NAYIB ARMANDO BUKELE, President of El Salvador, noted that, five years after his first General Assembly speech, “I come here as the president of a country that now has a voice in the world”. For decades “we were in chains due to an imported civil war and then a false peace that left behind more dead than war itself”, he said, but over the last five years, “El Salvador has been born again”.  The country has a flourishing tourist industry, with sports, surf and entertainment, while thousands of Salvadorans who fled war and poverty are now returning. Once the global capital of homicides, “we've now made this the safest country in our region”, he affirmed.  The transformation of El Salvador “is without comparison, and our success is undeniable — anyone can visit El Salvador and see this for yourself”.

El Salvador has become safer as the world has become less safe, while the Salvadoran people have become more optimistic as “the world has become divided, depressed, concerned and hopeless”, he stressed.  Pointing to cities in other countries where streets belong to drug traffickers and gangs, and to citizens of Western countries who have been arrested for postings on social media, he warned:   “We are moving towards a scary inflection point.”  “As a Salvadoran, I recognize these symptoms because we have experienced all of them,” he said.  Having witnessed the collapse of its nation, El Salvador can “only offer a word of warning to a friend who’s going through a dark period”.  As the smallest country on the American continent, El Salvador cannot change the world; but it can “become a small refuge in light of the approaching storm”.

“Some people say that we are the country that has imprisoned thousands, but actually, we’ve freed millions,” he stated, noting that El Salvador does not confiscate the “property of people who don’t agree with us — we don’t arrest people for their own ideas” in a country that now has freedom of expression that will always be protected. The Government fosters innovation and new ideas.  “In El Salvador, you will find the space to explore your ambitions, be that in technology, energy, medicine, arts, culture, music or architecture,” he emphasized.

Once one of the darkest places on the entire planet, the country was reborn because “we remembered that freedom is something that you take; it isn’t given to us”.  It is now a safe country for progress and innovation, as well as for families. “We welcome you all — mainly for our people, but also for anybody who wishes to contribute to our vision,” he said.  The next steps may be harder than the previous ones, but El Salvador must maintain its freedom “in a world that is increasingly less free”.  He affirmed to the international community that “it’s not too late to build a bridge and to escape the storm”.