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After defeating El Salvador’s gangs during a more than three-year state of emergency, President Nayib Bukele This month his attention turned to another persistent, but softer, problem: the many, many stray cats and dogs in his country.
“Thousands of dogs and cats live on our streets. We want to change this, but without cruelty. We have the financial resources, but we look for expert partners to make this a model Latin America,” Bukele wrote on X on October 8. “Who wants to come and help?”
San Salvador is struggling with a problem widely seen in cities across Latin America, as free-roaming cats and dogs sleep on the streets with no one to care for them. dogs Lying on the hot asphalt on the shoulders of the road, it can be seen expertly crossing six lanes of traffic as if it were running through a park or picking up garbage on the banks of a market. But they are often undernourished, sick or injured as they search for food and water.
It’s not clear what kind of solution Bukele, the bespectacled controversial leader with a well-oiled government communications machine, is aiming for, but he likes a problem that lends itself to a grand solution.
Plus, it appears this millennial leader has a soft spot for defensiveness. When he was mayor of the capital San Salvador, he adopted a dog, Cyan.
At the Good Fortune rescue shelter in Zacamil, just north of the capital, Rafaela Pérez said something urgently needed to be done “because the number of abandoned animals you see every day and reported on social networks is minimal compared to the animals that actually exist.”
“We need to change this bad culture of discarding animals and getting rid of them because they are living beings,” he said.
Bukele and his colleagues have already taken steps to address the lack of public institutions to care for the animals, leaving cash-strapped NGOs often filling the gaps.
In 2021, the government controlled by his New Ideas party made animal abuse in El Salvador punishable by a prison sentence of two to four years as well as a fine.
In 2022, his administration opened the region’s first public veterinary hospital, Chivo Pets Hospital. It offers services at a symbolic cost of 25 cents or its equivalent in Bitcoin.
Patricia Madrid of Fundación Gratitude, head of an organization dedicated to spaying, neutering and providing care for stray dogs, has worked long hours with six other volunteers on the streets of Salcoititan, about 50 miles from El Salvador’s capital. But they have struggled to maintain it because their funding comes from just one Salvadoran woman living in the United States.
Madrid said he hopes his organization can work with the government to change this.
It was not immediately clear where the money for Bukele’s latest project would come from. He has claimed earnings from buying the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, but the Central American country is facing rising debt and has received a loan of $1.4 billion. International Monetary Fund earlier this year.
Bukele previously sought help from China to build a modern public library in San Salvador’s main square.
The animal welfare idea has also drawn praise from outside the country, with people like Thailand-based social media influencer Niall Harbison saying he is “on a mission to save stray dogs around the world” by raising money for their sterilization.
Harbison responded to Bukele’s public call in a social media post on Twitter, saying he would “love to talk about how to help.” He said he would get on a plane to meet people to see what he could do.
Harbison wrote, “I have always been looking for a country with which to partner to demonstrate how collaboration between the private and public sectors can work – to make it so effective that other countries can copy and implement it.”
The social media-savvy president responded, “Let’s do it.”