El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, stands beside the country’s flags during the country’s Independence Day celebrations on September 15, 2024. (Flickr/PresidenciaSV/CC0 1.0)

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On October 8 of last year, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele published a post on X outlining his position on Palestine. “As a Salvadoran of Palestinian ancestry, I’m sure the best thing that could happen to the Palestinian people is for Hamas to completely disappear. Those savage beasts do not represent the Palestinians,” he wrote. Drawing parallels between Hamas and gangs in El Salvador, Bukele continued: “It would be like if Salvadorans would have sided with MS13 terrorists, just because we share ancestors or nationality. The best thing that happened to us as a nation was to get rid of those rapists and murderers and let the good people thrive.” Bukele closed his post with a word of advice, drawing from his nearly 30-month long—and counting—assault against gangs. “Palestinians should do the same: get rid of those animals and let the good people thrive.”

The parallel drawn by Bukele between Hamas and MS13 derives from an evangelical Christian understanding of “terrorist” security threats as a spiritual contest between good and evil. Bukele uses biblical allegories, religious narratives, declarations of devotion, and visual propaganda leveraging sacred symbols to justify the country’s security policies, in addition to asserting the Salvadoran government’s unwavering support for Israel during its genocide of Palestinians.

Security Theology

According to Bukele’s formulation, the great battle for the soul of nations demands a cleansing of uncivilized individuals living among otherwise good people.Since first declaring a state of emergency in March 2022, the Bukele regime’s hardline against gangs remains popular and most Salvadorans perceive an increase in public safety, despite a deepening record of political repression, authoritarianism, arbitrary detentions, the suspension of constitutional rights, and widespread human rights abuses—including 265 deaths in state custody and torture in prisons. El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to Bukele’s formulation, the great battle for the soul of nations demands a cleansing of uncivilized individuals living among otherwise good people. Recycled iterations of security discourse from the Cold War through the War on Terror and the current “war on gangs” rearticulate a colonial imaginary buttressed by Christian Zionism.

To celebrate his first presidential victory in 2019, Bukele posted an Instagram photo of himself praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. In the photo, taken during an official visit to Israel in 2018, then-mayor Bukele wears his trademark leather jacket and closes his eyes in devotion. The image speaks to multiple, long-standing sources of Israeli influence on Salvadoran foreign policy; it explains why, after October 7, 2023, the Salvadoran government refused to criticize the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, despite the country being home to a sizeable and politically consequential population of Palestinian ancestry, including Bukele. Furthermore, the image elucidates a common ideological frame underpinning both Salvadoran and Israeli security politics. Within this frame—what Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian calls “security theology”—security itself becomes religion, intertwined with biblical narratives.

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