Bukele and Maduro tussle over prisoners
April 23, 2025
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro rejected a prisoner swap proposed by his Salvadoran counterpart, Nayib Bukele. He urged that Bukele, instead of an exchange, sign “a decree granting unconditional freedom” to Venezuelans deported by the U.S. to El Salvador. (Associated Press)
Bukele reiterated his proposal yesterday, citing Venezuela’s 2023 prisoner swap with the Biden administration for a Maduro ally, reports the Associated Press. “Weren’t you the one who said you would do “whatever it takes” to secure the release of the Venezuelans detained in El Salvador?” Bukele wrote on X, addressing Maduro.
Families of Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador and political prisoners of the Maduro regime voiced concern that their relatives could be used as bargaining chips in an authoritarian PR stunt.
In an open letter, the Committee for the Freedom of Political Prisoners in Venezuela said while it wanted both groups to be freed, it opposed those incarcerated being “played with” or “used as a political resource to make invisible the inhumane conditions” in which prisoners were being detained in both countries. (Guardian)
The Venezuelan deportees case is causing a rift within the Venezuelan opposition: “Trump’s hostility toward the diaspora places democratic forces in an unexpected dilemma: that their allies are dispensing questionable treatment to their compatriots and undermining their cause in the eyes of the population,” reports El País.
“Further complicating matters for Machado and other opposition members, the U.S. has announced plans to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans in the country. The decision is currently paused after an injunction by a California federal judge, but the Trump administration has appealed,” notes Pirate Wire Services.
Another factor in the Bukele-Maduro fight is the presence in Bukele’s close advisory circle of an anti-Chavista group of Venezuelans “who wield enormous influence over his decision-making and strategy design,” according to El País.
More Deportations
Costa Rican authorities this week said they would make it possible for dozens of migrants deported from the United States to legally stay in the country — or leave if they so choose to. Starting this week, officials were returning passports and other personal documents to people who since February had been detained in a remote facility hours from San José, reports the New York Times.
Regional Relations
China and its BRICS partners will increasingly stand up for international co-operation as the U.S. withdraws under President Donald Trump, Celso Amorim told the Financial Times. “China and developing nations are today the main defenders of the multilateral system,” according to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s top foreign policy advisor. “What’s fundamental is to have rules which are multilaterally accepted.”
Lula said he has no desire to choose between the U.S. and China as an escalating trade fight pushes other countries to pick a side. “I don’t want a cold war. I don’t want to choose between the United States and China,” Lula said during an event alongside Chilean President Gabriel Boric in Brasilia yesterday. “I want to have a relationship with both. I don’t want to have a preference for one over the other. I want to trade with everyone.” (Bloomberg)
Brazil
A panel of Brazil’s supreme court justices has unanimously accepted criminal charges against six more key allies of former president Jair Bolsonaro over an alleged coup plot to keep him in office after his 2022 election defeat, reports the Guardian.
Regional
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins interviews historian Greg Grandin on his new book, America, América: A New History of the New World. The author discusses “the deep humanist, universal current of Latin American society, a current that has long stood in opposition to the darker side of the Spanish Catholic Empire, currents which gave birth to the first codification, in Mexico’s revolutionary 1917 Constitution, of what we now call social and economic rights. More simply put: social democracy.” (The Nation)
“Latin Americans are nationalists, and hold dear the ideal of sovereignty, but their nationalism is rarely the toxic kind that fuels fascism, but rather one that is imagined as a stepping stone toward a larger humanist universalism. For a century, this emancipationist tradition—which we might associate with the radical Enlightenment but also had deep roots in Catholic universalism—sharpened in antagonism to the United States, to its foreign-policy aggression, its Anglo-Saxon supremacy, its territorial expansion.”(The Nation)
Migration
The Dominican Republic says it deported more than 130 Haitian women and children on the first day of a crackdown on undocumented migrants in hospitals. Authorities said 48 pregnant women, 39 new mothers and 48 children were removed, reports the BBC.
Colombia
Colombia’s government will ask citizens to vote in a referendum on overtime starting earlier, receiving double their wages for work on Sundays and holidays, and granting special labor rights to farm and domestic workers, among other measures, after Congress rejected the President Gustavo Petro’s labor reform. (Bloomberg)
Former Colombian foreign minister Alberto Leyva accused Petro of being a drug addict, in a public letter that made headlines this morning, citing “disappearances, late arrivals, unacceptable failures to appear, trips without a purpose, incoherent phrases, and the questionable company you keep.” (Financial Times, El País)
Ecuador
Ecuador’s losing presidential candidate, Luisa González, asked the country's electoral council to review presidential vote tallies from 1,729 ballot boxes, part of her effort to prove what her party says was a massive fraud — though international observers have not backed up the claim. (Reuters)
Mexico
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum pushed back against the International Monetary Fund's new forecast of a contraction in GDP this year, saying public spending would help shield her country’s economy. (Reuters)
Sheinbaum’s pushback to U.S. ads demonizing migrants “points to the limits to what her government is willing to accept from the Trump administration as she responds to Mr. Trump’s tariffs, which are already taking a toll on Mexico’s export-driven economy, and his threats to take unilateral military action within Mexico against drug cartels,” reports the New York Times. (See yesterday’s briefs.)
Argentina
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the Trump administration would be willing to offer Argentina’s government a specific credit line if a global shock jeopardized President Javier Milei’s economic turnaround, according to three people with direct knowledge of his comments. Analysts pointed toward Bessent’s comment at the closed-door event yesterday for lifting Argentine bonds, reports Bloomberg.
Traders in Buenos Aires are beginning to buy into Milei’s target of strengthening Argentina’s currency toward 1,000 pesos per dollar, reports Bloomberg.
Argentina’s landmark trial against the military junta responsible for atrocities during the 1976-1983 dictatorship started 40 years ago this week. Corta’s “Juicio a las Juntas” project shares information as it occurred in real time, giving a sense of the magnitude of the undertaking in a country where democracy had just been reestablished.