With a warning, this Thursday the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, addressed the audience of CPAC, the influential Conservative Political Action Conference.
Bukele drew parallels between the years before the civil war in his Central American country and the current situation in the United States, and offered advice to the next president, but without naming Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the main candidates of the Democratic parties, by name. and Republican, respectively.
[Bukele and Milei will speak at the conservative CPAC conference: “Getting closer to the Latino community is a priority”]
"The next president of the United States must not only win an election, he must have the vision, the will and the courage to do what is necessary, to identify the dark forces conspiring against him. Those dark forces are already taking over his country," he said.
President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele addressing the CPAC audience on February 22, 2024. Screenshot via Rumble
CPAC is the nation's largest annual conservative conference, attended by activists and elected officials from the United States and beyond.
Its main event will be former President Donald Trump's speech this Saturday,
as in recent years.
This year it occurs from Wednesday, February 21 to Saturday the 24th.
The audience greeted Bukele by cheering his name, some dressed in blue and white and the Salvadoran flag.
Several times they interrupted his speech by shouting “We love you!”
In his speech in English, Bukele criticized globalization ("in El Salvador it has already died");
to the press, which he called "fake news", "puppets" and "activists";
to a "global elite" that "fears our success because "they cannot control the opinion of the people" and who he said control the media, prosecutors, and "persecute their political enemies," in a veiled reference to the four criminal cases opened against Trump in state and federal courts.
“In El Salvador we do not turn justice into a weapon, but here that may sound familiar,” he noted.
Bukele gave his strongest warning regarding a possible civil war breaking out in the United States in the coming years, as occurred in El Salvador between 1979 and 1992.
"There is a similarity between El Salvador and the United States. By the time we reacted it was too late and we were already in a civil war... as your friend I want to warn you of the mistakes we made... We see a society in decline because we recognize it in ourselves ", said.
The president also criticized cities governed by Democrats in the United States, such as San Francisco, New York and Philadelphia, which he called "places where crime and drugs are the daily norm and are accepted and promoted by their governments."
[From Milei to Trump: why so many Venezuelan immigrants support right-wing candidates in Latin America and the US]
CPAC officials told Noticias Telemundo last week that the invitation to Latin American leaders is
an effort by conservatives to reach U.S. Latinos
and win their vote in the November elections.
This effort includes speaking to different electoral blocs, such as Americans with connections to El Salvador and Argentina, in this case.
It is a strategy that the Republican Party has already used and taken advantage of in past elections, first with Cubans and more recently with Colombians, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans.
“Our movement, as we are seeing, is international: when you have two presidents from Latin America, it is something impressive,” said Schlapp, who was a senior strategic advisor to the Trump Administration.
Hearing directly from these leaders was important because they can communicate that “anti-communist, anti-leftist message, because they know the danger and damage of the communists in their countries, and in Latin America, in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.”
CPAC has been singled out for amplifying far-right voices such as Steve Bannon (sentenced to four months in prison for not testifying about his role in the attack on the Capitol) or Stephen Miller, one of the main authors of Trump's heavy-handed immigration policies. .
Populist leaders have also spoken, such as the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, who has said that “we do not want to become mestizo people” and who told the CPAC audience that “all globalists can go to hell” and criticized the “media leftists.”
The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, left, and the president of Argentina, Javier Milei.
Getty Images
Why Bukele?
The invitation to the Salvadoran president to speak at the conference was given because influential right-wing groups in the United States are “very impressed with Bukele and how he has managed to combat crime in his nation, combat gangs” and for his message “of how Countries have abandoned their values of religion, of God, of family.
He has a message that inspires a lot and speaks to the hearts of Latinos in the US, which is family, faith and homeland... We have seen that Bukele speaks to the Latino community,” Schlapp said.
El Salvador has admitted “errors” in its war against gangs, and its vice president, Félix Ulloa, acknowledged that in the mass detention of citizens by his Administration, the Government
imprisoned thousands of people who had not committed any crime.
He specified that it is something they are correcting, but justified the harsh actions as being widely popular and completely “legal.”
Since declaring a state of emergency in March 2022 following a spike in violence, the Government has detained 76,000 people, more than 1% of the small Central American nation's population.
The declaration, which suspended fundamental rights such as access to a lawyer and being told why you are being detained, has been renewed by Congress every month since.