Lawyers said the El Salvador’s government is denying Venezuelans arrested in the country access to lawyers and contact with the outside world. They dispute the incarceration of more than 200 people deported by the United States.
Under an agreement with the Salvadoran government, the government of US President Donald Trump sent 238 Venezuelans in March to the Terrorism Confinement Center, the largest prison in Latin America, as part of an immigration repression.
The lawyers said they could not visit, talk or find out about the whereabouts and conditions of their clients, whose identities they obtained through leaked information.
The presidency of El Salvador did not immediately respond to requests for comment. President Nayib Bukele visited the White House on Monday (14).
Private lawyers, some recruited by the Venezuelan government and all paid by families, filed for requests from Habeus Corpus in the Supreme Court of El Salvador, seeking to oblige the government to justify the detention of the deported Venezuelans or free them.
The Ortega Group law firm, which represents at least 30 of the Venezuelans deported, received no response to any of these petitions, said director-general Jaime Ortega.
“None of these people committed a crime in El Salvador,” Ortega told Reuters. “If they are foreigners and people who lived in other countries, why did they come here directly to a penitentiary center?”
Human rights groups and foreign governments, including the United States, have said for years that El Salvador lacks an independent judiciary, and the Supreme Court has taken no measure to consider Habeus Corpus’s petitions so far.
Human Rights Watch said on Friday (11) that there is no official list of arrested Venezuelans and that relatives did not receive answers to information on their location to Salvadoran and American authorities.
The Human Rights Group has asked the Salvadoran government to confirm who is detained and where, reveal any legal basis for detention and allow contact with the outside world.
The Salvadoran Human Rights Group is preparing habeas corpus requests for more than 100 Venezuelans, but director Noah Bullock is not optimistic about the result.
The group filed more than 7,200 requests from habeas corpus not answered for salvadors arrested during the Bukele government.
Bukele came to power in 2019 with the promise that he would fight the notorious gangs and crime rate of the country. Since then, his party has acted in Congress to remove the Attorney General and all five Supreme Court judges, replacing them with allies.
This content was originally published in lawyers accuse El Salvador to deny access to Venezuelan prisoners on the CNN Brazil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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