The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, described the dramatic crackdown on violent gangs in his country 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 sat down with Carlson for an interview published Wednesday night in the context of his second inauguration as president, which took place on June 1. Bukele won reelection with a resounding 85 percent of the vote in the national election in February, and his party won nearly every seat in the National Assembly, the federal legislature:
President Nayib Bukele saved El Salvador. He may have the blueprint for saving the world. pic.twitter.com/92etFh7sSI
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2024
No major international observers questioned the legitimacy of the election results, though some contested Bukele’s ability to be on the ballot at all, as the Salvadoran Constitution does not allow for the reelection of an incumbent president. The nation’s top court approved of his candidacy on the condition that he step down from the executive office six months before his term ended, which Bukele did.
Bukele’s overwhelming popularity is in large part a result of his success in eliminating the chokehold that transnational criminal gangs had on the country. Through arrests of tens of thousands of suspected gang members, the building of “mega-prisons” to house them, and a dramatic increase in the size of the national military, Bukele’s administration largely erased the presence of the gangs in the daily lives of citizens, according to reports even from sources critical of Bukele’s policies.
El Salvador debuts “mega prison” for thousands of suspected gang members (Twitter/Nayib Bukele).
Carlson asked Bukele how he achieved this success, and Bukele had two answers: a multi-pronged national plan executed efficiently and a “miracle.”
Bukele admitted that he and his cabinet took time out for prayer during sensitive security meetings, suggesting divine intervention was, in part, necessary due to the “satanic” nature of the gangs.
“They didn’t start as a satanic organization,” Bukele explained. “MS-13 started in Los Angeles, in the U.S., because Salvadorans weren’t allowed to sell drugs by the Mexican gangs.”
Gang member of MS-13. The gang has a stronghold in Los Angeles, where it emerged in the 1980s as a neighborhood street gang (AP Photo/Luis Romero, File).
“At the beginning, it was some youth causing harm, assaulting, trying to control their territory, selling drugs, things that are bad but probably not criminal,” he explained. “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 we now arrested – we’ve even found altars and things like that … they became a satanic organization.”
Bukele relayed the story of an imprisoned gang member who offered a state-approved interview to journalists. The gang member, he recalled, had killed so many people he could not remember how many but left the gang due to satanic rituals.
“I was used to kill[ing] people, but I killed for territory, I killed to collect money, I killed for extortion,” Bukele recalled the gang member saying in the interview, “but I came to this house and they were about to kill a baby.”
“And he, the killer that had killed tens of people, said, ‘oh well 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,” the president continued. “He left the gang because he couldn’t tolerate what he was seeing.”
Years of reports on MS-13 activity in El Salvador and in the United States has documented the discovery by law enforcement of satanic altars and witness evidence of human sacrifices, including sacrifices of children. An unnamed victim of the gang, a 14-year-old girl, told police in 2017 after her rescue that she had been kidnapped by MS-13 in Houston, Texas, and raped repeatedly while in captivity, alongside at least one other girl. The girl disappeared after the 14-year-old heard gang members say that Satan “demanded a soul,” according to a Telemundo report at the time.
Speaking to Carlson, Bukele described the defeat of MS-13 and associated gangs as a “miracle” and the greatest challenge facing his government as the fact that the gangs would kill indiscriminately, while the government was limited to attacking only suspected gang members.
“When the gangs started attacking us back, basically, they killed 87 people in 3 days, which for a country of 6 million people, it’s crazy,” he explained. “It would be the equivalent of having 5,000 murders in the United States in three days.”
“They can kill their grandma and it’s your victim, because they don’t care about their grandma,” Bukele continued. “If the state goes after them, the state has no intention of killing or harming anybody but the gang members – so you have 70,000 objectives, which were the 70,000 gang members, but they have 6 million possible targets.”
In response to the chaos, Bukele said he prayed for wisdom, victory, and minimal civilian casualties. Bukele is of Palestinian Christian background and has previously described himself as a Christian, though he has not specifically embraced a denomination in public. El Salvador is a predominantly Christian country whose Christian population is almost evenly divided between Catholics and Protestants.
“There’s a spiritual war and there’s a physical war,” Bukele told Carlson on Wednesday. “Our impressive victory was because we won the spiritual war.”
