Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), and Tim Kaine (D-Va.) — or as I like to call them the Three Muskattention Whores — must not have a lot going on in their home states because they seem awfully intent on sticking it to El Salvador at the moment. More specifically, they want Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Scott Bessent to impose sanctions on el presidente Nayibe Bukele and his vice president, Felix Ulloa, as well as several of the country’s other ministers and government officials and even unnamed folks who might fit the senators’ criteria.
Last month these three clowns introduced the El Salvador Accountability Act of 2025, legislation that calls for everything from property-blocking sanctions to stripping the officials of their visas due to “gross violations of internationally recognized human rights” because the country is supposedly “colluding with the Trump Administration” to detain United States deportees, according to Van Hollen. The legislation also insists that Rubio provide a report on the Salvadoran use of cryptocurrencies (El Salvador was the first country in the world to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, and these guys insist that there’s something corrupt about it), and it blocks U.S. assistance to El Salvador until certain standards are met.
“We must hold Bukele and his cronies accountable for these wrongful actions as well as for the gross violations of human rights they are committing in El Salvador,” Van Hollen said last month when he announced the bill.
Long story short, these three are wasting even more taxpayer dollars and time to introduce a bill that will never get passed, in an attempt to tell a sovereign nation how to run itself and ruin our country’s relationship with one of our greatest allies in Latin America.
Where do you even start with something like this? First, let’s go with the obvious. These guys don’t care about what happens in El Salvador. They don’t care about the Salvadoran people. They just want to find any excuse they can to go after Donald Trump, and at the end of the day, they’ll use anyone and anything in their path to do so. Democrats love to preach about “people with brown skin,” but ultimately, they only see them as pawns in their political games. There are days when this makes me sick to my stomach.
Beyond that, some on the left have been going after Bukele for years because maybe he doesn’t necessarily follow the Washington rulebook. As a matter of fact, the Joe Biden administration did sanction certain government officials in El Salvador (while going easy on or bending over backward to appease corrupt regimes in countries like Cuba and Venezuela), something Rubio and others criticized heavily at the time.
Someone should remind them that El Salvador is not the United States. The country cannot not necessarily be governed through a red, white, and blue lens, and we shouldn’t expect it to be. What matters is that the people in El Salvador are happy. And they are. Overwhelmingly so. Bukele won re-election in 2024 with something like 84% of the vote in a generally free election, and he has one of the highest organic approval ratings of any leader in the world. That’s largely because El Salvador’s crime rates have dropped dramatically in recent years.
I feel like I’ve told this story a million times, but maybe I need to tell it again. Before Bukele, people called El Salvador the murder capital of the world. In 2015, the Migration Policy Institute reported that more immigrants came to the U.S. from El Salvador than from any other Central American country. It was also the second-highest source of illegal immigration into the U.S. That same year, the murder rate was 106.3 per 100,000 people, with a total of 6,656 murders. That’s a lot, especially for a tiny country. I won’t even get into the ridiculously high numbers for other grotesque crimes like sexual violence.
People feared for their lives. Gangs ran El Salvador. Citizens couldn’t go to work. Kids couldn’t play in the parks. You couldn’t even walk down the street without fear that you were in the wrong territory. The country was in a constant state of emergency. Where were all the Democrats who care so much about the “people with brown skin” back then?
Bukele, who ran on curtailing the violence, came in and fixed it in the only way he knew how. In a few short years, he gave the citizens back their country. Even the Associated Press conceded last year, “The crackdown has been tough, but people have reclaimed their neighborhoods. Small businesses are no longer extorted into oblivion. People can safely seek jobs in neighborhoods formerly controlled by rival gangs. Children can walk to school without fear of forced gang recruitment.”
By 2024, the murder rate dropped to 1.9 per 100,000 people or 114 murders per year. Some who came to the U.S. in decades’ past are returning home. It’s even becoming a tourist destination. Earlier this year, the State Department raised its travel advisory to a Level 1 — the best a country can earn.
Placing such harsh sanctions on Bukele and limiting his ability to run his country the way he and the overwhelming number of citizens who elected him see fit is literally — wait for it — a threat to democracy. Not only that, but it puts those citizens’ lives at risk. How quickly would they return to the hell that they just fought their way out of? It punishes the people, not the government officials.
Finally, as I’ve mentioned, El Salvador is a strong ally for the U.S., and Bukele has a great relationship with Trump and Rubio. He wants to work with us. This comes at a time when China is doing everything it can to move into Latin America as quickly as it can — something that’s a detriment to the entire Western Hemisphere — and people like Venezuelan “president” Nicolas Maduro are doing everything they can to undermine the United States. If these senators cared anything about their own country and their own constituents, they’d recognize the importance of this and stop playing politics over the fact that they don’t like Donald Trump or anyone willing to work with him.
As I said, this bill will never pass. It’s all a dog and pony show for these three stooges — the ones who drink margaritas with gang members, disrupt private press conferences and cry about it, and think a Hillary Clinton for president is such a great idea that they agree to be her VP — because that’s about all they know how to do: performance art.
They think it makes them look tough, as if they’re doing something great for “human rights,” but all it does is expose their truth. They don’t care about Salvadorans. They don’t care about U.S. citizens. They don’t care about “people with brown skin.” They don’t care about immigrants, illegal or otherwise. They don’t care about democracy. If this were truly about any of that, they’d be focused on diplomacy, not harsh sanctions that would destabilize El Salvador.
They just want to stick it to their political opponents. They’re using a tired and outdated narrative to justify their own ideological bias.
Oh, and as for Bukele? I don’t think he’s too concerned. Maybe these guys should look to him for some tips on leadership.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA the Dems are just salty… https://t.co/O6CLtZuV46
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) July 8, 2025
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