The US government has deprived hundreds of allegedly criminal Venezuelans to El Salvador. Now President Bukele Venezuela proposes a prisoner deal. Meanwhile, US President Trump is heading against the Supreme Court.
After the controversial deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members from the USA to El Salvador, they could now be laid again. Because the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, offered his authoritarian colleague from Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro.
Bukele proposes to exchange Venezuelans, which was imprisoned in El Salvador, for the same number of political prisoners imprisoned in Venezuela, as he wrote on the X platform. The 43-year-old demanded, among other things, the release and delivery of a number of family members of high-ranking Venezuelan oppositioners as well as journalists and activists who were arrested in the elections last year.
The exchange should also include “almost 50 imprisoned citizens of other nationalities”, including Americans, Argentinians, Chilen and also Germans. Bukele initially did not give any further details. According to him, the Foreign Ministry would officially present the Venezuelan government's proposal.
Deportation deal with the USA
Bukele takes a hard hand against criminal gangs in his country. At a meeting with US President Donald Trump in the White House last week, he confirmed the support of his country for the United States in the deportations.
Now Bukele wrote to Maduro: “In contrast to our prisoners, many of whom committed a murder or rape and some of whom were even arrested several times before they have been deported, their political prisoners have not committed a crime.” Instead, many people in Venezuela are only imprisoned “because they stood against them and their voting fraud”.
Maduro speaks of “kidnapped” citizens
Venezuela's head of state Maduro announced his protest at the United Nations against the deportation of the Venezuelans. He described the Venezuelan citizens deported from the USA as “kidnapped”. The government in Caracas said that it may consider the transfer of its citizens to El Salvador as “crimes against humanity”.
Despite allegations of the opposition and international criticism, the authoritarian Maduro was sworn in for a third term of six years in January. The Maduro, who has been in office since 2013, won the presidential election at the end of July, according to the official result, with 52 percent of the vote. However, the opposition denounces election fraud. As a result, violent protests and numerous arrests occurred.
USA promotes deportations
US President Trump had made an election campaign with a tough course against irregular migration. After taking office, hundreds of migrants were deported to El Salvador in a short time, where they were detained in a notorious high -security prison for serious criminals. Washington pays the Central American country a million sum for this.
The US government accuses the deported members of the two Latin American gangs to be MS-13 and “Tren de Aragua”. However, it is often questioned whether everyone affected is actually serious criminals – or whether they have committed crimes at all.
Most recently, a dispute caused a sensation that a man had accidentally been deported to the notorious prison. The U.S. Supreme Court had recently stopped the deportation of dozens of other Venezuelans for the time being. “The government is instructed to deport no members of this alleged group of prisoners from the United States until further notice,” said the judges in a letter.
Trump was shining against the Supreme Court
With this decision, the court attracted the anger of the US president. In his online service Truth Social, he ran against the “weak and incompetent judges and law enforcement officers who allow this dark attack on our nation to continue”.
His government made an objection to the court decision – one was convinced that one will prevail “against radical activists”, press spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt wrote on the online intelligence service X. The rights of “terrorists” were more important than that of American citizens.
But even within the Supreme Courts, the decision is not undisputed. The conservative judge Samuel Alito now publicly contradicted the decision. It was “premature and premature”, he wrote in a statement. The court had literally issued an unprecedented and legally questionable legal remedy in the middle of the night without giving the lower courts the opportunity to make a decision without listening to the counterparty. “
