El Salvador has about 100,000 Palestinians, in a country of six million people. Roughly 1.6% of the population. Yet, two of their recent presidents have been of Palestinian extraction.
Given the Palestinian tendency to success, that percentage should be big enough to influence the country’s foreign policy concerning the Mideast. Yet, it is not so.
Why?
Because in El Salvador, the Evangelical percentage (34%) of the population is closing in on the Catholic percentage (43%). Evangelicals in El Salvador take the faith more seriously, and that faith tends to lean to Christian Zionism.
Source: Christian Zionism in Bukele’s El Salvador
NACLA
Isabel Rikkers & Noelle Brigden
October 9, 2024On 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.
As noted many times before, here in Latin Arabia, the biggest friend that Israel has in Latin America is Evangelical Christianity.
The President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, is of Palestinian extraction – his ancestors arrived in El Salvador about a century ago – but his administration is pro-Israel. His father converted from Christianity to Islam, and his mother was Catholic. While he is ambivalent about his Christian denonimational affiliations, he seems to have picked up a lot of Evangelical practices.
Posted on YouTube: November 27, 2024
The growing Evangelical presence in El Salvador is what is overruling any power of a potential for a Muslim or Palestinian lobby.
Posted on YouTube: June 5, 2024
By that logic, what is needed for Chile to break the power of its Palestinian-Chilean (Chilestino) lobbies is an Evangelical revival. However, the Evangelical percentage of the population in Chile is somewhat small (18%) compared to the El Salvador percentage (34%).
What is an emerging conclusion is that anti-Zionism and antisemitism seem to follow left wing political attitudes in Latin America. And especially regarding Zionism, faith seems to trump ethnicity as well as politics.