Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has proposed a prisoner exchange with Venezuela, offering to repatriate hundreds of Venezuelans who were deported from the United States in exchange for “political prisoners.”
In a post on X, Bukele offered to exchange 252 Venezuelans currently detained in El Salvador’s mega prison for “an identical number (252) of the thousands of political prisoners” he says Venezuela holds, including family members of opposition leaders.
“Unlike our detainees, many of whom have committed murder, others have committed rape, and some have even been arrested multiple times before being deported, your political prisoners have committed no crime,” Bukele said in the post, which was directed at Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. “The only reason they are imprisoned is because they opposed you and your electoral fraud.”
The US and El Salvador say most of the deportees locked up in El Salvador’s Cecot prison are members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua and some are members of the MS-13 Salvadoran gang. But officials have provided scant evidence to show the inmates have ties to those criminal groups.
Venezuela’s leader has described the deportation of the mostly Venezuelan migrants as a “kidnapping,” and denied they are criminals while backing calls for their return.
The Salvadoran leader named some of the “political prisoners” incarcerated in Venezuela, including Rafael Tudares, son-in-law of exiled opposition presidential candidate Edmundo González.
González, who fled the country after claiming to have defeated Maduro in July’s presidential election, said his son-in-law was detained in Venezuela’s capital in early January, just days before Maduro was inaugurated.
He also mentions Corina Parisca de Machado, the mother of Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who he says is facing political pressure.
Bukele also proposed swapping four political leaders seeking asylum in the Argentine Embassy in Venezuela. The group has been sheltering at the facility for more than a year, accused of terrorist activities and treason for working with Machado, who says they did nothing wrong.
Also included in Bukele’s proposed agreement are journalist Roland Carreño, lawyer and activist Rocío San Miguel, and nearly 50 detained citizens from other countries, including the US.
Bukele’s proposal comes amid heightened scrutiny about the Salvadoran’s willingness to accept hundreds of migrants who the Trump administration claims are gang members or violent criminals.
One of the region’s most popular leaders, Bukele has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator” and the “philosopher king” as he suspends certain civil liberties to go after his country’s gangs.
That has earned him the ire of international human rights organizations, which allege large-scale abuses in his crackdown on crime. But it has also earned him popularity inside El Salvador; Bukele, 43, won reelection last year by a landslide.
This is a developing story and will be updated.