Offering US His Torture Prisons, Bukele Wants MS-13 Leaders Back

Thursday, February 6, 2025
Gabriel Labrador

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El Salvador, a country with the highest prison population rate in the world and an overcrowding of at least 130 percent, has offered to receive inmates of any nationality who are being held in the United States, as announced Monday night by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, during his tour of Central America and the Caribbean. The announcement was complemented Tuesday morning by the Salvadoran ambassador in Washington, Milena Mayorga, who revealed that, during the diplomat's visit, President Bukele asked him “as a point of honor” that among those deported to El Salvador are gang leaders, some of whom secretly negotiated with his administration a decrease in homicides and electoral support.

“The President, in an act of extraordinary friendship toward our country, has agreed to the most extraordinary and unprecedented immigration agreement in the world,” Rubio said. According to the diplomat, in addition to receiving undocumented Salvadorans in the United States, Bukele agreed to receive “any illegal alien in the United States who is a criminal of any nationality, whether from MS-13 or the Tren de Aragua, and house them in his jails.”

In addition, the Salvadoran president also offered to “house in their jails dangerous U.S. criminals detained in our country, including U.S. nationals and legal residents. No country has ever made such an offer of friendship.” But the latter has not yet been agreed to. “It is an offer made by President Bukele. Obviously there are legal aspects to consider. We have a Constitution,” Rubio clarified Tuesday upon his arrival in San José, Costa Rica, his second-to-last stop in Central America. “But it is a very generous offer to outsource for a fraction of the cost some of the most dangerous and violent criminals we have in the United States.”

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The prisons that the Salvadoran government has offered to incarcerate people sent by the United States are collapsed and are, since the installment of the state of exception in March 2022, places without independent supervision in which systemic torture, murders, and deaths due to medical negligence have been widely registered. They are, moreover, directed by Osiris Luna, an official sanctioned both by the Magnitsky Act of the U.S. Treasury Department and by the Engel List, published by the State Department now headed by Marco Rubio.

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https://elfaro.net/en/202502/el_salvador/27734/offering-us-his-torture-prisons-bukele-wants-ms-13-leaders-back