El Salvador's Bukele Has the Perfect Response to a BBC Reporter Concerned About His Crackdown on Crime

Leah Barkoukis | February 22, 2024 9:00 AM

President Nayib Bukele has turned El Salvador from the murder capital of the world to one of the safest in the Americas through the mass arrest of gang members in the country. Voters rewarded him handsomely for it, giving him a landslide win in recent elections. But his methods have been widely criticized by Western progressives concerned about human rights.

Bukele addressed these criticisms head on in a response he gave to a BBC reporter, explaining that the “recipes” Western nations gave to his country failed over and over again because what may work in other countries was not sufficient in addressing El Salvador’s epidemic of gang-related murders.

On the point of innocents being arrested, Bukele said every country’s police is guilty of doing the same—that’s what judicial systems are for, he argued.

“We are baffled by the criticism of something you well know that any police in the world will make, which is a small percentage of innocent people getting in the net,” he said.

El Salvador’s judicial system has so far released 7,000 wrongly imprisoned and continues to free innocent people, Bukele noted.

When the reporter pushed back that 75,000 people are not typically arrested, Bukele reminded the reporter that he does not live in the murder capital of the world.

“Not only do we have the right to do what we think is right … but also we have proven it works, and you haven't proven that your system works in our country. Might work in yours, I don’t know, but it doesn’t work in ours,” he said.

Bukele then recalled what he told a member of the European Union.

“You take your best government. Choose your best government... same people, same talent, same experts, same will to do things the right way,” he said. “You take your best government, and you put them to govern Afghanistan, and you tell them 'Okay, you govern Afghanistan the same way you govern this European country. You'll be dead in a week because you cannot govern Afghanistan like you govern Europe.”

Bukele continued, “So, stop trying to make us use your recipes because they don't work here. You have your own system. We don't tell you that you shouldn't have a Monarchy...Why? Because It's your country, you can do whatever you want with it, but suddenly we have to do what you want to do with our country... El Salvador was turned from the most dangerous place in the world to the safest in the Western Hemisphere. That’s not a small feat. That’s not done easily and nobody in the world has done it before so fast and so clean like we have done it here. … I know it’s different…but were doing our best here…”