The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, acts as he leaves following a meeting at the White House with President Donald Trump, on Monday April 14, 2025, in Washington.
Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP
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Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP
San Salvador, El Salvador – President of Salvador, Nayib Bukele, proposed to have an exchange of prisoners with Venezuela on Sunday, suggesting that he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the United States.
In an article on the X social media platform, directed against President Nicolás Maduro, Bukele has scored a number of family members of high-level opposition personalities in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the electoral repression of the South American government last year.
“The only reason they are imprisoned is to have opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement which includes the repatriation of 100% of the 252 Venezuelans who have been expelled, in exchange for the liberation and the surrender of an identical number (252) of the thousands of political prisoners that you hold.”
Among those he listed was the son -in -law of the former Venezuelan presidential candidate Edmundo González, a certain number of political leaders looking for asylum in the Argentine Embassy of Venezuela, and what he said to be 50 citizens detained by a certain number of different countries around the world. Bukele also listed the mother of the opposition chief María Corina Machado, whose political leader said was surrounded by the Venezuelan police in January.
Bukele said he would ask El Salvador’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be in contact with the Maduro government.
The office of the Venezuela prosecutor responded on Sunday evening, qualifying the “cynical” bukele declarations and referred to chief Salvadoran as a “neofascist”.
He demanded that the government of Bukele provide the Venezuelan government with a list of detained persons as well as their legal status and their medical reports.
“The treatment received by the Venezuelans in the United States and Salvador is a serious violation of international human rights law and constitutes a crime against humanity,” he said in the statement.
The proposal comes as El Salvador was the subject of a vivid international examination for accepting the Venezuelans and the Salvadoran expelled by the Trump administration, who accused them of being members of alleged gangs with little evidence. The deportees are locked in a “mega-prison” known as Terrorism Contest Center (CECOT), built by the Bukele government during its repression against the country’s gangs.
The controversy only continued after being revealed that a father of the Maryland married to an American citizen, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was expelled. The United States Supreme Court has ordered the US government to facilitate its return, but there is no sign.
The archbishop of El Salvador, José Luis Escobar alas, called on Sunday in Bukele “to allow our country to become a large international prison”.
Despite the controversy, Bukele argued that all the people he kept in the prison was “part of an operation against gangs like the Aragua Tren in the United States”.