Rehabilitation Redux: El Salvador Proposes Prisoner Swaps with Venezuela For the Deported

El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele proposed a prisoner swap in which El Salvador would repatriate a number of Venezuelans deported by the US and detained in El Salvador if Venezuela releases the same number of “political prisoners,” wrote the BBC. 

In a post on X addressed to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Bukele named relatives of opposition leaders, journalists, and activists jailed during Venezuela’s electoral crackdown last year, according to the Associated Press. 

Bukele used his X post to tell Maduro that the people imprisoned are only detained for having opposed him and his “electoral fraud” and have committed “no crime,” Al Jazeera reported. On the contrary, he said, many of the Venezuelan deportees had committed “rape and murder.” 

“I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that includes the repatriation of 100 percent of the 252 Venezuelans who were deported, in exchange for the release and surrender of an identical number (252) of the thousands of political prisoners you hold,” he wrote. 

This proposal follows a deal between El Salvador and the US in which Bukele agreed to accept Venezuelans and Salvadorans deported by US President Donald Trump, who are accused of belonging to gangs.  

The prisoners are being held in El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) – a mega-jail capable of holding up to 40,000 people built by Bukele’s government in an effort to combat gang violence in El Salvador. The Trump administration has given Bukele’s government about $6 million to house the detainees at CECOT. 

Maduro condemned the US deportation of Venezuelans to El Salvador as “kidnapping” and called it a “massive abuse” of human rights. 

Venezuela also lashed out at Bukele by calling the El Salvadoran president a “tyrannical human trafficker” whose “cynical” offer exposed him as a narcissistic “neo-Nazi” who had “kidnapped” more than 250 Venezuelan migrants, the Guardian reported. 

“Bukele is a serial human rights violator,” said Venezuelan attorney general Tarek William Saab, pointing to the politician’s “horrifying” three-year anti-gang crackdown, which has seen at least 85,000 Salvadorians thrown in jail, largely without due process.  

The US-El Salvador deal has been criticized by human rights groups and faces legal challenges. Analysts say the El Salvadoran offer to swap prisoners is a “PR stunt” for Bukele to distract from his own human-rights abuses. Lashing out at El Salvador serves a similar purpose for Maduro. 

Meanwhile, over the weekend, the US Supreme Court ordered the US to halt the deportation of another group of alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process.