WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Friday that Venezuela freed 10 Americans as well as political prisoners in a deal in which El Salvador released Venezuelans deported there by the United States.
“Every wrongfully detained American in Venezuela is now free and back in our homeland,” Rubio said in a statement.
Rubio said the State Department and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele helped secure the agreement that also saw the release of an unspecified number of “Venezuelan political prisoners and detainees” by the leftist government in Caracas.
“The Trump administration continues to support the restoration of democracy in Venezuela,” said Rubio, a staunch critic of Latin American leftists.
“The regime’s use of unjust detention as a tool of political repression must end,” he said.
The State Department posted on social media a picture of what it said were 10 Americans freed from Venezuelan prisons.
The men, in matching dark blue T-shirts and jeans, together held up an American flag.
Rubio said that the deal, which had previously been under discussion, came as El Salvador released the Venezuelans deported by the United States to the Central American country.
President Donald Trump had controversially deported the 200-plus migrants to El Salvador, where Bukele has boasted of jailing people for the United States at a discount in a maximum-security prison.
Bukele said on X that El Salvador has handed over all the Venezuelans detained in his country.
They had been accused of membership in the Tren de Aragua gang, which Trump has designated as a terrorist group as he pursues a sweeping crackdown on undocumented migrants in the United States.
