President Nayib Bukele: Seeking God’s Wisdom, Taking Down MS-13, and His Advice to Donald Trump
President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador. He may have the blueprint for saving the world.
En español: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_ZtiS2k9XQ
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Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro
0:04:47 Bukele’s Formula to Save El Salvador
0:09:50 The Satanic Side of MS-13
0:16:28 Bukele's 3-Point Economic Plan
0:28:41 Is Western Civilization Dying?
0:50:10 Will Donald Trump Get Elected?
0:56:09 Bukele's Advice to Trump
1:00:03 Americans Moving to El Salvador
They started as a Republican delegation, but then Democrats jumped in the wagon, and we had a bipartisan delegation from Congress.
So, you know, it's like, so it adds up.
I don't know at the end what happened, but I think that it's like how a star, you know, how stars are born.
They say that, you know, the debris starts joining up, and if they become an asteroid.
But if more debris joins up, it becomes a planet because the gravitational pull.
The more debris 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 because God wants it like that, or just by 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.
Well, of course, you cannot do anything if you don't have peace.
And when I say peace, I include war, civil wars, invasion, crime.
I mean, you need to have peace.
You need to be able to move freely, to have your basic rights respected, starting with the right to live, the right to move, the right to have property.
So you need your basic rights to be respected.
So you need peace.
That's the first thing a society will struggle to achieve.
And once you achieve peace, then you can struggle for all the other things, like infrastructure, wealth, well-being, quality of life.
But you have to start with peace.
So we had to start with peace.
And in the case of El Salvador, we're literally the murder capital of the world.
And we turned it into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere.
We're safer than any other country in the Western Hemisphere, which is, you know, it was, if I would have said that five years ago, they would have said that I was crazy, right?
Well, the phases included building up of the police forces, the army.
We doubled the army.
We literally doubled the army to fight crime, to use the army to fight crime.
And we equipped them before, like soldiers we didn't have, like, you know, useful guns or vehicles, drones, you know, basic things that an operation of that magnitude would need.
So, yeah, we roll up the phases and then we went after them.
When gangs started attacking us back, basically, they killed 87 people in three days, which for a country of six million people, it's crazy.
It would be the equivalent 60 times, would be the equivalent of having 5,000 deaths 5,000 murders in the U.S. in three days.
Wow.
So we were in a meeting and, well, when it started, not when it ended, but when it started, we were in the 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 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 a street.
It was 18th Street over there.
But then the vision 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 sent them here.
And they came, they were few, but unchecked.
At the same time, some laws were passed to protect minors from imprisonment.
And of course, the 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 territory, 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 of right outside Washington, D.C.
Yes, of course.
You have in Long Island and LA.
It's a huge criminal international organization.
So they grew and they started killing more people just to get territory or to fight against rival gangs or to collect debts or money or whatever.
But as the organization grew, they became satanic.
They started doing satanic rituals.
I don't know exactly when that started, but it was well documented.
And in our arrest, we've even found authors and things like that.
And even when you sometimes when you interview gang members that are in prison, they would say, I'm out of the gang.
Of course they're in prison, but they would say, I'm not a member of the gang anymore.
And when they asked them why, I remember one, I remember the news outlet that made this, this, but it's a very well-known news outlet that made this interview with a gang member in person.
We allowed him to go into prisons and do the interviews.
And the guy that they asked him, how many people have you killed?
And he said, I don't remember.
He didn't remember how many.
Probably 10, 20.
He didn't remember.
And then they asked him, what is your position in the gang?
He explained how he went up in positions, but I left the gang.
I said, why do you left the gang?
And he said, well, because I was used to kill people.
But I killed for territory.
I killed to collect money.
I killed for extortion.
But I came to this house and they were about to kill a baby.
And he, the killer, that had killed tens of people.
He said, oh, wait, wait, what are we doing?
Why are we going to kill that baby?
And they told him, because the beast asked for a baby.
So we have to give him a baby.
So he said that he couldn't resist that.
So he left the gang.
He's in prison because he's a killer.
But he left the gang because he couldn't tolerate what he was seeing.
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.
It's like, like, there's, 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?
They have benchmarks that they need the countries to follow and they need their countries to do.
This is out there, right?
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.
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 was literally the most dangerous country in the world.
We have triple the amount of the murder rate that Haiti has right now.
With all the money 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.
I mean, 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 you 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 they have human rights.
I don't say they don't.
They're humans.
But if you have to prioritize, what will you prioritize?
The human rights of the honest, hardworking, 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 we basically, they try to block every step of what we were doing.
And now that the results are there, that 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 a huge problem, because I heard some people say, oh, El Salvador could do it because the problem was not that big.
And like, we're literally the murder capital of the world.
How bigger can it get, right?
We were literally the most dangerous place in the world.
Three times more dangerous than Haiti right now.
So, I mean, 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 eight 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 World Bank reports, et cetera.
They said El Salvador has around 70,000 gang members, 500,000 collaborators.
So we spared the collaborators, basically, and we only got the gang members.
Why?
Because most of the collaborators were just family members or the woman that selled 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, 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, not all, 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.
You know, I had an argument with my, at the beginning of the government, I had an argument with my Ministry of Public Works, my Minister of Public Works, because there was this neighborhood that was built in an area that you shouldn't build things.
It was a mountain, almost the soil was basically flour.
So it was, you know, the mountain was falling and the houses were falling with the mountain.
So to save the people, the Ministry of Public Works started building a huge wall to stop the houses from falling.
So they were building this huge 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, you should build, let's build houses for the people somewhere else.
It would be cheaper.
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 things.
It didn't fall.
Don't worry.
The way for that plot list.
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'll be on us because we built it.
Of course.
So I started pressuring him.
Why do you build that wall?
What do you build that wall?
If the wall falls in the future, it would be our fault.
And I thought he grew tired of me, his pressure.
He said, well, everything that is made by humans needs maintenance.
I mean, of course, if we just leave the wall there, it would fall in 10, 20, 30 years.
But if we give maintenance to the wall, the wall won't fall.
Right?
So that stuck on me, not because of the wall itself, but because everything is like that.
I mean, your hair cut, you need, if you want to maintain it, you need to spend time and resources and effort in maintaining it.
So Western civilization, because civilization goes like this.
So Western civilization reached the peak.
I cannot point exactly where the peak is.
It's like timing the market, right?
I'm going to buy in the bottom and I'm going to sell at the top.
Nobody can do that, right?
And so I don't know exactly what was the peak.
But we can all agree that we're in the decline.
So that is happening because we're not maintaining, we're not giving the correct maintenance to the civilization.
What made the West the leader in the world at the time we're living right now?
What caused that to happen?
A lot of things, like, you know, importing the scientific process, started developing science, focusing, putting a lot of money into art, into science, into trying to build the best things as fastest and as best and as great as possible.
And importing wisdom and technology and trying to develop new technology and trying to, you know.
But suddenly, when you get wealthy, happens with families too.
Yes, it does.
Then people probably get spoiled or they get, you know, I want more things, I want that, I want this.
You have to provide me that.
And politicians, the problem, I mean, democracy is great, right?
The U.S. has proven that democracy can work.
But the problem with democracy, because everything has pros and cons, the problem with democracy is that politicians have a great incentive to offer to give away the treasury.
Yes.
So if I say, no, I'm going to keep the treasury because we might need it for an emergency or something, nobody would like that.
People would be like, oh, I'm going to give away the treasury.
So they will vote for him.
Then another politician went, you know what?
I'm going to give the treasury plus another treasury.
So we're going to go into that, right?
Everybody will say, great, let's receive more money from the treasury.
And when I say treasury, I mean anything.
Building stuff, giving free stuff, sending checks to people.
Nobody can say it doesn't, because it worked in the United States, right?
But if you don't maintain, if you don't give maintenance to the system, it will fall like the wall if you don't give maintenance to it.
Because the same system will degrade itself.
So what you're having right now is a huge erosion of Western civilization.
So you have governments pandering to their basis, to their ideology because they mobilize the vote or whatever, looking at what would happen in the election, what we can do to get more votes in the election.
I don't want to get into U.S. politics because the name was not mine.
But so we had this, we have this huge voter group.
Let's give them something to get their vote.
Let's give them, I don't know, $100,000 each.
It makes sense, right?
To get their votes.
But it doesn't make sense for a country.
I mean, why would you give $100,000 to each member of a voting group?
It should be illegal.
But it's not because who makes laws?
It's the government.
So the system is eroding.
And if maintenance, if the maintenance team doesn't go in and fix all the things that have been degrading the last 50, 70 years, of course, it will eventually fall.
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 you know, the founding fathers decided that the U.S. United States would be a democracy, right?
And it worked.
Nobody can say it didn't.
It worked.
But 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 state or church conjoined with the state.
It's just that things work until they don't.
So the problem, I think, is not the concept of democracy itself, but the state of the democracy, of democracies in the world right now.
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, build back better and stronger, right?
Or whatever.
And build it, you know, two mile high skyscraper.
I'm not a fan of two mile high skyscrapers, but you know, you could have done that.
I mean, you have the money, you have the resources, you have the engineers, you have the market.
Because if I built a mile skyscraper, I can fill with offices because I don't have enough market to fill with residences and offices or whatever.
You do have the market in New York 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.
I mean, so, well, just the fact that a third of our population fled the country and went to the United States 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.
But our problems were bigger than your problems in relative sizes.
So you can, if you can, I mean, if you can fix a mess like this with, in the US, with unlimited amount of wealth, with, you know, scientists, innovation, like no other country in the world.
still the innovation is coming from the U.S., it's more than any other country still, right?
Even not because of the government, but still it has the best innovators, AI.
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, acquire...
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're not seeing it.
Either they are evil, or this is not a conspiracy theory, this is 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, I don't 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.
I mean, we were running with a party and they canceled it.
I mean, they annul our party.
So I stayed, I was partyless.
So we went to a small party and said, you don't have any candidates, you're very small.
Do you want to win the election?
So we got that party registration, and they canceled that party.
And they canceled that party in the last day that you can file the candidacies.
So we got a medium-sized party at 11 p.m. and we were able to file our candidacy.
So it was not like it was easy or the system wasn't rigged.
It was just so fair.
We put up our proposals and the people just voted.
It was very hard to win.
And then when we won, since we didn't have simultaneous parliamentary elections, we actually went to the executive branch, totally opposed to the legislative branch and the judicial branch.
So they control the Supreme Court and they control 90% of the legislative body.
So I had to veto everything.
And they override my vetoes and they approved over 70 laws that I veto.
Yes, and everything that we do, Supreme Court is unconstitutional, unconstitutional, unconstitutional.
So we went to the people and said, no, we cannot work like this.
We need a majority in Congress.
We need a huge majority in Congress because we not only need to approve laws, we need to get all these people out.
And the only way to get it out democratically and respecting the rules of the system is if we get a huge, immense majority in Congress, right?
Because Congress can fire anybody, even the president.
Yes.
So people gave us the huge majority.
It was hard because they still control the electoral tribunal as of today.
That's why our election was recognized by all the countries in the world.
Because they know the electoral tribunal is controlled by the opposition.
And we have liberales, 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 went 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, in 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.
And, yeah, we got a...
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 don't you think that Bukele is doing things that are not within the constitutional limits that he has?
And this interview was today, earlier.
And 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, you know, will be like that.
But sometimes you get a super score in 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.
Some of them, yeah, I think some of them do, but of course the ones that don't, or they think that, you know, that's their problem with endogamous groups, right?
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.
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, who's a Catholic priest who was murdered here more than 40 years ago in your airport, I think.
But you can make the case as an art connoisseur that he didn't like the place we put the painting.
But the fact that he protested or he expressed his deep concern on Twitter and not 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, we can even come and see it for himself.
But of course, he was doing an attack, right?
But he backfired because first the painting was right in front.
So you had just to move the camera.
It was on the other side.
So he misfired.
Also, the fact that a U.S. congressman is trying to micromanage where art is being displaced, 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 El Salvador because of the war or because of the gangs or because of the economical issues that have always happened here, a lot of them are coming back.
That's over half a million Salvadorans coming back.
So that's super significant because, I mean, we expelled them from their homes, right?
Because of crime, because of a war, because of lack of opportunities.
And the fact that they're coming back is, I mean, it's the biggest proof that we're doing things the right way.
have a long way to go but we're doing things the right way so after so we have a lot of americans american-born americans coming but we have also a lot of salvadorian americans with american citizenships coming here Do you have the space?
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...
They only have permission to get in food, medicine, but they control the jails, not only in the subject, they do it in most of the Latin American countries.
So gangsters or narcos, they will control the jails, right?
It's their operation hours.
They even go out and bad and get back, yes.
So we totally control that.
And we have 100% control in our jail system.
So Latin American countries look to our jail system to see if they can fix their own.
So we do a lot of cooperation in security issues, jails, army, training.
Do you know of even more powerful in bigger countries, of course, in Latin America?
Have you ever, you know, a lot of heads of state, because you are one, 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?