President of the General Assembly, Secretary-General. Your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, as we're here talking about peace, international security and cooperation, thousands of people are dying victims of war hunger, violence, disease and injustice. It's as if we've lost our sense of humanity. It's not a future tragedy. The fact is that thousands, millions of people are dying as we're here. Right now, at this very moment, there will be mothers, fathers, children, entire families breaking up and asking themselves a question that's not an abstract one, a diplomatic one, or a geopolitical one.

It's a fundamental question that they are asking with the most profound sense of humanity in a very human way. And that is, where are the United Nations? Where are the United Nations? This question, perhaps more than any other question, is the very reason we're here. And this is why I want to ask all of us here at this Assembly very seriously, with a strong sense of conviction, whether today we have an organization that is still relevant with a conviction to deal with the challenges that our humanity is dealing with. That's the question. President, we are living through an extremely complex era where changes and challenges happen in a matter of seconds.

These changes, and I think that we've all experienced them, overwhelm us. However, the most vulnerable people that suffer the most, the poorest people that don't have a voice and who we owe it to work for, are aspiring to something much more simple. They just want peace, security, jobs, freedom, and a safe future for their children.

And this is the greatest contradiction of our time. We have more capacities than ever before, but we also face challenges that no state can tackle alone. As the United Nations, we need to commit ourselves and work to redefine the international order so that we can prioritize the common well-being of the whole of humanity, regardless of whether of where they live and their condition guarantee the well-being of our brothers and sisters, the whole of humanity. We need a multilateral system that is able to listen, but also to make decisions, to safeguard present principles, to respect the sovereignty of states. But that at the same time understands that no state can resolve problems that know no borders alone. The fact is that the credibility of the United Nations is not something that we can build exclusively with resolutions. On the contrary, its legitimacy is achieved when the organization is really, truly able to preserve and save people's lives and to ensure a decent future for all people. And this is something that El Salvador has firsthand experience in.

Mr. president, for decades, my small but great country was known for a reality that it seemed impossible to change. The scourge of violence was deeply entrenched in our society. An entire nation was resigned to being condemned to live with this reality. After decades of institutional indifference, in 2019, the El Salvadoran people opted for Nayib Bukele, our president, who is now known across the world, a young leader who dared to challenge something that an entire generation thought they were condemned to and strove to profoundly transform the reality of our country, regardless of the consequences or the criticisms he had received from the international community. El Salvador went from being the most violent country in the world, with a murder rate of 103 people per 100,000 inhabitants. We as a country in peace, had more deaths than a country at war. So we moved from 103 murders per 100,000 inhabitants to 1.3 murders per 100,000 inhabitants in just five years. Unimaginable. Just think about it. But we achieved that. Por eso. Thank you. So thanks to this, my country is now a benchmark for others who suffer from the same problem. The International Monetary Fund has said that improvements for security has strengthened trust in and the economic activity of my country. And it's estimated the El Salvadorian economy will grow by 4.5% in 2026. So this has skyrocketed. And this is driven by investment, private consumption, remittances, tourism and inward capital flows. However, it would be a mistake to boil all of this down to numbers, because behind each and every number, these numbers that we have got used to when we say millions, they're not just numbers, they're millions of faces, individual people, individuals. So in my country, that we're talking about a mother who no longer has to be scared about whether her children are coming home in the evening or not. A business owner who used to face so much anxiety that knew that their basket of mangoes that they had to sell, they had to sell them for more than $10. Because if they didn't sell them for more than $10, they wouldn't be able to pay their protection money and they'd get shot in the head. So now behind these figures, we have a business owner who's able to open their business without fear, somebody who's able to breathe easily and cross the city freely, and a child who's able to run around all of the streets of our country, streets and spaces that they weren't able to dream of going in before, and something more profound, even the fact is that we now have a society that has recovered hope, grounded in the ability to imagine a different future. This is what recovering security really means. It doesn't just mean reducing crime, it means giving freedom its rights, its rightful space back. And I'm talking about freedom for each and every one of our citizens and each and every person that visits our country. And when a society recovers its freedom to walk around, to work, to do business and to live and breathe without fear, a second transformation begins. That is the recovery of trust. And this explains why El Salvador is now a benchmark for countries that are seeking support and looking for answers to their own security challenges. And it's not that our journey can be copied and pasted mechanically because there's no universal formula. Each situation needs to be resolved according to each country's individual experience. However, there is a lesson that we believe can be a universal lesson, and that is that no nation should have to accept collapse and government impotence as their destiny, the destiny for their people. No country. El Salvador, no. El Salvador has not come to this assembly to say that we've resolved all of our problems. No, we still got a lot to do. That would be false. To claim that we've come to say something much more profound. With determination, we have demonstrated that a problem that seemed irreversible could be tackled and turned around, regardless of whatever problem it is. And I want to be clear in line with the vision of my president, Mr. Bukele, security is not the final destination.

It's just the departure point. In El Salvador, we have placed education at the very heart of our national transformation, and we've done this because we believe that transforming a school ultimately leads to transforming someone's life, transforming our homeland. And with initiatives like the Two Schools per Day initiative, we are overhauling public education comprehensively from early childhood to middle school and in healthcare. We've renewed infrastructure, modernized equipment and created digital care through Doctor SV and we have managed to reach the length and breadth of our country, even the most forgotten corners, and providing immediate care for anyone who needs it, regardless of whether of wherever they live.

Care is free and drugs are free too. And we are the first in the world to achieve this feat. The vision of our first Lady, Gabriela Rodriguez de Bukele, uh, is a profoundly human one. And that is that every boy girl, each and every young person, deserves to grow up in liberty to fully develop their potential and to have real opportunities to build the life that he or she wants for him or herself.

Now, the efforts of our nation are focused on turning security into investment, investment into jobs and jobs, into social mobility technology, into opportunities and education, into skills and stability and to prosperity. Heading up alongside Estonia, the Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance, El Salvador reaffirmed that this technology must expand capacities and create opportunities to build environments that can be competitive in the future. Mr. president, the transformation that my country is experiencing has shown us that security, development and human dignity are not separate files. The fact is that without security, development is fragile.

Without development, it's very difficult to make security sustainable and without dignity, neither of these things make any sense. The international community must understand that resolving these challenges, these global challenges, goes above and beyond, well beyond actually, any resolutions, millions of resolutions on paper. Multilateralism that does not oblige countries to constantly choose between sovereignty and cooperation. Today, we have an historical and inexcusable challenge, and that is making multilateralism synonymous again with capacity to act. El Salvador believes that the reform of the United Nations should not be restricted to reorganising its structures. We need an organisation that is agile, representative, effective and transparent that's able to resolve contemporary challenges with the speed required. So enough with the conformism. Enough of personal and national interests prevailing over the needs of the world and global crises. And enough, ladies and gentlemen. Enough with the bureaucracy. Let us hope that the next Secretary General of the United Nations is able to show leadership with absolute full independence and ability to engage in dialogue, moral authority, knowledge of the international reality, and that they have a willingness to reform and a conviction that we need to reform to benefit humanity, like my president, Bukele, regardless of the consequences, because one human life is worth it. Just a single life is worth the effort. El Salvador, in a short but historic period of seven years, made strong strides forward to change our reality, recovering our security, our spaces, trust, dignity.

However, we did this while always fighting to safeguard our sovereignty because our sovereignty is not up for negotiation, our sovereignty must not be touched. We are resolved to defend it because we spilt too much blood, recovering our sovereignty. I am convinced that each and every one of my compatriots within our borders, as well as those outside of our borders, would be prepared to defend our homeland and our sovereignty with the highest level of commitment and sacrifice. Today, El Salvador wants to leave this assembly with four fundamental lessons. Number one. That nations are not condemned to eternally repeating their past. Two, the problems, even if they may seem impossible to resolve, are not impossible to resolve. Number three, that the size of a country with a very small country does not determine the size of our responsibility. And that the future does not necessarily have to belong to those that have the most power. It belongs to those who dare to engage in transformations with a sense of determination. El Salvador's invitation to this General Assembly is very simple.

Let us not give in. Let us not accept that war, poverty and violence are inevitable. Let us not accept that this organization is condemned to incapacity. And let us not accept that differences between nations are more powerful than what unites us. Today we must ask a vital question for the present and future of our nations. And that is what world do we want to build to ensure that nobody dies, that no innocent person has to suffer, so that the whole of humanity, regardless of their country, their origin, their social condition, is able to prosper?

El Salvador already made a decision on our own future, and this is something I don't say lightly. Today we come here to declare loud and clear that change is possible not merely in words, but in deeds. It is possible to change, and we are doing this. We're demonstrating this through our actions and not with words.

And we will continue to change. And we will not take a single step back because it's possible to do it. We can. Thank you and may God bless all of you.