El Salvador’s Bukele Proposes to Swap USA Prisoners with Venezuela’s Maduro

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele proposed a prisoner swap to Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, offering people renditioned from the USA in exchange for people he called “political prisoners.”

Diplomatic relations between El Salvadaor and Venezuela have been suspended since 2019.

Bukele made the proposal through Elon Musk’s social media platform X (formerly Twitter). He posted:

The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud. However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that includes the repatriation of 100% 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.

Among the people Bukele wants to get from Maduro, he listed relatives of high-level political opposition, journalists, activists detained in last year’s crackdown, political leaders requesting asylum through Argentina’s embassy, and what he claimed were 50 people from a number of different countries across the world who have been detained in Venezuela. The nationalities involved include American, German, Dominican, Argentine, Bolivian, Israeli, Chilean, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Spanish, French, Guyanese, Dutch, Iranian, Italian, Lebanese, Mexican, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Ukrainian, Uruguayan, Portuguese, and Czech.

Venezuela responded by demanding that Bukele send a list of the Venezuelans in his custody along with their legal status and medical condition.

The USA paid El Salvador $6 million to detain men it sends there in prison for a year. Bukele’s proposal makes the USA providers of people for human trafficking.

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