(AFP) – El Salvador on Friday freed scores of Venezuelans deported from the United States to a notorious maximum security jail, ending a controversial months-long detention. Washington said the men were freed in exchange for 10 Americans held in Venezuela, and an unknown number of the South American country’s “political prisoners.”
After months of uncertainty over the fate of more than 250 Venezuelans expelled from the United States in March, a flight from El Salvador is expected later Friday at Maiquetia International Airport near Caracas, a source familiar with the operation told AFP on condition of anonymity. Venezuela did not say how many prisoners were being freed, but Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said on X that “today, we have handed over all the Venezuelan nationals detained in our country.”
The United States in March sent the group of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador to be locked up in its feared CECOT anti-“terrorism” jail, accused without evidence of belonging to the Tren de Aragua criminal gang. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on X Friday that “ten Americans who were detained in Venezuela are on their way to freedom” thanks to a deal that also included “the release of Venezuelan political prisoners.” He thanked Bukele “for helping secure an agreement for the release of all of our American detainees.”
“I can’t contain my happiness,” Mercedes Yamarte, mother of CECOT inmate Mervin Yamarte, told AFP. “I arranged the reception, what am I going to do? I’ll make a soup.” The Trump administration invoked rarely used wartime laws to fly the men to the Central American nation without any court hearings. Bukele claimed in his X post that many of the men “face multiple charges for murder, robbery, rape, and other serious crimes.”
– ‘Kidnapped, persecuted’ –
Another plane arrived at Maiquetia airport earlier Friday from Houston with 244 Venezuelans deported from the United States and seven children who Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said had been “rescued from the kidnapping to which they were being subjected.” The children were among 30 who Caracas says remained in the United States after their Venezuelan parents were expelled. Parliamentary president Jorge Rodriguez has said the children were “separated from their mothers, their fathers, their family, their grandparents” and “taken to institutions where they don’t belong.”
“They have arrived in Venezuela, they have been received by their families, they have been cared for after being kidnapped, persecuted on US territory,” Cabello said after receiving the kids at the airport. Clamping down on migrants is a flagship pursuit of Trump’s administration, which has ramped up raids and deportations. It has agreed with Maduro to send undocumented Venezuelans back home, and flights have been arriving near daily also from Mexico, where many got stuck trying to enter the United States.
Official figures show that since February, more than 8,200 people have been repatriated to Venezuela from the United States and Mexico, including some 1,000 children. The Venezuelans detained in El Salvador had no right to phone calls or visits, and their relatives unsuccessfully requested proof of life. The last time the men were heard from was in March when images surfaced of them chained and with their heads shaved. Bukele had built CECOT as part of his war on criminal gangs, but he agreed to receive millions of dollars from the United States to house the Venezuelans there.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other rights groups have denounced the detentions as a violation of human rights.
burs-mlr/mlm – Margioni BERMÚDEZ
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