Venezuela frees jailed Americans in swap for migrants in El Salvador

Caracas, Venezuela (AP) – Venezuela released 10 Americans imprisoned Friday in exchange for obtaining home scores of migrants expelled by the United States in El Salvador in months ago under the repression of immigration from the Trump administration.

The resolution represents a diplomatic achievement for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, helps President Trump in his goal of bringing Americans back to the house imprisoned abroad and Lands El Salvador an exchange that had proposed months ago.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio thanked Trump and President Salvadoran Nayib Bukele for obtaining the agreement.

“The ten Americans who were detained in Venezuela are on the way to freedom,” tweeted Rubio.

El Salvador will send some 300 Venezuelan migrants after the Trump administration agreed to pay $ 6 million to host them in a Salvadorian notorious prison. The arrangement led to an immediate return of flowers when Trump invoked a law on the 18th century war to quickly remove the men that his administration had accused of belonging to the violent Street Gang of Aragua.

The Venezuelans were detained in a mega-prison known as Terrorism Confinement Center, or Cecot, which was built to hold alleged gang members in the war of President Salvadoran Nayib Bukele against the country’s gangs. Human rights groups have documented hundreds of deaths and cases of torture within its walls.

The release of the Venezuelans is an invaluable victory for Maduro while he pushes his efforts to assert himself as president despite credible evidence that he lost the re -election last year. Since the receipt of accusations of human rights violations, Maduro for months has used the detention of men in Salvador to return the script to the American government, even forcing some of its strongest political opponents to agree with its condemnation of the treatment of migrants.

The return of migrants will allow Maduro to reaffirm support in its narrowing base, while it demonstrates that even if the Trump administration and other nations see it as an illegitimate president, it is still firmly in power.

The Venezuelan authorities arrested nearly a dozen American citizens in the second half of 2024 and linked them to alleged conspiracies to destabilize the country. They were one of the dozens of people, including activists, opposition members and union leaders, whom the government of Venezuela took care of its brutal campaign to suppress dissent during the 11 months since Maduro claimed to gain a re -election.

The American government, as well as several other Western nations, do not recognize Maduro’s claim to victory and rather points to the accounting sheets collected by the opposition coalition showing that its candidate, Edmundo González, won the July 2024 elections by a margin of two against one.

The dispute on the results caused immediate demonstrations, and the government responded by holding more than 2,000 people, mainly young poor men. González fled into exile in Spain to avoid arrest.

Although the United States does not recognize Maduro, the two governments have carried out other recent exchanges.

In May, Venezuela released an Air Force veteran after about six months in detention. The family of Scott St. Clair said that the language specialist, who had served four tours in Afghanistan, went to South America to be treated for a post-traumatic stress disorder.

St. Clair was given to Richard Grenell, Trump’s envoy for special missions, during a meeting on a Caribbean island.

Three months earlier, six other Americans that the US government wrongly considered Venezuela were released after Grenell met Maduro at the presidential palace.

Grenell, at the meeting of the capital of Venezuela, Caracas, urged Maduro to postpone expelled migrants who have committed crimes in the United States, hundreds of Venezuelans have since been expelled in their country of origin, but more than 200 people expelled from the United States have been detained since mid-March in El Salvador.

Lawyers have little access to those of the prison, which is strongly kept, and the information has been tight, other than highly produced state propaganda videos showing tattooed men wrapped behind bars.

Consequently, human rights and lawyer defense groups working with the Venezuelans on legal affairs had little information on their movement until they go up on the plane.