Venezuela has launched an investigation into the alleged involvement of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, and his senior officials in the detention of 252 migrants after they were deported from the United States.
Attorney General of Venezuela, Tarek William Saab, announced the news in Caracas on Monday, as he revealed the accounts of some of the men who claimed they were beaten, sexually abused, and given rotten food while incarcerated in a notorious El Salvador prison.
Saab urged the UN Human Rights Council and the International Criminal Court (ICC) to take action because some patients were denied access to medical care or treated without anaesthesia.
After US President Donald Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged Tren de Aragua gang members without receiving proper evidence, the Venezuelans were deported from El Salvador in March.
Human rights organizations voiced fierce opposition to the deportations, and the Trump administration fought back legal. Many of the men’s families and attorneys deny having gang connections.
Prisoner swap
In exchange for 10 US citizens and political prisoners detained in Venezuela, the former detainees made their way to Caracas on Friday following their release from El Salvador.
Saab claimed that the prosecutor’s office was interviewing the refugees who had returned. Some of the former prisoners have since reconnected with their families, but they haven’t yet left their homes.
One person had a split lip, several had bruises on their bodies, and one had rubber bullet wounds on their bodies.
Andry Hernandez Romero, a 32-year-old beautician from El Salvador, claimed he had hardly lived through the ordeal.
In a video that Saab presented, he claimed, “We were going through torture, physical aggressions, psychological aggressions.” I experienced sexual abuse.
Others described being imprisoned in “inhuman cells,” dehydrated from sunlight and ventilation, and given rotten food and unsafe drinking water while imprisoned in El Salvador.
The men were denied access to lawyers or their families, and the last time they were seen were when Bukele’s government published photos of them arriving at the prison strung and shorn.
Venezuela will look into Osiris Luna Meza and Gustavo Villatoro, the country’s justice minister, according to Saab.
The media contacted Bukele’s office to request a comment, but the office did not respond right away. Bukele did not respond to the abuse allegations until late on Monday when she reported the return on social media.
He claimed on X that the Maduro regime was happy with the swap agreement. They now yell their contempt because they have just realized they have no longer hostages in the most powerful nation on earth.
On his television program on Monday, President Nicolas Maduro claimed that Bukele had made an “last-minute” attempt to stop the migrants from leaving.
He said, “You could not stop the first plane, but he put a car on the runway for the second plane to cause an accident or stop them from leaving.”
In a television interview on Monday, Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado referred to the situation as an “exchange of prisoners of war.”
Similar allegations of torturing prisoners and denying them access to political prisoners’ legal representation also apply to Venezuela, which is currently the subject of an ICC investigation in The Hague.
Source: Aljazeera
Leave a Reply