Venezuela Frees US Diplomats and Political Figures; Washington Welcomes Move
Venezuela released 10 jailed Americans Friday in exchange for getting home scores of migrants deported by the United States to El Salvador months ago under the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The resolution represents a diplomatic achievement for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, helps President Donald Trump in his goal of bringing home Americans jailed abroad and lands El Salvador a swap that it had proposed months ago.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio thanked Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele for securing the agreement.
“Ten Americans who were detained in Venezuela are on their way to freedom,” Rubio tweeted.
El Salvador will send back some 300 Venezuelan migrants after the Trump administration agreed to pay $6 million to house them in a notorious Salvadoran prison. The arrangement drew immediate blowback when Trump invoked an 18th century wartime law to quickly remove men his administration had accused of belonging to the violent Tren de Aragua street gang.
The Venezuelans have been held in a mega-prison known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT, which was built to hold alleged gang members in Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s war on the country’s gangs. Human rights groups have documented hundreds of deaths and cases of torture inside its walls.
The release of the Venezuelans is an invaluable win for Maduro as he presses his efforts to assert himself as president despite credible evidence that he lost reelection last year. Long on the receiving end of accusations of human rights abuses, Maduro for months used the men’s detention in El Salvador to flip the script on the U.S. government, forcing even some of his strongest political opponents to agree with his condemnation of the migrants’ treatment.
The migrants’ return will allow Maduro to reaffirm support within his shrinking base, while it demonstrates that even if the Trump administration and other nations see him as an illegitimate president, he is still firmly in power.
Venezuelan authorities detained nearly a dozen U.S. citizens in the second half of 2024 and linked them to alleged plots to destabilize the country. They were among the dozens of people, including activists, opposition members and union leaders, that Venezuela’s government took into custody in its brutal campaign to crack down on dissent in the 11 months since Maduro claimed to win reelection.
The U.S. government, along with several other Western nations, does not recognize Maduro’s claim to victory and instead points to tally sheets collected by the opposition coalition showing that its candidate, Edmundo González, won the July 2024 election by a more than a two-to-one margin.
