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Floor Speech
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Mr. COTTON. Mr. President, I recently returned from a trip to El Salvador, where I met President Nayib Bukele and saw firsthand the effects of his remarkable transformation of that country from the most dangerous nation in our hemisphere to one of the safest.
As we drove around San Salvador, the images were commonplace yet extraordinary--children played soccer in the parks, young women jogged at twilight, couples dined outdoors--commonplace because one should expect to see such scenes in any decent community; extraordinary because they were unheard of just a few years ago.
Unfortunately, this trip was also a reminder that President Biden is as weak, unpopular, and divisive abroad as he is at home. And just as he coddles criminals and cartels in our own country, he too often sympathizes with them in other nations.
Since taking office, President Biden has refused to meet President Bukele, Secretary of State Tony Blinken has criticized him, and the administration has significantly reduced foreign assistance to his government.
One must ask why. After all, President Bukele is the most pro- American leader in Latin America, and he overwhelmingly won two elections--free and fair elections, I must add, contrary to liberal allegations. Indeed, one of his bigger vote shares came from Salvadorans living outside the country, including in the United States, far removed from any supposed intimidation or coercion inside El Salvador.
It is not surprising because, after years of bloodshed, the Bukele government is bringing stability and safety to a country that desperately needs it, which is also good for America. There has been a 40-percent drop in illegal Salvadoran migrants arriving at our border.
No, Joe Biden doesn't oppose President Bukele for good or fairminded reasons. He opposes President Bukele because he is tough on El Salvador's murderous gangs, the most prominent of which is MS-13, a group with the psychotic motto ``kill, rape, control.''
Our own country has experience with this sadistic gang. In 2017, not far from here in Wheaton, MD, members of MS-13 beheaded a man, cut his heart out, and stabbed him over 100 times. The year before, members of the gang murdered two teenage girls on Long Island, NY, using baseball bats and a machete. And just last year, an illegal immigrant member of MS-13 in California was convicted of torturing and murdering a 10-year- old boy. Let me say that again. He tortured and murdered a 10-year-old boy.
That is what MS-13 has done here in America, the richest and most powerful Nation in the world. It has done far worse to the people of El Salvador. And MS-13 isn't alone. Factions of the infamous 18th Street gang also terrorized the country. Before the government's crackdown, more than 100,000 gang members and associates roamed the streets of the nation of fewer than 6\1/2\ million people. For years, they waged war with each other and the government, turning neighborhoods and cities into ungovernable battlefields. They would impress preteen boys into their gangs or demand preteen girls provide sexual favors--or they would kill the whole family and still take the boy or girl.
As a result, El Salvador has long been one of the most dangerous nations on Earth. Indeed, it was so dangerous that many of my Democratic colleagues have argued that those fleeing the country should automatically be eligible for asylum here. In late March 2022, 2 years ago, the nation reached its breaking point when gang members committed 87 murders in a single weekend, killing more people in 3 days than were killed in the entirety of the previous month. Tragically, March 26, 2022, marked the deadliest day in El Salvador since the end of that nation's civil war 30 years ago.
Finally, people had had enough. President Bukele requested the declaration of a state of emergency, and the National Assembly agreed. The government surged troops throughout the country, overwhelming the gangs and arresting and imprisoning its members. One active gang member told reporters:
There were too many soldiers everywhere all at once.
According to recent estimates, the Bukele government has imprisoned more than 75,000 gang members and killed hundreds more. President Bukele's prison-or-death anti-gang strategy has worked. In 2022, the number of murders in El Salvador dropped nearly 57 percent and then dropped another 70 percent last year. In 2018, the Salvadoran murder rate stood at 53 per 100,000. Last year, it was 2.4 per 100,000. For context, Washington, DC, had a murder rate of 40 per 100,000 last year. That means I was much safer 2 days ago in what was once the murder capital of the world than any of us today are in Joe Biden's Washington.
Yet Joe Biden, one of the least popular, least successful, and most pro-criminal leaders in the world, is lecturing one of the hemisphere's most popular and accomplished Presidents on crime. In particular, the Biden administration has expressed concern that the emergency declaration, which suspends certain due process protections, is a threat to the rule of law--apparently, an even greater threat than the marauding thousands of gang members still at large.
President Biden evidently doesn't understand that order is a prerequisite for law. Indeed, it is a prerequisite for nationhood. Without order and the state's monopoly on force, you don't have a country, and you certainly can't have a democracy.
Perhaps President Bukele's tactics are harsh. I don't think so, but I will grant you that. But they were also absolutely necessary to establish order. And I would remind the Biden administration that El Salvador's gang members aren't victims; they are murderers, rapists, and many of them have American blood on their hands.
I saw up close thousands of these savages--or devils, as President Bukele puts it--when I toured the Terrorism Confinement Center, the massive new prison housing tens of thousands of gang members. The inmates live together by the dozens in group cells. They don't go outside. They don't take classes. They don't get visitors. Most will never leave.
Armed guards are everywhere you turn inside the triple-walled prison, including on the steel-grate ceilings so guards can monitor the inmates from above. Some so-called human rights groups whine about this prison. I guess they think it is too harsh. And it is not Club Med, I will concede, but the inmates receive food and water, they conduct personal hygiene daily, and doctors and nurses work at an aid station next to the cells.
Those same groups also complain about a supposed lack of due process. I don't know. Call me crazy, but if it is illegal to belong to a gang and you have got MS-13 tattoos all over your face and body, I am not sure what more process you are due. Maybe that is just me.
No, the victims aren't the devils I encountered at the Terrorism Confinement Center. The people of El Salvador are the victims. After years of abuse, law-abiding Salvadorans, particularly those from poor and working classes, overwhelmingly support President Bukele's efforts to restore order and a meaningful rule of law.
I am hopeful that El Salvador's leaders will help bring stability and prosperity to a nation that deserves better than gangland terrorism, and I urge the administration that if it is unwilling to help, at least stay out of the way.
Finally, the example of El Salvador not only exposes the failures of President Biden's approach to foreign policy but also his approach to crime. If nothing else, President Bukele has proven once again that incarceration works, obviously. If you lock up murderers, amazingly enough, there will be fewer murders--a truth so obvious that only liberal ideologues could miss it.
Sadly, that is what we have in many places in today's criminal justice system: progressive lawyers who refuse to prosecute criminals; progressive judges who refuse to sentence them appropriately; and progressive politicians who pass jailbreak bills to release them. So long as we continue to pursue these progressive policies, our communities will, sadly, continue to look more and more like El Salvador--not the El Salvador of today but of just a few years ago.
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