May 21, 2025
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela on Sunday, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the United States being held by his government for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela.
In a post on the social media platform X, directed at 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 Venezuelan presidential candidate Edmundo González, a number of political leaders seeking asylum in the Argentine embassy in Venezuela, and what he said were 50 detained citizens from several different countries across the world. 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 be in contact with the Maduro government.
Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office responded Sunday night, demanding that Bukele’s government provide the Venezuelan government with a list of the people detained as well as their legal status and medical reports.
Controversy has only continued after it was revealed that a Salvadoran man in Maryland illegally, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the U.S. government to facilitate his return, but there’s no sign of that happening.
Despite the controversy, Bukele maintained that all of the people he has kept in prison were “part of part of an operation against gangs like the Tren de Aragua in the United States.”
