July 19, 2024 - 9:15pm

Donald Trump accused El Salvador President Nayib Bukele of solving his country’s crime problem by sending criminals to the US during his speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday.

Bukele’s crackdown on gang activity, which involved the imprisonment of about 75,000 alleged gang members in 2022, has been credited with transforming the continent’s murder capital into one of the safest countries in Latin America, and he’s become an icon for the American Right in the process. Yet Trump argued yesterday that Bukele’s popularity in the US is unmerited, and suggested he was to blame for migrant-related crime.

El Salvador’s President is “sending all of his criminals, his drug dealers, his people that are in jails, he’s sending them all to the United States,” Trump said. “He’s trying to convince everybody what a wonderful job he does in running the country. Well, he doesn’t do a wonderful job.”

Bukele took office in June 2019, with his state of emergency and mass imprisonment programme beginning in March 2022. US Border Patrol’s annual encounters of single Salvadorean adults at the southern border have fluctuated since Bukele took office, hitting a low of 9,000 in 2020 amid a Covid-related border crackdown and a high of 51,000 in 2022. This was considerably higher than the 10,000-30,000 annual encounters in the three years preceding Bukele’s presidency.

The history of migration between the US and El Salvador is particularly fraught. The MS-13 gang was formed as a direct result of the migration of men, often trained in guerilla warfare, from El Salvador to the US during the country’s civil war. The gang engages in ritualistic murders in the US, not only of gang members but of randomly selected civilians including teenage girls.

Bukele has previously positioned himself as an ally of the former US president, and criticised his recent criminal prosecution. “Just imagine if this happened in any other country, where a government arrested the main opposition candidate,” he said following Trump’s arrest. “The United States’ ability to use ‘democracy’ as foreign policy is gone.”

Following Trump’s Thursday speech, Bukele wrote only a brief response online: “Taking the high road.”


is UnHerd’s US correspondent.

laureldugg