My vote goes to President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador.
Nayib Bukele is such a man. El Salvador went from 6,500 homicides in 2023 to just 114 in 2024. This is pretty damn huge as far as improvement goes.
While sending the military after violent criminal gangs and going medieval on them, locking up tens of thousands of violent gangsters, Bukele has also been improving the nation’s infrastructure and economy, trying to make it a stable and peaceful place ready for investment.
The world is run by leaders who are “all talk, no game”. They all talk the talk, they’ve been blessed with the gift of the gab but they don’t walk the walk… Bukele does what any leader in a country taken over by drug cartels and violent street gangs should do — sweep the streets, consider the gangs a national security risk (which they are) and go after them with the same intensity one would go after rebel forces or a terrorist organization. A drug cartel is, at the end of the day, nothing but a coked-up version of ISIS or al-Qaida.
To me, El Savador’s Nayib Bukele is the “man of the year” in 2024. Everyone talks about Trump, Putin, Modi or Xi. Leaders of big countries. But in the meantime it’s the leaders of small countries — El Salvador only has 6 million inhabitants — who are quietly moving mountains, fixing decades long internal strife and doing so without the world noticing.
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