President Nayib Bukele: Seeking God's Wisdom, Taking Down MS-13, and His Advice to Donald Trump
The Inauguration That Drew the World
Tucker Carlson: You were inaugurated two days ago. This is a small country, and yet your inauguration was international news, was everywhere. Why do you think that is?
Nayib Bukele: It was a shock for us too. We knew that a lot of people were coming — big delegations from 110 countries — so of course that would draw some attention. If a chancellor comes from a country, he brings his media team, and that creates news over there. If a president comes, or a king comes, that creates news. Even you came, so that creates some news. But why were they coming? Different reasons, definitely different reasons.
For example, the US government sent a big delegation, but we also had a delegation from Congress that started as a Republican delegation, then the Democrats jumped in the wagon and we had a bipartisan delegation from Congress. It's like how stars are born, they say. Debris starts joining up and it becomes an asteroid, but if more debris joins up it becomes a planet because of the gravitational pull. If even more comes up, it becomes a star because the gravitational pull is too big. That's called critical mass. I don't know — sometimes, by the grace of God or just by stroke of luck or whatever, you get some critical mass in something you're doing and it becomes bigger than the sum of all of its parts. Probably we got some critical mass that we didn't foresee.
Carlson: 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.
Bukele: Yes.
Carlson: Lacking abundant natural resources, and since the country was born. Is that true?
Bukele: Yes. The country has been poor since it was born. Lacking everything, basically. Lacking everything. With a dense population, a lot of people packed in.
From Murder Capital to Safest Nation
Carlson: What did you do first?
Bukele: You cannot do anything if you don't have peace. When I say peace, I include war, civil wars, invasions, crime. 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 property. You need peace. That's the first thing a society will struggle to achieve. Once you achieve peace, then you can struggle for the other things — infrastructure, wealth, wellbeing, quality of life. But you have to start with peace.
We were literally the murder capital of the world, and we turned it into the safest country in the Western Hemisphere — safer than any other country in the Western Hemisphere. If I'd said that five years ago, they would have said I was crazy. Your capital is now safer than Washington, by a lot. The country is safer than the United States as a whole. The US murder rate is around six murders per 100,000 inhabitants. Our murder rate is two. We're safer than Canada, safer than Chile, safer than Europe, safer than the United States, safer than any country in the Western Hemisphere. There are countries in the other hemisphere that are safer than El Salvador, but not in the Western Hemisphere.
Carlson: You did that in just a couple of years?
Bukele: We did that basically in three years.
Carlson: What's the formula?
Bukele: I can tell you the official formula and the real formula. The official formula is that we did a plan comprised of phases. We rolled up the first phase, then the next one, then the next one. Then gangs started attacking back, so we had to roll up everything at once, in a hurry. It worked in a couple of weeks. We basically pacified the country in a couple of weeks.
Carlson: How do you do that? How do you pacify a country?
Bukele: The phases included building up the police forces, the army. We doubled the army — literally doubled the army — to fight crime, to use the army to fight crime. We equipped them. Before, soldiers didn't have useful guns or vehicles, drones — basic things that an operation of that magnitude would need. We rolled up the phases and then we went after them. That's the official version.
Carlson: What's the real version?
Bukele: It's a miracle.
Carlson: What do you mean?
Bukele: It's a miracle. When gangs started attacking us back, they killed 87 people in three days, which for a country of six million people is crazy. Sixty times that would be the equivalent of having 5,000 murders in the US in three days.
The Night of Prayer
We were in a meeting at my office at 3:00am, 4:00am, just watching what was happening and trying to figure out what to do. The problem with gangs is that they don't only attack their objectives when they want to create terror — they can attack anyone. They can kill their grandma, and it's your victim, because they don't care about their grandma. You care about their grandma. If they kill their grandma, you have one death and they've achieved the terror they want to create. They can kill anybody — a woman walking by, a guy working in the street, a taxi driver. They can kill anybody.
If the state goes after them, the state has no intention of killing or harming anybody but the gang members. You have 70,000 objectives, which were the 70,000 gang members, but they have six million possible targets. It was almost an impossible task. It's a guerrilla war, really. It was an impossible task because you have to go after them. They were interned with the population. They were everywhere and they were killing randomly. How do you stop that?
We really tried to figure out what to do, and I basically said, we're looking at an impossible mission here, so let's pray. We prayed.
Carlson: You prayed in the meeting?
Bukele: Yes, several times.
Carlson: What did you pray for?
Bukele: For wisdom. To win the war. I thought at the time that we would have civilian casualties, so we prayed that the civilian casualties would be as low as possible. We didn't have any civilian casualties.
Carlson: Was everyone in the meeting comfortable with that?
Bukele: Yes. All my security cabinet are believers. They all believe in God. We're a secular country, of course, but we all believe in God.
The Satanic Nature of MS-13
Carlson: MS-13 is one of the major gangs, and they are satanic also. Can you explain?
Bukele: They didn't start as a satanic organisation. MS-13 started in Los Angeles in the US because Salvadorans weren't allowed to sell drugs by the Mexican gangs, so they created a gang called the 18th Street gang because they wanted to sell drugs in a street that was 18th Street over there. Then divisions started, they started infighting, so they created MS-13. MS-13 started outgrowing the other gangs and they started exporting the organisation to other parts of the US.
When Bill Clinton decided to deport those guys, he didn't tell our government at the time, "I'm deporting these criminals." They just sent them here. They came — there 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. At the beginning it was youth causing harm, assaulting, trying to control their territory, selling drugs — things that are bad, but probably not critical. But they grew. They grew and they grew. They started controlling territories. A few years later they were a huge international criminal organisation. They have bases in Italy, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, the United States — basically a lot of major cities in the US have strongholds.
They started killing more people to get territory or to fight against rival gangs or to collect debts or money or whatever. As the organisation grew, they became satanic. They started doing satanic rituals. I don't know exactly when that started, but it was well-documented. We've even found altars and things like that.
Carlson: Was human sacrifice a part of it?
Bukele: I remember a news outlet that made an interview with a gang member in prison. They asked him, "How many people have you killed?" He said, "I don't remember" — probably 10, 20, he didn't remember. They asked him, "Are you in the gang? What is your position in the gang?" He explained how he went up in position, but said, "I left the gang." They asked why. He said, "I was used to killing. 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." The killer, who had killed tens of people, said, "Wait, what are we doing? Why are we going to kill that baby?" They told him, "Because the Beast asked for a baby, so we have to give him a baby." He said 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 saying.
In the United States a couple of weeks ago, I saw the news that they were going to kill a young girl, or they killed a young girl — I don't remember exactly — because it was a satanic ritual.
The Spiritual War
Carlson: That's almost never described in English-language press as clearly as you just described it, which is weird, right? You sort of wonder why. If there's a spiritual component that's driving it, why not just say so?
Bukele: There's a spiritual war and there's a physical war. The physical war — that's the unofficial version. The spiritual — if you win the spiritual war, it reflects into the physical war. I think our impressive victory was because we won the spiritual war very fast.
Carlson: That leads me to your inaugural. I was listening on headphones for the translation. You said, "We have achieved this great victory and made this a safe country. That's the predicate for everything that follows, and the next thing we're going to do in this term is work on the economy, to make it better, grow the economy." You said, "I have a three-point plan," and I'm thinking, I wonder what that is. The first point of your plan was "Seek God's wisdom."
Bukele: Yes, I said that.
Carlson: Why would that be the first point of an economic plan?
Bukele: Why wouldn't it be? It should be the first part of the plan. Most people who elect the politicians would say, "Yeah, that's fine. I believe that." But then you ask the politician and he would say, "No, no, no, that's not." Who is he trying to pander to? It doesn't make sense. It's a common-sense thing to say — God's wisdom — of course. It's a prerequisite for wise decision-making.
International Condemnation and the Real Agenda
Carlson: Do you think that's one of the reasons that your successes — which are measurable, provable fact — why there's been hostility?
Bukele: Different reasons. Definitely different reasons. One of the reasons is that we don't pander to them, so probably they don't like that. There are worldwide agendas. These are provable facts. They have benchmarks that they need the countries to follow. But sometimes if you work 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 so many people that we were the murder capital of the world — literally the most dangerous place in the whole world, more dangerous than Haiti, more dangerous than Iraq — we got huge condemnations. The main themes they have, we had triple that. When we did that, we got huge condemnations — name an organisation, we got a condemnation from them. A lot of them were human rights organisations. You would ask, what about the human right of a woman not to be raped? What about the human right of kids to play, or to be free, or to go to the park? 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.
The killers have human rights. They're humans. But if you have to prioritise, what would you prioritise? The human rights of the honest, hardworking, decent people, not the human rights of the killers and rapists and murderers. We secured the country and we did it with no help from any other country and with huge condemnation in everything that we were doing. Everything. We changed the attorney general. We got so much condemnation because we changed the attorney general that we needed to change to prosecute the murderers. They tried to block every step of what we were doing.
Now that the results are there — they're tangible, measurable, undeniable — they don't know what to do, because a lot of other countries, similar to ours, with similar problems, are saying, "Maybe we should do that too." But they don't want that, because that's not in their agenda.
The Lesson for the World
Carlson: That's why I came here, to be totally honest. 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 — 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.
Bukele: Yes, you can make that logical conclusion. I think that's probably what they are afraid of. We don't have weapons of mass destruction. Why are they afraid? Why would they take so much time and make condemnations to El Salvador? It doesn't make any sense. You didn't send a man to the moon. I think they're afraid of the example, 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 we have a huge problem — I heard some people say, "Somebody could do it because the problem was not that big." We were literally the murder capital of the world. How big can it get? We were literally the most dangerous place in the world, three times more dangerous than Haiti right now. How bigger can the problem get?
At the same time, we had 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. We lost eight between police officers and soldiers, and we basically eradicated all crime. We arrested 70,000 gang members, which is the official number that all the organisations said we had of gang members. You can watch World Bank reports — they said El Salvador has around 70,000 gang members and 500,000 collaborators. We spared the collaborators, basically. We only got the gang members. Why? Because most of the collaborators were just family members or the woman that sells tortillas who had to tell, "Oh, the police is coming," because if not she would probably have been killed by the gang. Most of the collaborators were not really criminals, but just people living in a society controlled by gangs.
The government was really — the real government was the gangs. Just like in Haiti, you have a fake government. You have the real government — the government of Haiti is the gangs. It was like that. You had a formal government, of course, with offices and everything, but you had the real government in the territory, which were the gangs.
Why Do Governments Tolerate Crime?
Carlson: Why would a government that has the means to end violent crime not? There's always going to be crime, people breaking laws, but violent people murdering and raping each other is a voluntary decision that a government makes. Why would a government choose to have that?
Bukele: I don't know. I can make up theories, but I really — you have a gut instinct about it?
I think it's a combination of factors. There might be evil people doing it on purpose, planning stuff — possibly. At the same time, there's a lot of people that are just being fed these ideologies and they think they're doing the right thing. Like allowing shoplifting, for example. That's the most stupid thing you can think of, but they do it.
Carlson: You don't allow shoplifting here?
Bukele: No, of course not. You would think, why would anybody think allowing shoplifting would be a good idea? Or giving away drugs. It's very stupid things. You would guess that some of the people enacting these policies are not necessarily evil — they're just being fed this ideology and they think they're doing the right thing.
I give you an example. I think a month ago, the Spanish police arrested a gang member that had fled El Salvador. With an international operation between our police and the Spanish police and Interpol, they were able to arrest the guy. In those cases you don't need to do an extradition because it's an automatic international operation. They just got the guy, processed him, and should send him to the original police that filed the claim.
The Spanish police was very proud of the arrest, so they put it up on Twitter. They said, "We just arrested this gang member." I quoted the tweet and said, "Great. Send him, we'll take care of him." That was used in his court hearing in Spain as proof that he wouldn't get a fair trial here. He was protected by Spanish laws and he stayed there in Spain.
Carlson: Maybe they don't have enough gang members in Spain.
Bukele: Exactly. I don't care if they want to keep him. It's a mouth we don't have to feed. They can keep him. But the thing is, you would think, why would the Spanish government want an extra gang member? It's not necessarily out of evil. It's just the laws, the system, the things that are being fed to the judge, to the prosecutor. They think my tweet was too mean and this gang member's rights would not be respected or he wouldn't get a fair trial in El Salvador, so he had to stay in Spain to be protected. They know he's a killer. They actually arrested him because of that. It was an international operation and everything. They know he probably murdered dozens of people, but they feel the need to protect him.
The Decline of Western Civilisation
Carlson: What's sad about that is that's a sign that your defence mechanism no longer works, and that your society is dying. Spain is a wonder, in my opinion — a wonder. Civilisation is reaching a point where it will start failing.
Bukele: It's obvious to those of us who live here, unless things are done. Of course, you can always do things. Everything erodes and degrades. That's just the laws of nature. That's why we die. We age and we die. You can slow it — you can stay fit, diet — but you're eventually going to age and die. You cannot avoid that. Same happens with anything. Infrastructure.
I had an argument with my Minister of Public Works at the beginning of the government. There was a neighbourhood built in an area where you shouldn't build things. It was a mountain — the soil was basically flour, so 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. I couldn'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. You should 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. They will be fine."
They finished the wall. They enabled it. It didn't fall. I was still angry because I thought 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. I started pressuring him: "Why did you build that wall? If the wall falls in the future, it'll be our fault." I thought he grew tired of me pressuring him. He said, "Well, everything that is made by humans needs maintenance. Of course, if we just leave the wall there, it'll fall in 10, 20, 30 years. But if we give maintenance to the wall, the wall won't fall."
That was enlightening to me, not because of the wall itself, but because everything is like that. In a relationship, a plant at home — everything. Your hair, your haircut. If you want to maintain it, you need to spend time and resources and effort in maintaining it. Western civilisation goes like this. Western civilisation reached the peak. I cannot point exactly where the peak is. It's like timing the market — I'm going to buy at the bottom and I'm going to sell at the top. Nobody can do that. I don't know exactly where the peak was, but we can all agree that we're in the decline. That is happening because we're not maintaining, we're not giving the correct maintenance to the civilisation.
Why? 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. Importing the scientific process, developing science, focusing, putting a lot of money into art, into science, into trying to build the best things and as fast and as best and as great as possible. Importing wisdom and technology and trying to develop new technology. But suddenly, when you get wealthy, what happens? It happens with families too — people probably get spoiled. They get, "I want more things. I want that. I want this. You have to provide me that."
Politicians — the problem — democracy is great. The US has proven that democracy can work. But the problem with democracy, because everything has pros and cons, is that politicians have a great incentive to give away the treasury. 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 like, "Oh, I'm going to give away the treasury," so they would vote for him. Then another politician: "You know what? I'm going to give the treasury plus another treasury, so we've got to go into debt." Everybody will say, "Great, let's receive more money from the treasury."
When I say treasury, I mean anything — building stuff, giving free stuff, sending checks to people, COVID relief, stimulus, whatever. The politicians have the incentive of just giving away the treasury and entering huge amounts of debt. That not only destroys the structure of the government, but it also destroys the structure of society. If you give, for example, money — "Okay, 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, housing" — why would you work? In that story, you'd shoplift and probably get in trouble. The incentives are wrong.
It's not only because they are evil politicians or evil people planning everything — which might be the case, but I won't go into that — but just because the incentives are wrong. Even a normal, not evil politician has the incentive to give away the treasury because he needs the votes. He needs to be elected. That's what he needs. He needs the votes. It's the nature of the system. The problem is that democracy works. Nobody can say it doesn't, because it worked in the United States. But if you don't maintain it, 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.
What you're having right now is a huge erosion of Western civilisation. You have governments pandering to their bases, to their ideology, because they mobilise 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 US politics because it's not my place, but okay — so 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. Makes sense, right, to get their votes? But it doesn't make sense for a country. 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.
The system is eroding. If the maintenance team doesn't go in and fix all the things that have been degrading the last 50, 70 years, it will, of course, eventually fall.
Can the West Be Saved?
Carlson: Does anyone in the West, to 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?
Bukele: The fun thing about any concept, like democracy, is that it works until it doesn't. It happened with monarchies. It happened with anything. They say things like, "Oh, we have to separate religion from state." It worked. It really worked. But it also worked — religion with the state at their time, very well, until they didn't. The thing is that things work until they don't.
The problem is not democracy. It's not the concept of democracy. The concept of democracy is great. Imagine: the power of the people. Why would the people have the power to decide their own thing? It's the most — I really like the concept. It's not a theoretical concept like communism. It works. Democracy has been improving. George Washington could have been a king if he wanted to. He could have been King George the First. But the Founding Fathers decided that the United States will 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 state or church conjoined with state. It's just that things work until they don't. The problem, I think, is not the concept of democracy itself, but the state of democracies in the world right now. Have we reached the end of the democratic period? I don't know, but it's maybe the beginning of the end if a huge maintenance team doesn't come and fix things.
This is not about geopolitics or anything. I'm not going to even mention the countries, but I saw — somebody showed me — the 600-metre railway that was built in California. It cost, like, $15 billion or something like that to build the 600-metre piece of railway.
Carlson: It's a lot per metre.
Bukele: You cannot go on. It's obvious. It's like somebody eats too much. You can be a little fat — it's fine. But then if someone's morbidly fat, somebody will come and say, "Okay, you have to stop, because your heart can't take it anymore." Or somebody drinks. I don't drink, but if somebody drinks, a doctor might say, "Your liver can't take that anymore. Look at your liver." Or the lungs for smoking or whatever.
When you see things like that — 600 metres of railway, $15 billion, 10 years — there's no other possible diagnosis. You have to stop that path now, because if not, the decline is inevitable. It's inevitable. It's not like I'm telling you a forecast. It's there. $15 billion to make a 600-metre piece of railway that's not even working, in 10 years. The Empire State Building was built in a year. One year they built the Empire State Building. That's where things were working. I don't know how things were back then, but they built the Empire State Building in one year.
What happened with the World Trade Centre Freedom Tower? They changed the name later to World Trade Centre. How long did it take? Forever. The whole country was united to build it. There was no budgetary — I know it was private, but if it needed budgetary support, it was not a problem of budget or investors willing to pour money on it or engineers. Why would it take over a decade to build something that was so significant for the whole country? 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 back better and stronger." Build it — a two-mile-high skyscraper. I'm not a fan of two-mile-high skyscrapers, but you could have done that. You have the money. You have the resources. You have the engineers. You have the market, because if you build your skyscraper, you can fill it with offices. You do have the market in New York to build offices and hotels. It would fill like this. But you didn't. You took over a decade to build a very unimpressive building, and that was 20-something years ago. Now you're building 600-metre railways with $15 billion.
How long would it take to rebuild the Baltimore Bridge?
Carlson: Should take a year.
Bukele: How long would it take here? A year, two years. And we're a small, poor country. We're one of the poorest nations in the world. The US still has unlimited amounts of resources, because you can just print money. That's another topic, but you can just print whatever. How much is it? Do it. That sounds like a systemic failure. It doesn't sound like maintenance. Maybe that's something you have to level and rebuild or something. Maybe that's beyond maintenance.
Carlson: What is the answer to that?
Bukele: I don't know. You need leadership. But I'll tell you something. If you see the mess that we were living here, it's a bigger mess than what you have over there. Just the fact that a third of our population fled the country — I 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.
Our problems were bigger than your problems in relative sizes. If you can fix a mess like this, with limited amount of wealth, with scientists, innovation like no other country in the world still — the innovation coming from the US is more than any other country still, even not because of the government, but it still has the best innovators. AI, for sure. Anything. 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 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. Mexico or Canada are not going to attack the US. Your enemies are too far away, and you still have the biggest army, biggest armed forces.
Carlson: Biggest energy reserves in the world.
Bukele: Yes. And the US, like Russia, was built as a superpower. It's not like, for example, if you see the economy in Spain, it's very good. It's a robust economy. It's big. G7. But they sell — how do you say in English? Nuggets. They sell nuggets, or they sell Ibérico ham. It's very good, expensive, but you don't actually need that. Luxury goods. If you sanction Spain, you'll break their economy. But if you sanction Russia, you can't break Russia, because they were built as a superpower. They have wheat. They have energy. They have natural gas, oil. They were built like that. Industrial capacity. Factories. Workers.
The US is like that too. It was built as a superpower. You have wheat. You have corn. You have workers. You have blue-collar workers. You have trained, skilled factory workers. You have colleges, universities, school system, infrastructure, cities, tourism. The Mississippi River. You have everything. You have ships. You have warehouses. Agriculture. Fertile lands. What you didn't have before, you got. You took from Mexico or whatever. The US was built to be a superpower. Texas was part of Mexico, but it's part of the US, and you have all the oil there. Then you have California. The US is built as a superpower.
The US 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 and they want to destroy the US because of some evil reason, or they're puppets and they're being handled by people that need the US 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. Changing a country and changing a lot of things that are badly done will probably anger some people, some groups, some lobbies, some interests. If you say, "Okay, we're going to stop the railway that's costing us $15 billion per 600 metres," a lot of companies will be angry, a lot of mayors. You have a system that needs to be handled.
That needs leadership, and it needs a clear mandate that is probably a little hard to get in the US because of the opposite views and the bipartisanship and everything. But you need to do it.
Trump and Election Integrity
Carlson: Ultimately, as you well know, since you've succeeded in it so thumping, the instrument for all of that is the ballot, is the election itself. How many votes do you get? That's your mandate. But I think there is a sense among a lot of non-conspiracy-minded voters in the United States that that part of the system is itself corrupt, and that it is actually hard to affect change through voting because it's rigged. With that in mind, do you think Trump — he's ahead in the polls — do you think he can get elected?
Bukele: Yes, he can get elected. I'll give you an example. In 2019, the system was totally rigged. They cancelled our party. We were running with a party, and they cancelled it. They annulled our party. I stayed partless. 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?" We got that party's registration, and they cancelled that party — in the last day that you can file the candidacies. We got a medium-sized party at 11:00pm and we were able to file our candidacy.
It was not like it was easy or the system wasn't rigged. It was just — it was very hard to win. 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. They controlled the Supreme Court and they controlled 90% of the legislative body. I had to veto everything. They overrode my vetoes. They approved over 70 laws that I vetoed. Everything we did, the Supreme Court said was unconstitutional.
We went to the people and said, "We know we cannot work like this. We need a majority in Congress. We need a huge majority in Congress, because we don't only need to approve laws — we need to get all these people out. The only way to get them out democratically and respecting the rules of the system is that we get a huge, immense majority in Congress, because Congress can fire anybody."
People gave us the huge majority. It was hard, because they still controlled the Electoral Tribunal — as of today. That's why our election was recognised by all the countries in the world, because they know the Electoral Tribunal is controlled by the opposition. Still, it's the only thing that's controlled. It's the only thing, and we have validated that. That validates and legitimises everything else.
In 2021, when we went to congressional elections, we carried a supermajority that they said was impossible, because the system was designed so you cannot get a supermajority. But we got it. We got more than that. With that supermajority, there's an article in the Constitution that allows the supermajority in Congress to fire the Supreme Court justices. Our party fired the Supreme Court justices when they got the majority. They fired the attorney general, which I couldn't — the president appoints the attorney general here. Congress elects the attorney general. Congress fires the attorney general, but you need two-thirds of Congress to fire an attorney general. We got 75% of Congress.
Carlson: But you stayed within the rules the whole time.
Bukele: We have never not respected a single rule. That's also a narrative that they want to promote. They cannot point out a single thing that was done by not respecting the rules that were written by them. The 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, to the inauguration. They asked him in Costa Rica, "Don't you think that Bukele is doing things that are not within the constitutional limits that he has?" 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. The rules are made so the score will be like that. But sometimes you get a super score on one side. 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 criticised for is getting a huge score in his favour with the rules of the game that they laid out for him."
Carlson: Did you ever worry they would try and put you in jail?
Bukele: They did. Even when I was president — already in the presidency — they tried to impeach me. They said — there's an article in the Constitution that says Congress can actually fire the president if he's not fit to lead. They said I wasn't fit to lead, and they tried to impeach me because of that. But there was such a — the people were — they feared that the people would rise up against them or something. It's a fair concern, given your majority.
Carlson: What advice would you give to another former democratically elected leader seeking office who is facing jail time?
Bukele: If there was a way to stop the candidacy, then he's probably in trouble. But if there's no way to stop him from competing in the election, all the things that they do to him will just give him more votes. That seems to be happening. Either you stop the candidacy or you let him be. But just hitting him — you're just making the greatest campaign ever.
Carlson: Do you think they know that?
Bukele: Some of them do. But of course, the ones that don't — or they think — that's the problem with endogamous groups, because they all: "Yeah, we're so great. Yeah, let's do it." They're making a huge mistake. Huge, huge mistake.
US Interference and the Oscar Romero Painting
Carlson: If you're a country like El Salvador, 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 criticised from the United States. 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, a Catholic priest who was murdered here more than 40 years ago, in your airport. What did you make of that? It seemed like a pretty minute criticism, pretty small.
Bukele: We actually moved it to a nicer place, in front. It's not like we moved it from a very nice place and put it in some warehouse or whatever, some place that nobody — what if you did? It's your country. Of course, of course. 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 expressed his deep concern on Twitter — and not, you know, call — if he would have called here and said, "Hey, did you move the painting?" They would have said, "No, no, it's right here, Mr Congressman." He could even come and see it for himself. But of course he was doing an attack. But it backfired, because first, the painting was right in front. Just to move the camera, it was on the other side. But also, the fact that a US 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.
Carlson: Like colonialism, to me, a little bit.
Bukele: Yes, yes, and it comes from the Democratic Party, which you would guess would be the anti-colonial party. But at the end, sometimes the guy that's called racist is not really the racist. Or the guy that is called colonialist is not really the colonialist. Sometimes it's weird how narratives work.
Americans Moving to El Salvador
Carlson: Are you getting a lot of Americans moving here?
Bukele: Yes. Probably in numbers it won't be significant to you, but yes, you can see it everywhere. We're also getting something that's very meaningful to us: a lot of our diaspora, a lot of our immigrants — the people that immigrated to 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.
There's a study made by the IOM and USAID — I'll send you the link — that says that 62% of Salvadorans living in the United States want to come back to live here. 62%. And 18% are already making plans to come. That's over half a million Salvadorans coming back. That's super significant, because we expelled them from their homes, because of crime, because of a war, because of lack of opportunities. The fact that they're coming back is the biggest proof that we're doing things the right way. We have a long way to go, but we're doing things the right way.
After that, we have a lot of American-born Americans coming, but we also have a lot of Salvadoran-Americans with American citizenships coming here.
Carlson: Do you have the space?
Bukele: It has created a housing bubble, because we don't produce as many houses as are being bought right now. But that will create a temporary problem, which is the housing bubble — but it's not actually a bubble. It's just the offer and demand finding its own level. Now, of course, construction companies know that the amount of houses they will build, they will sell them. Construction has become 20% of our GDP and it's growing. There's going to be a huge construction boom. They have the client, so it's not built in a bubble or speculation. It feels like a bubble, but it's built on people coming back home.
Sharing the Model with Other Countries
Carlson: Has any other head of state called you for advice on how to improve their country?
Bukele: Yes. Several. Some of them have said so in public. We have meetings, mostly on security issues. We're talking with a lot of Latin American leaders. They have come. They have sent their security ministers to meet here with our security ministers. They have sent people to see our jail system.
Sometimes people see our jail system and they try to compare it to the United States jail system and say, "Oh, look — they don't have gyms, they don't have Netflix." But you shouldn't compare El Salvador's jail system with the US jail system. You should compare El Salvador's jail system with Latin American jail systems. If you go and see most of Latin American countries, the jails are run by the gangs, as they were here. I remember that. They had parties, prostitutes, strippers. It was autonomous. You had to get their permission to go in. You have to get the permission to go in. They only had permission to get in food, medicine, but they controlled the jails. Not only in El Salvador — they do it in most of the Latin American countries. Gangsters or narcos control the jails. It's their operation. They even go out and back.
We totally control that. We have 100% control in our jail system. Latin American countries look to our jail system and see if they can fix their own. We do a lot of cooperation in security issues, jails, army, training. Even more powerful, bigger countries.
Carlson: Have you ever met a head of state who, when faced with a serious problem, a threat to their own country, would in the middle of a cabinet meeting pause and say a prayer?
Bukele: I don't recall, but yeah, probably.
Carlson: Do you know anyone who would do that? Do you think?
Bukele: Yes, probably. Probably. I don't recall right now, but that's just so far from the mindset of any leader I've ever interviewed — anyone who would admit, "I'm not sure what to do. Let's ask God."
Bukele: Probably not that common, but yeah, I would guess some leaders do.
Carlson: How long do you plan to stay president?
Bukele: Five years. That's as much as the Constitution allows me.
Carlson: Thank you for talking to us.
Bukele: Thank you, Tucker.