President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele said on Sunday that his country is willing to send deported illegal migrants detained at the CECOT mega-prison to France after Mexican-American fashion designer Willy Chavarria held a performance “inspired” by the detainees at the Paris Fashion Week show.
Chavarria, a California-based designer reportedly described as “Chicano and queer and proud of it,” held a fashion show in Paris on Friday titled “Huron” that included 35 male models dressed and styled as CECOT inmates. The models wore white tall tees and sported crew cuts while walking out to José Feliciano’s acoustic version of “California Dreamin’.”
Footage from the event shows the models kneeling on the runway, with their heads bent low in seeming submission. The shirts worn by the models were reportedly made in partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). According to GQ Magazine, Chavarria’s show evoked the “disturbing images” of the 252 Venezuelan illegal migrants suspected of being members of the Tren de Aragua terrorist organization who were deported to El Salvador this year after President Donald Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act.
“We’re are [sic] ready to ship them all to Paris whenever we get the green light from the French government,” Bukele said in English on his official Twitter account late Saturday evening.
Minutes later, the official account of the Salvadoran Press Secretariat of the Presidency translated Bukele’s message to Spanish and stressed the government would take “a firm stance against the attempt to glorify criminality.”
On Sunday afternoon, Bukele published a second message that read, “This is the result of glorifying criminals in Paris. He who spares the wolf sacrifices the sheep.”
The message was accompanied by a video of an unidentified crying woman denouncing being the repeated target of harassment in Paris and stating she was afraid of doing anything alone in the French capital.
In a separate, third message, Bukele wrote, “People complaining that we had to put 1.5 percent of our population in prison… (By the way, more than half of them are undergoing rehabilitation and will be released in a couple of years).” Bukele accompanied the text with a meme picture from Disney’s 2018 film Avengers: Infinity War.
French authorities have not publicly responded to Bukele’s “offer” at press time.
Since March 2022, El Salvador has been under a “state of exception” emergency decree that allowed Bukele to enact a massive crackdown against the country’s most violent criminal gangs and enact several strict security policies, including the construction of CECOT. Bukele’s policies have successfully curbed violent crime in what was once the homicide capital of the world.
Regional governments in Latin America have expressed their intention to adopt some of El Salvador’s security policies or construct their own CECOT-style prisons to fight crime in their countries. Among those who have explicitly referenced Bukele as an inspiration are Security Minister of Argentina Patricia Bullrich and Ecuadorian President Daniel Noboa.
As per the terms of an agreement between Bukele and President Trump, a group of 252 Venezuelan illegal migrants suspected of being Tren de Aragua members were deported to El Salvador and detained at CECOT — drawing the ire of Venezuela’s socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro. Maduro, an ardent opponent of the existence of Israel and an Iranian ally, claimed that the deportation of the illegal migrants to El Salvador through the Alien Enemies Act is comparable to the persecution of the Jewish people by Nazi Germany and their imprisonment in concentration camps.
Since then, Maduro and his authoritarian socialist regime have repeatedly accused Bukele of “kidnapping” the illegal migrants, an accusation he reiterated last week, calling Bukele a “lowly monster” and comparing him to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has also been the target of Maduro’s ire in recent days.
“Nayib Bukele has become a low-level monster. He is a monster. He is a Netanyahu, but he is a low-level monster. And he is simply in charge of creating the largest satrapies ever seen in Central America in a long time, in a very long time,” Maduro said during last week’s broadcast of his television show With Maduro Plus.
“And the Salvadoran people know it. The peoples of Central America already know it, in Latin America they know it,” he continued. “Human rights organizations know it full well, but they prefer to remain silent, because those organizations only use them to attack independent, anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist countries, the countries of the global south.”
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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