El Salvador’s President Najib Bukele has described the country’s dramatic crackdown on gangs as a “spiritual war,” explaining to journalist Tucker Carlson this week that the largest gang, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), has a long history of satanic activity.
Bukele spoke with Carlson in the interview to mark his second inauguration as president, which took place on Wednesday night. June 1Bukele was re-elected in February with an overwhelming 85% of the vote, and his party won almost every seat in the national parliament, the National Assembly.
President Najib Bukele saved El Salvador, and he may have the blueprint to save the world. pic.twitter.com/92etFh7sSI
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2024
While no major international observers questioned the legitimacy of the election results, some questioned Bukele’s ability to run because the Salvadoran constitution does not allow a sitting president to be re-elected. The country’s Supreme Court approved his candidacy on the condition that he step down from office six months before the end of his term, a condition that Bukele accepted.
President Bukele’s overwhelming popularity is due in large part to his success in eliminating the stranglehold that transnational criminal organizations had on the country. Even sources critical of his policies report that his administration has all but eradicated the presence of criminal organizations from the everyday lives of the population through the arrest of tens of thousands of suspected members of criminal organizations, the construction of “megaprisons” to house them, and a massive expansion of the national military.
Carlson asked Bukele how he achieved this success, and Bukele gave two answers: efficient implementation of a multifaceted national plan, and “miracles.”
President Bukele acknowledged that he and his cabinet members took time to pray during a secret meeting on security, suggesting that divine intervention was partly necessary because of the “satanic” nature of the gangs.
“They didn’t start out as a satanic organization,” Bukele explained. “MS-13 started in Los Angeles in the United States because Mexican gangs wouldn’t let Salvadorans sell drugs to them.”
MS-13 gang members. The gang is based in Los Angeles and emerged as a neighborhood street gang in the 1980s (AP Photo/Luis Romero, File).
“In the beginning it was young people harming others, assaulting others, trying to control territory, selling drugs, doing bad things but probably not criminal,” he explained. “As the organization grew, they became Satanic. They started doing Satanic rituals. I don’t know exactly when it started, but it’s well documented. And now we’ve made arrests. We’ve even found altars and so on… They’ve become a Satanic organization.”
Bukele told the story of an imprisoned gang member who gave a government-sanctioned interview to journalists in which the gang member recalled killing so many people he couldn’t remember how many, but then leaving the gang to perform satanic rituals.
“I was used to killing.[ing] “I killed people, I killed for territory, I killed to collect money, I killed for extortion,” Bukele recalled the gang member saying in an interview, “but then I came to this house and they were trying to kill a baby.”
“And the guy who killed dozens of people said, ‘Oh wait a second, what are we doing? Why are we killing this baby?’ And the guy told him The Beast wanted the baby and he had to give it to him,” the president continued. “He couldn’t stand what he was seeing, so he left the gang.”
Year of Reports Investigations into MS-13 activity in El Salvador and the United States have documented law enforcement discoveries of satanic altars and eyewitness accounts of human sacrifices, including child sacrifices. One victim of the gang, a 14-year-old girl who has not been named, told police after her rescue in 2017 that she had been kidnapped by MS-13 in Houston, Texas, and that she and at least one other girl had been repeatedly raped during their captivity. The girl was Had disappeared According to a Telemundo report at the time, the 14-year-old boy said he heard gang members say “the devil is asking for your soul.”
President Bukele told President Carlson that the defeat of MS-13 and associated gangs was a “miracle” and that the biggest challenge facing the government is that the gangs commit indiscriminate killings while the government is limited to targeting only suspected gang members.
“When the gangs started fighting back, they basically killed 87 people in three days, which is insanity in a country of six million people,” he explained. “That’s the equivalent of 5,000 murders in three days in the United States.”
“They kill your grandmother, and that’s your victim, because they don’t care about her,” Bukele continued. “Even if the government goes after them, the government has no intention of killing or harming anyone who isn’t a gang member. So, they have a target of 70,000 – 70,000 gang members – but they have six million potential targets.”
Bukele, a Palestinian Christian, said he prayed for wisdom, victory and that civilian casualties be kept to a minimum in the wake of the unrest. Explained He is a Christian but does not publicly identify with any particular denomination. El Salvador is a Christian-majority country, with Christians making up roughly half of the population. Divided between Catholics and Protestants.
“There is a spiritual war and a physical war,” Bukele told Carlson on Wednesday. “Our spectacular victory is because we won the spiritual war.”
