Salvadoran President Bukele proposes prisoner swap with Venezuela

El Salvador could swap 252 Venezuelan deportees for the same number of political prisoners Venezuela holds, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele said on Sunday. All the Venezuelans currently in Salvadoran jails are members of gangs, including Tren de Aragua, and were deported from the United States, the Salvadoran president said. He criticized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro for imprisoning people who claimed there had been electoral fraud. El Salvador’s foreign ministry would send an official request for the swap, Bukele said.

Maduro in March asked the United Nations to push for the release of Venezuelans held in El Salvador. The Venezuelan leader said that their rights had been violated, and many of their families denied gang ties, Reuters reported. He did not publicly respond to Bukele’s proposal by Monday morning.

Who are some of the political prisoners Bukele wants freed?

• Rafael Tudares is the son-in-law of a political opponent of Maduro’s, Edmundo González Urrutia, who ran for president last summer and went into exile after Maduro claimed a 51% victory. Tudares was kidnapped days before Maduro took office this year, Urrutia told the Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy in February.

• Roland Carreño is a well-known journalist who opposed Maduro and who has been imprisoned for more than 8 months, according to the opposition political party Voluntad Popular.

• Rocío San Miguel, a lawyer and anti-Maduro activist, has been imprisoned for more than a year on charges including terrorism, according to Venezuela’s attorney general.

• Corina Parisca de Machado is the mother of María Corina Machado who also ran against Maduro last summer. Bukele said she faces intimidation from the Maduro government, which also frequently sabotages her electricity and water. It was not immediately on Monday clear whether or not she was detained.

• Four aides of Machado have lived in the Argentine embassy seeking asylum for over a year, according to Latin America Reports.

• Bukele seeks the release of nearly 50 detainees from other countries including America, Israel, and Ukraine.

Dig deeper: Read Christina Grube’s report on Bukele’s stance in the hotly contested case of a deported Salvadoran man.