-enact things he had seen on television earlier in the evening. This led to what Freddie calls “the most traumatising thing that ever happened to me”.