El Salvador’s Bukele proposes prisoner swap with Venezuela for U.S. deportees

SAN SALVADOR — Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela on Sunday, suggesting he would send Venezuelan deportees from the United States his government has kept imprisoned in exchange for detainees in Venezuela he calls “political prisoners.”

In a social media post on X directed at Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Bukele listed a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year.

“The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “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 those he listed were the son-in-law of former presidential candidate Edmundo González Urrutia, a number of political leaders seeking asylum in the Argentine Embassy in Venezuela and what he said were 50 detained citizens from different countries.

Bukele also listed the mother of opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose house the political leader has said was surrounded by Venezuelan police in January.

Bukele said he would ask El Salvador’s Foreign Ministry to contact the Maduro government, which did not immediately respond to the post.

The proposal comes as El Salvador has come under sharp international scrutiny for accepting Venezuelans and Salvadorans deported by the Trump administration, which accused them of being members of the gang Tren de Aragua, with little evidence.

Deportees are locked up in a harsh mega-prison know as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, built by the Bukele government during his anti-gang crackdown, which human rights groups say has been indiscriminate in targeting suspects for incarceration.

Controversy has only continued after it was revealed that a legal U.S. resident, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was among those deported by the Trump administration, and court battles have ensued over his potential return.

Salvadoran Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas on Sunday called on Bukele not “to allow our country to become a big international prison.”

Despite international criticism, Bukele on Sunday maintained that all of the people he has kept in the prison were “part of an operation against gangs like the Tren de Aragua in the United States.”

Aleman and Janetsky write for the Associated Press.