El Salvador's president offers Maduro US-deported Venezuelans for prisoner swap

[In It to Win It]

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.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/el-salvador-president-offers-maduro-001641210.html

[Mopar151]

1. Bukele has to pick a fight!

Every time he has to speak to a non sycophant!

[JustAnotherGen]

2. This was his angle all along

He's a person of the lie and a thief. If he's going to exchange NON rapists & murderers - give us back the money.

[LisaL]

4. Wouldn't these people be better off in Venezuela than in El Salvador prison?

[0rganism]

3. WTF? These are (or were, until recently) humans with lives, not Pokemon trading cards

It's just a nightmare bottomless abyss of pure evil with these assholes, every goddam day something incrementally more awful than before, something that somehow takes the framework laid by the stupid insane evil shit that preceded it and builds onto it just a little more of stupid, insane, and/or evil shit. Eventually, and hopefully soon, at least some of the assholes will receive a down payment from the mystical land of consequences.

[Ol Janx Spirit]

5. This is an odd story. Presumably....

...when Bukele got these "political prisoners" he would release them since he sees them as wrongfully imprisoned. And, presumably Maduro would release the prisoners he received in kind since he also claims they are wrongfully imprisoned. This would certainly pave the way for many of them to find their way back to the U.S.

But the U.S. Administration has had to claim no jurisdiction over those handed over to El Salvador despite paying to house them--in what appears to be a very opaque agreement--in order to keep from having to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This would seem to put the Administration in a very precarious position where their little trick to keep from deporting these people to back to Venezuela where they would be released by Maduro to potentially find their way back to the U.S. could potentially backfire on them.

So what is this? Does Bukele actually care about the "political prisoners" in Venezuela and genuinely want to make a swap even knowing that the ones he releases will once again be a potential danger to the U.S.? Is this a play to extract more money out of the Administration? Or is this something else entirely?