SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
By Meg Kinnard
There was the pool furniture in the background. There were the tropical drinks, which looked to be margaritas garnished with cherries. And then there were the deported prisoner and the US senator, sitting and chatting.
That senator, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, accused El Salvador’s government of aiming to paint the picture of a leisurely respite for the wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia by staging their meeting with drinks appearing to be alcohol, and angling to set the meeting by a hotel pool.
Bukele posted photos of US Senator Chris Van Hollen seated with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, including with the drinks, garnished with maraschino cherries.Credit: X / @nayibbukele
Van Hollen referred to the stagecraft with a term that had ricocheted around social media for much of the day: “Margaritagate.”
“Nobody drank any margaritas or sugar water or whatever it is,” the Democratic senator said on Friday (Saturday AEDT) , calling the whole situation “a lesson” in “the lengths that [El Salvador’s President Nayib] Bukele will do to deceive people about what’s going on”.
A Salvadorean citizen who was living in Maryland, Garcia was sent to El Salvador by the Trump administration in March despite an immigration court order preventing his deportation. The US government alleges he is a member of the gang MS-13.
US President Donald Trump and Bukele said this week that they had no basis to return him to the US, even as the Trump administration has called his deportation a mistake and the US Supreme Court has called on the administration to facilitate his return.
Van Hollen said that when he and Abrego Garcia first sat down for a meeting at the hotel, they “just had glasses of water on the table, maybe some coffee”.Credit: X / @ChrisVanHollen
During a news conference Friday at Virginia’s Dulles International Airport, just after returning from El Salvador, the Maryland Democrat said Bukele was aiming to “deceive” people about what happened during his meeting with Garcia, in part by posting a photo with drinks appearing to be alcohol.
When he and Garcia first sat down for a meeting at the hotel where Van Hollen had been staying, the senator said, they “just had glasses of water on the table, maybe some coffee”.
Subsequently, Van Hollen said, “one of the government people” on the sidelines of their half-hour meeting deposited other beverages on the table, with salt or sugar around the top — “but they look like margaritas”.
Bukele – who has called himself “the world’s coolest dictator” – then posted photos on X of Van Hollen seated with Garcia, including with the drinks, garnished with maraschino cherries.
“Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture’, now sipping margaritas with Senator Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!” Bukele wrote, adding an emoji of a tropical drink.
Van Hollen also noted that the Bukele government had initially proposed that he and Garcia conduct their meeting poolside at the hotel, rather than in the restaurant setting where they convened.
“They want to create this appearance that life was just lovely for Kilmar,” Van Hollen said.
In his news conference, Van Hollen also revealed that Garcia told him that he was no longer being held in isolation at the high-security Terrorism Confinement Centre – or CECOT – where he and others were initially taken upon leaving the US.
Van Hollen, right, at his press conference with Garcia’s brother Cesar and mother Cecilia at Dulles International Airport on Friday.Credit: AP
Van Hollen said he was initially denied entry to the facility but surmised that had been because Garcia had already been moved from there to a detention centre with better conditions.
“They decided that it was not a good look to continue to detain Abrego Garcia without anybody having access to him,” Van Hollen said. He added that Garcia told him he had not had contact with anyone outside prison at all since he was removed from the US.
It was unclear where Garcia was taken after the meeting with Van Hollen.
Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, wiped away tears as Van Hollen spoke of her husband’s comments about wanting to speak with his wife. She did not speak during the news conference.
Garcia’s wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura wipes a tear from her face as Van Hollen speaks.Credit: AP
The New York Times described CECOT, about an hour outside the capital San Salvador, as a low-security rehabilitation site that was transformed into Bukele’s signature “megaprison” with sophisticated surveillance and other equipment. An emblem of his crackdown on gangs, it has eight cell blocks each with capacity for about 3000 prisoners.
Many inmates are held for more than 23 hours a day in cells with metal bunks with with no mattresses or sheets. Forbidden to use utensils, they eat with their hands. The New York Times reported that part of what made CECOT unlike other prisons was the extreme isolation in which its inmates are kept, denied even virtual visits and blocked from access to lawyers, according to rights groups.
Prison guards stand outside cells at the CECOT prison in 2023.Credit: AP/Salvador Melendez
Lucas Menget, a French journalist and filmmaker who recently visited CECOT to make a documentary, called it a “tropical gulag”.
“I thought that it would be very noisy like in every other jail in the world,” he told the New York Times. “When we arrived inside, it was a huge silence. Nobody’s talking.”
AP
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