El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele offered his prediction of the potential future facing the United States, while reassuring Americans that they still have an opportunity to reverse course, in a speech in Washington, DC.
President Bukele spoke on the evening of February 22 at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), telling his audience that “they say globalism comes to die at CPAC. I’m here to tell you that, in El Salvador, it’s already dead. But, if you want globalism to die here too, you must be willing to unapologetically fight against everything and everyone that stands for it.”
Bukele proposed that the problem of globalism “is like the metaphor of the boiling frog” because “Once the water boils, it’s already too late.” “Just like the frog, people become complacent and they don’t realize how bad things are getting until it’s too late.”
Pres. Bukele related the problems experienced by El Salvador to those of the United States, declaring that “by the time we reacted, it was already too late, and we were already boiled like the frog.”
“It took us fifty years, two wars, 250,000 lives, one-third of our population displaced, and a near miracle to get our country back.” Bukele said, cautioning that “you don’t want to wait fifty years and maybe hope for a miracle to get out of hell. You can still jump before the water boils.”
Once criminal gangs had come to control El Salvador in the aftermath of the civil war, the country was forced to “do the unthinkable in order to cleanse our society: we arrested the terrorists,” Pres. Bukele said.
Bukele called misguided esteem for institutions one of the common sources of problems in both the United States and El Salvador:
“I always criticize the defenders of institutionalism, not because I don’t think that strong institutions are paramount and necessary for a democracy, but because I find them very hypocritical. They don’t seem to have the same standards for themselves as they are trying to impose on others.”
“Institutions were created to serve the people and not the other way around,” Bukele added, explaining that justice and upholding the law have become secondary concerns, and even objects of avoidance for judges and for the police, and that those institutions must come to prioritize their original purposes once again:
“We should not defend those institutions for the sake of being institutions. Instead, we should defend the principles that created those institutions in the first place.”
Finally, Bukele encouraged his audience to fight for their country “with all your heart and soul” and be a “beacon of hope that your Founding Fathers, with all their faults like every human being has, dreamt for your country:
“Fight for your freedoms, for your rights, fight for the original purpose of these institutions and not their mere existence. It’s still not too late, it can be done. It’s time to erase these new paradigms that have been imposed in recent years that make no sense. If you can, just free your minds from those invisible chains. You can do it.”