Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s president, credits his country’s transformation from the Western Hemisphere’s murder capital—with San Salvador’s homicide rate once exceeding Washington D.C.’s—to a near-elimination of violence in three years, slashing rates to two per 100,000. His "miracle" involved a rapid, all-out military crackdown against gangs like MS-13, which he frames as satanic cults practicing human sacrifice, despite global condemnation for targeting 70,000 members while avoiding civilian casualties. Bukele dismisses Western criticism as ideological, arguing democracies fail by prioritizing special interests over structural reforms—like California’s $15B railway fiasco—while his authoritarian methods, including firing Supreme Court justices, follow the law and rally public support. With 62% of Salvadoran diaspora eager to return and global interest in his jail reforms, he warns Western decline risks collapse unless leaders embrace faith-based governance and decisive action, positioning El Salvador as a potential blueprint for salvation. [Automatically generated summary]
That it started as a Republican delegation, but then Democrats jump in the wagon and we had a bipartisan delegation from Congress.
So, you know, it's like...
So, you know, top...
I don't know at the end what happened, but I think that it's like how stars are born.
They say that, you know, debris starts joining up and they become an asteroid.
But if more debris...
Joins up, it becomes a planet, because, you know, the gravitational pull.
The more degree comes up, it becomes a star, because then the gravitational pull is too big.
So that's called critical mass.
So, I don't know, sometimes, just, you know, because, you know, God wants it like that, or just a stroke of luck or whatever, you get some critical mass in something you're doing, and then it becomes bigger than the sum of all of its parts.
So, I don't know, probably got some critical mass that we didn't foresee.
My guess is that of all the countries in the hemisphere, El Salvador seemed in the toughest shape or close to the bottom in the rankings for everything.
And we turned it into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere.
Safer than any other country in the Western Hemisphere, which is, you know, if I would have said that five years ago, they would have said that I was crazy, right?
So we were in a meeting, well, when it started, not when it ended, but when it started, we were in a meeting at my office, 3 a.m., 4 a.m., just watching what was happening and trying to figure out what to do, because the problem with the gangs is that they don't only attack their objectives.
When they want to create terror, they can attack anyone.
Well, they didn't start as a satanic organization.
MS-13 started in Los Angeles, in the U.S., because Salvadorans weren't allowed to sell drugs by the Mexican gangs.
So they created a gang that was called the 18th Street Gang, because they basically wanted to sell drugs in the 18th Street over there.
But then divisions started to create, they started dividing themselves and started infighting, so they created the MS-13.
And then MS-13 started outgrowing the other gangs, and they started exporting the organization to other parts of the U.S. And when Bill Clinton decided to deport those guys, he didn't tell our government at the time, I'm deporting this criminal, they just, you know, send them here.
And they came, there were few, but unchecked.
At the same time, some laws were passed to protect minors from imprisonment.
And of course, gangs used that to recruit.
15-year-olds, 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds.
So at the beginning, it was some youth causing harm, assaulting, trying to control their territories, selling drugs, things that are bad, but probably not critical.
But they grew, they grew, they grew, and they started controlling territories.
A few years later, they were actually a huge international criminal organization that they have bases in Italy, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, the U.S. Basically, a lot of major cities in the U.S. will have strongholds.
In your inaugural, and I was listening on headphones for the translation, so I just want to check this, you said, we have achieved this great victory and made this a safe country, and that's the predicate for everything that follows, and the next thing we're going to do in this term is to work on the economy to make it better.
Do you think that that's one of the reasons that your successes, which are just measurable, I'm not saying this for ideological reasons, but just a fact that you've transformed the country in a good way and that you're literally the most popular elected leader in the world?
Again, not speculation, provable fact.
You'd think that would be greeted in the hemisphere as this amazing thing, like, what's going on in El Salvador?
And instead, there's been this, what's going on in El Salvador?
I'm not sure, but one of the reasons is that we don't pander to them.
So probably they don't like that.
It's probably a reason.
I'm not going to go into conspiracy theory.
I'm going to go into provable facts, right?
Like you said.
So there's worldwide agendas, right?
These are provable facts, right?
Benchmarks that they need their countries to follow and they need their countries to do.
This is, you know, out there, right?
And...
But sometimes if you work on those things, you're probably neglecting the important things for your people, the things that your people are really asking for.
I'll give you an example.
When we arrested the gang members that were killing, that were...
Killing so much people that we were the murder capital of the world.
Literally the most dangerous place in the whole world.
More dangerous than Haiti.
Right?
More dangerous than Iraq.
This is literally the most dangerous country in the world.
We have tripled the murder rate that Haiti has right now.
With all the mayhem that they have, we have tripled that here.
So, what do you have to do?
You have to stop that, right?
I mean, it's a no-brainer.
You don't even need to have a big thought process.
You have to stop that.
That's the first thing you have to do.
When we did that, we got huge condemnations.
You name it.
Say an organization, we got a condemnation from them.
And a lot of them were human rights organizations.
And he would ask, what about the human right of a woman not to be raped?
I mean, what about the human right of kids to play or to be free or to go to the park?
And what about the human right to live?
Or the human right to walk in the street?
But no, they were worried about the human rights of the killers.
Which, you know, they have human rights.
I don't say they don't.
They're humans.
If you have to prioritize, what will you prioritize?
The human rights are the honest, hard-working, decent people, not the human rights that they do have.
But you won't prioritize the human rights of the killers and rapists and murderers.
And so we secured the country, and we did it with no help from any other country.
And with huge, huge condemnation in everything that we were doing.
Everything.
I mean, we changed the Attorney General.
We got so much condemnation because we changed the Attorney General that we need to change to prosecute the murderers.
So, basically, they tried to block every step of what we were doing.
And now, the results are there.
That it's, you know, they're tangible, measurable, undeniable.
Now they don't know what to do.
Because a lot of other countries are saying, maybe a lot of other countries similar to ours, they have similar problems, they are saying maybe we should do that too.
But they don't want that because that's not in their agenda.
But I guess that's why I came here, to be totally honest, is what your success says about the country that I live in or other countries, In the hemisphere or in Europe where people are killed by the thousands every year and what you've proven with very little money and no help from anyone else is it's not that hard to fix.
Therefore, all that killing must be a voluntary decision that my government and many other governments are making about their own citizens.
Because a lot of people might say, hey, we want that too.
If they can do it with no money, with very few resources, and with a huge problem, because I heard some people say, oh, the subway could do it because the problem was not that big.
We're literally the murder capital of the world.
How big can it, how bigger can it get, right?
We're literally the most dangerous place in the world.
Three times more dangerous than Haiti right now.
So, I mean, what bigger can it, how bigger can the problem get?
And at the same time, We had little, very few resources.
And we were able to do it with no civilian casualties.
After we started the war on gangs, we had no civilian casualties.
And we lost aid between police officers and soldiers.
And we basically eradicated all crime.
And we arrested 70,000 gang members.
Which the number is not a number that just came up.
That's the official number that all the organizations said we had of gang members.
And you can watch the World Bank reports, etc.
They said El Salvador has around 70,000 gang members and 500,000 collaborators.
So we spared the collaborators, basically, and we only got the gang members.
Why?
Because most of the collaborators were just, you know, family members, or, you know, the woman that sold tortillas, and she had to tell, oh, the police is coming, because if not, she would probably have been killed by the gang.
So most of the collaborators were not really criminals, but just people living in a society that was controlled by gangs.
The government was really, the real government was the gangs.
Just like in Haiti, you have a fake government, and you have the real government.
The government in Haiti is the gangs.
It was like that.
You had a formal government, of course, with offices and everything, but you have the real government in the territory, which were the gangs.
So, I mean, and I know you want to stick to the facts, but I mean, at some point you do have to, I mean, this is a really important question.
Why would a government that has the means to end violent crime, there's always going to be crime, people breaking laws, but violent crime, people murdering and raping each other, is a voluntary decision that a government makes.
At the beginning of the government, I had an argument with my Ministry of Public Works.
My Minister of Public Works.
Because there was a...
There was this neighborhood.
That was built in an area that you shouldn't build things.
It was a mountain.
The soil was basically flour.
The mountain was falling and the houses were falling with the mountain.
To save the people, the Ministry of Public Works started building a huge wall to stop the houses from falling.
They were building this huge The wall.
And of course, I can't micromanage everything.
So when I saw the wall being built, I called my minister.
I said, what are you doing?
You won't stop the mountain.
And I said, let's build houses for the people somewhere else.
It would be cheaper.
And he said, no, no, the wall will be fine.
We have engineers from international corporations and everything.
It will be fine.
So they finished the wall.
They inaugurated the thing.
It didn't fall.
Don't worry.
Don't wait for that.
Don't wait for that plot twist.
But I was still angry because I thought that it was a huge waste of money and a lot of risk that if in the future the wall falls, it will be on us because we built it.
So the politicians have the incentives of You know, just giving away the treasury and entering huge amounts of debt.
And that doesn't only destroy the structure of the government, but it also destroys the structure of society.
Because if you give, for example, money, if you don't work, I'll give you money.
Or if you can shoplift $1,000 a day, And still get some money from the government for food, you know, housing.
Why would you work?
In that store, we shoplifted and probably get in trouble, right?
So the incentives are wrong, but it's not only because, you know, there's, maybe they are, but I'm not going to go into conspiracy theories, but it's not only because there are evil politicians or evil people planning everything, which might be the case, but I won't go into that.
But just because things, you know, The incentives are wrong.
So, if the West doesn't continue to maintain its systems, which you have said, I think correctly, have worked really well for a couple hundred years, they will degrade just like anything else made by human hands.
If you don't maintain it, it will fall, like your house.
The question is, does anyone in the West, do its leaders have the will to fix the system that is clearly failing?
Do you think that will happen?
And if it doesn't, what is the message about democracy to the rest of the world?
But he decided, well not he, but the founding fathers decided that the United States would be a democracy.
And it worked.
Nobody can say it didn't.
It worked.
So the fact that democracy appears to not be working, I don't think it's because the concept doesn't work, like church separated from a state or a church.
And it was, you know, the whole country united to build it.
There was no budgetary, I mean, I know it was private, but it was no, if it needed budgetary, it was not a problem of budget or investors willing to pour money on it or engineers.
I mean, why would it take over a decade?
To build something that was so significant for the whole country.
I mean, you could build the tallest building in the world.
You didn't.
You could have built the tallest building in the world and said, okay, we're coming back bigger and stronger.
We're going to build, you know, yeah, we got a hit, but now we're going to build back better and stronger, right?
Or whatever.
And build it, you know, two-mile-high skyscraper, I'm not a fan of.
I mean, you have the money, you have the resources, you have the engineers, you have the market.
Because if I built a, you know, a mile skyscraper, I can't fill with offices because I don't have enough market to fill it with residences and offices or whatever.
You do have the market in New York to, you know, to build offices and you want hotel rooms.
I mean, it would feel like this.
But you didn't.
You took over a decade to build a very unimpressive building.
...gives you an example that the mess we were living here, and that we still have in other areas, not safety, we're the safest country in the Western Hemisphere, but we have problems in other areas, like the economy, for example.
If you can fix a mess like this in the US with a limited amount of wealth, with scientists, innovation like no other country in the world.
Still, the innovation is coming from the US. It's more than any other country still.
Not because of the government, but...
Still, it has the best innovators, AI. For sure.
I mean, anything.
So, you still have the best innovators.
You still have the biggest companies.
You still have the world reserve currency.
The biggest wealth.
The biggest GDP. The availability to hire talent from anywhere.
You can bring whatever talent you need to fix any gaps.
You can pick any.
You get it.
You get what you want.
You still can get what you want.
You can't get attacked because you're too far away from anyone that wants to attack you because Mexico or Canada are not going to attack the US. So your enemies are too far away.
So you have wheat, you have corn, you have workers, you have blue-collar workers, you have trained, skilled factory workers, you have colleges, you have universities, you have a school system, you have infrastructure, you have cities, tourism.
The Mississippi River.
I mean, you have everything.
You have ships, you have warehouses, agriculture, fertile lands.
You didn't have before you got, right?
You took from Mexico or whatever.
So the U.S. was built to be a superpower, right?
Acquire land, acquire fertile lands.
I mean, Texas was part of Mexico, but it's part of the U.S. and you have all the oil there.
So, I mean, and then you have California.
I mean, the U.S. is built as a superpower.
So, the U.S. has everything to go on for a thousand years.
It's not like it's doomed to fail.
But apparently, the leaders, or most of them, you have probably very good leaders, but most of the leaders, they are not seeing.
Either they are evil.
Or, this is not a conspiracy theory, it's just the options you have.
Either they're evil, and they want to destroy the U.S. because of some evil reason, or they're puppets, and they are being handled by people that need the U.S. to be destroyed for some reason, or they're incompetent, and they're just doing wrong stuff because they're not capable of doing the right stuff.
Or, sorry I said three, but the incentives, right?
I mean, changing a country and changing a lot of things that are badly done probably will anger some people, right?
Some groups, some lobbies, some interests.
I mean, if you say, okay, we're going to stop the railway that's costing us $15 billion per 600 meter, a lot of companies will be angry, a lot of, you know, mayors.
You have a system that needs to be handled.
And that needs leadership.
And it needs a clear mandate that is probably a little hard to get in the U.S. because of the opposite views and the bipartisanship.
And we have a liberal like that, so that validates and legitimizes everything else.
But the thing is that in 2021, when we went to congressional elections, we carried a supermajority that they said it was impossible because the system was designed so you cannot get a supermajority.
But we got it with more than that.
And then with that supermajority, there is an article in the Constitution that allows the supermajority in Congress to fire the Supreme Court justices.
So our party fired the Supreme Court Justices when they got the majority.
They fired the Attorney General, which I couldn't...
I mean, the states, the president appoints the Attorney General.
Here is Congress.
Congress elects the Attorney General.
Congress fires the Attorney General.
But you need two-thirds of Congress to fire an Attorney General.
They cannot point out a single thing that was done by not respecting the rules that were written by them.
Because the rules are written by people.
It's not like, oh, these rules were, you know...
These rules are not given by God.
These rules were written by people.
But still, we respected all the rules that were written by them.
I just saw an interview that the president of Costa Rica gave in Costa Rica, because he came also, like many other world leaders, he came to the inauguration.
So they asked him over there in Costa Rica, and they said, but do you think that Bukele is doing things that are not within the constitutional limits that he has?
And this interview was today, earlier.
The President of Costa Rica said, well, in a soccer game, or in a football game, you have the rules, and you have the score, right?
And the rules are made, so the score will be like that.
But sometimes you get a super score on one side, right?
So are you angry at the rules, or are you angry at the score?
Because the president of El Salvador, the only thing he can be criticized for is to getting a huge score in his favor with the rules of the game that they lay out for him.
If you're a country like El Salvador, or really any other country in the hemisphere, including Canada...
Your eyes are on the United States because it's the dominant power, obviously.
But it puts you in a weird position if you're being criticized from the United States.
So there's a congressman from Massachusetts, a pro-communist congressman called Jim McGovern, literally pro-communist, not an attack, just an observation, who attacked you the other day for daring to move a painting of Oscar Romero as a Catholic priest who was murdered here more than 40 years ago in your airport, I think.
What did you make of that?
It seemed like a pretty minute criticism, pretty small.
But you can make the case as an art connoisseur that he didn't like, you know, the place we put the painting.
But the fact that he protested or he expressed his deep concern on Twitter and not, you know, call.
If he would have called here and said, hey, do you move the painting?
They would have thought, no, no, it's right here, Mr. Congressman.
So, of course, he can even come and see it for himself.
But, of course, he was doing an attack, right?
But it backfired because first the painting was right in front.
So, yeah, just to move the camera, it was on the other side.
So, it was...
You know, he misfired, but also the fact that a U.S. congressman is trying to micromanage where art is being displayed in another country just gives you an example of how out of touch they are.
I mean, probably in numbers it won't be significant to you, but yes, you can see it.
I mean, you can see it everywhere.
And we're also getting something that's very meaningful to us, is that we're getting a lot of our diaspora, a lot of our immigrants, the people that emigrate al Zabler because of the war, because of the gangs, or because of the economical issues that have always happened here, a lot of them are coming back.
And there's a study made by the IOM and the USAID that says that 62% of Salvadorans living in the United States want to come back to live here.
Well, it has created a housing bubble because, you know, we don't produce as much houses that are being bought right now, but that would create a temporary problem, which is the housing bubble, but then, which is not actually a bubble, it's just, you know, the offer and...
Have you ever met a head of state who, when faced with a serious problem, a threat to his own country, would, in the middle of a cabinet meeting, pause and say a prayer?