El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele defended his anti-gang crackdown in a speech to the United Nations on Tuesday.
"In the last five years, El Salvador was reborn,” he said during the 79th Session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. “We returned the streets of our country to our people.”
Since March of 2022, Bukele has imprisoned at least 76,000 Salvadorans in a move that drew fierce criticism from human rights groups, some of which argue the arrests are indiscriminate and arbitrary.
At the start of 2024, the country registered a murder rate of 2.4 per 100,000 inhabitants, Turkish public broadcaster TRT World reports. In 2022, it had been at 7.5. Two years prior to that, the rate was 21.31.
"In El Salvador, we prioritize the safety of our honest citizens over the comfort of criminals,” Bukele said in his speech. “Some say that we have imprisoned thousands, but the reality is that we have freed millions. Now it is the good guys who live free, without fear, with their freedoms and human rights fully respected.”
"We made our nation that was the homicide capital of the world, the safest country in the entire Western Hemisphere. It was the greatest challenge that our nation has overcome," he continued. "We returned the streets of our country to our people and established a thriving tourism industry, hosting international events, surfing, sports, entertainment. We gave thousands of Salvadorans who fled wars and poverty a country to return to.”
"In El Salvador, your freedom of expression, as well as your private property, will always be protected," Bukele added. Here are 23 seconds of my speech at the UN.
23 segundos de mi discurso en la ONU. pic.twitter.com/Lh3demxfUi
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) September 24, 2024
The Salvadoran president broadly criticized Western countries for abandoning their principles of freedom and free speech.
“As Salvadorans, we recognize these symptoms of decline when we see them because we have been through them all,” he said. “We lived through the stages of our nation’s downfall, one by one, and we are seeing those same stages once again, but this time on a global scale.”
Bukele continued:We cannot and do not wish to tell other countries what to do. … We can only offer a word of caution from a friend who has been through a dark time and has fought the battle of his life to get out of it. … We cannot prevent the dark times that are coming, but what we can do is become a small shelter from the coming storm and maintain hope.
Bukele, a millennial who describes himself on his X profile as a “Philosopher King,” had previously deemed himself “the coolest dictator in the world.”
In February, Bukele was re-elected to office despite a previous Supreme Court ruling that consecutive re-election was unconstitutional. The president won in a landslide with nearly 85% of voters’ support.
In April, Bukele informed every official in the executive branch that they would be investigated for corruption by the country’s attorney general.
“You can see that everyone here is from the executive branch … that I oversee, except for one person: the Attorney General. He’s not part of the Executive Branch, but he’s here for a simple reason: I want to ask him publicly to investigate everyone sitting here. Retroactively and into the future,” Bukele said at the time, speaking directly to officials under his command.
“I imagine that there should be no problem with that,” he added.
