Bukele's deportation calculus
March 18, 2025
The U.S. Trump administration’s deportation of 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they have been detained in a maximum security penitentiary by President Nayib Bukele is shaping up to be a legal showdown in the U.S. (Guardian, Guardian, New York Times, Associated Press, see yesterday’s post)
U.S. officials said the three planes sent with deportees to El Salvador, included 137 people removed through the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, an obscure law the Trump administration invoked to deport Venezuelans older than 14 who are alleged to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang. An additional 101 were Venezuelans who were deported under normal immigration proceedings, but the U.S. government claims they also have gang ties. A further 23 people deported more were members of the Salvadoran gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. (New York Times, see yesterday’s post)
But in El Salvador legal experts are also questioning the deportations of people who are allegedly affiliated with criminal organizations, though no evidence has been publicly presented. The Venezuelan deportees have not been condemned in El Salvador, which raises the question of what legal basis there is for their detention. It is also unclear who exerts responsibility for the new detainees, as, Salvadoran judges oversee conditions for people sentenced in the national legal system. (La Prensa Gráfica)
A video released by Bukele on social media shows the deportees being shackled and transported to Bukele’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. The video has been viewed more than 21 million times on Bukele’s X account in less than 48 hours, drawing attention for the harsh treatment of prisoners in El Salvador, reports the Washington Post.
The deportation created panic among Venezuelan families, who feared their relatives were among those handed over to the Salvadoran authorities. Family members of Venezuelan migrants who suspect their loved ones were among the weekend’s deportations to El Salvador are struggling to get more information as a legal battle plays out, reports Reuters.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said yesterday that U.S. law enforcement authorities had spent the better part of a year assembling a roster of known gang members. All the people deported to El Salvador had been on that list, he said. (Reuters) “If one of them turns out not to be, then they're just illegally in our country, and the Salvadorans can then deport them to Venezuela,” Rubio said.
“The Trump administration said that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigated each migrant sent to El Salvador to verify their ties to the gang. Robert Cena, an acting ICE field director, wrote in a court filing that those efforts included reviewing surveillance data and testimonies from victims,” reports the Washington Post. “He acknowledged that “many” of those deported under the act do not have criminal records in the United States, but he said that “does not indicate they pose a limited threat.””
“El Salvador’s role in the Trump administration’s deportation strategy signals a new level of power and global visibility” for Bukele, reports the New York Times.
In addition to the $6 million fee El Salvador will charge for detaining the Venezuelan deportees, Buekel requested the deportation of two high-level MS-13 leaders detained in the U.S. — they were, along with 21 other alleged MS-13 members. The government framed it as “a point of honor,” but the move is, in fact, aimed at preventing Bukele’s alleged negotiations with gang leaders from coming to light in the U.S. justice system. (New York Times, Latin America Risk Report)
Veteran gang member César Antonio López Larios, alias “Greñas de Stoners,” was one of the leaders returned (the other has not been identified). The deportation required the Eastern District of New York, in charge of prosecuting 27 MS-13 leaders, to waive Larios’ indictment in the U.S., in favor of his trial in El Salvador, for “geopolitical and national security concerns of the United States.” (El Faro)
”Given the context under the Biden administration, where the Salvadoran and US governments were fighting over the leaders of MS-13, the return of Greñas to El Salvador is an exotic milestone, difficult to interpret,” explains El Faro. “Without a doubt, it can send a message to gang members imprisoned in the United States who try to collaborate with the authorities of that country to denounce the pact of that organization with the Bukele government: They can all be returned to El Salvador.”
Mexico
Mexico's government sent a diplomatic note to the United States seeking to prevent Mexicans from being sent to the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, President Claudia Sheinbaum said today. (Reuters)
Sheinbaum said yesterday she is signing a decree to strengthen the commission responsible for helping to search for missing persons and will send further reforms to Congress, following the shocking discovery of a mass grave and criminal “extermination camp” in Jalisco state last week. (Reuters)
Brazil
Brazil's government will propose a 10% tax on corporate profits and dividends sent abroad to help offset revenue lost from an expanded tax exemption for individuals with lower incomes, reports Reuters.
Colombia
Colombia has been rejecting offers to do a debt-for-nature swap over fears such a deal could impact its sovereign credit rating, according to the country's former environment minister. Colombia’s concern is that a debt-for-nature swap could “send the wrong message to the markets and make our financial situation worse,” Susana Muhamad, who resigned as Colombia’s environment minister last month, told Bloomberg.
The global suspension of USAID funding is shuttering peace and anti-gang programs in Colombia’s most impoverished places, endangering implementation of the country’s 2016 peace deal with leftist FARC rebels, reports Reuters.
Venezuela
Three U.S. citizens who were detained in Venezuela and freed in January spoke with the New York Times, giving a window into Maduro’s penitentiary system: “The guards wore name tags that read ‘Hitler’ and ‘Demon’ and covered their faces with ski masks. The Americans in the Venezuelan prison were confined to cement cells, beaten, pepper-sprayed and subjected to what one prisoner called ‘psychological torture.’”
Cuba
Radio and TV Martí, the U.S. federally funded media outlets that for decades broadcast news to Cuba from South Florida, went off the air yesterday after the Trump administration cut their funding, reports CBS.
Haiti
Armed gangs in Haiti have increasingly targeted foreign-financed health facilities, most notably the State University Hospital of Haiti, the country’s largest public hospital. The institution’s “fate underscores the increasingly desperate conditions facing Haiti and its international donors as they try to rescue Port-au-Prince from the control of armed gangs,” reports the New York Times.
CEPR's Jake Johnston joined Haitian writer, journalist, and human rights advocate Monique Clesca for “Haiti: Crisis in Context,” a discussion on Haiti's ongoing crisis hosted by International Affairs Forum at Northwestern Michigan College, last month.
Regional
El Salvador’s failed experiment at using Bitcoin as legal tender”illustrates the benefits of institutional innovations tied to new technologies—but also the challenges of Latin America’s pervasive state fragility. If the proper lessons are learned, the experiment could still pay dividends,” argues José Ignacio Hernández in Americas Quarterly.
Cuba
Two separate attacks on Cuba’s Washington DC embassy — one in 2020 and another in 2023 “harken back to a time more than half a century ago when terrorism by Cuban exile groups based in the U.S. was rampant. And the lack of progress and the apparently less than aggressive U.S. government investigation has become one more irritant in the fraught U.S.-Cuba relationship,” writes Michael Isikoff in Spy Talk.
Peru
Peru has declared a state of emergency in the capital amid a spate of violence and criminality, reports Al Jazeera.
People
Peruvian fisherman Máximo Napa Castro survived 95 days lost at sea. “Without food or water, he ate cockroaches, birds and finally a turtle, whose blood he drank to slake his thirst,” reports the New York Times.
Twelve people were killed in a plane crash off the Honduran island of Roatán, yesterday. Well-known Garifuna musician Aurelio Martínez Suazo was among the dead. (New York Times, Reuters, Guardian) Here’s the NPR Tiny Desk Concert he recorded in 2015. (Thank you David Holiday.)