Overview
- Nayib Bukele, posting on X on Tuesday, offered to transfer 100% of El Salvador’s prison population to Colombia after Gustavo Petro called Salvadoran prisons “fields of concentration.”
- Petro said thousands of innocent people are jailed and cited documents reported by El País that 36% of detainees lacked prior police records tying them to gangs.
- El Salvador has operated under a state of exception since March 2022, with authorities detaining more than 91,000 people as part of a gang crackdown.
- Rights groups report at least 6,889 complaints of abuses and a local NGO counts at least 512 deaths in custody, while Bukele has acknowledged about 8,000 wrongful detentions.
- The public exchange on X heightens international attention and could invite more scrutiny from bodies like the UN and the Inter‑American human rights commission.