THE Venezuelan government has slammed El Salvador’s far-right President Nayib Bukele for admitting that he was holding 252 Venezuelan migrants as “hostages” in detention centres and demanded their immediate release.

Mr Bukele said on Sunday that he was proposing a prisoner swap with Venezuela.

He said El Salvador would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the United States who have been imprisoned by his government for what he described as “political prisoners” in Venezuela.

In a post on X, directed at President Nicolas Maduro, Mr Bukele listed a number of family members of high-level opposition figures, journalists and activists detained after last year’s Venezuelan presidential election. 

He claimed: “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud.

“However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that includes the repatriation of 100 per cent of the 252 Venezuelans who were deported, in exchange for the release and surrender of an identical number of the thousands of political prisoners you hold.”

Venezuelan Attorney General Tarek William Saab called Mr Bukele’s statements “cynical” and referred to the Salvadoran leader as a “neofascist.”

He said Mr Bukele accepted that he was holding “252 Venezuelans hostage in El Salvador.”

Mr Saab demanded that the Salvadorean government provide Caracas with a list of the people detained as well as their legal status and medical reports.

El Salvador’s actions are “a serious violation of international human rights law and constitutes a crime against humanity that mimics the repugnant Nazi practices of the mid-20th century,” he charged.

Mr Saab said the Venezuelans had been illegally deported from the US and were being arbitrarily detained and subjected to forced disappearance in a concentration camp in El Salvador.

He also urged various international organisations to join the call for the immediate release of “our compatriots, now vilely kidnapped by a tyrant, and to prosecute this criminal act.”