SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
By Meg Kinnard
There was the share furniture in the background. There were the tropical cocktails, which looked to be cocktails garnished with strawberries. And then there were the deported slave and the US senator, sitting and chatting.
That legislator, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, accused El Salvador’s state of aiming to color the photo of a quiet respite for the badly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia by staging their conference with drinks appearing to be alcohol, and angling to arranged the meeting by a hotel pool.
Van Hollen referred to the choreography with a word that had ricocheted around social press 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 resident who was living in Maryland, Garcia was sent to El Salvador by the Trump presidency in March despite an immigration judge order preventing his imprisonment. The US government alleges he is a member of the crew MS-13.
US President Donald Trump and Bukele said this week that they had no base to gain him to the US, even as the Trump presidency has called his imprisonment a error and the US Supreme Court has called on the management to help his profit.
During a news conference Friday at Virginia’s Dulles International Airport, only after returning from El Salvador, the Maryland Democrat said Bukele was aiming to “deceive” folks about what happened during his conference with Garcia, in part by posting a picture with coffee appearing to be drinking.
When he and Garcia first sat down for a meeting at the lodge where Van Hollen had been staying, the lawmaker said, they “just had glasses of water on the table, even some coffee”.
Consequently, Van Hollen said, “one of the state people ” on the outside of their half-hour meet deposited other beverages on the table, with water or sugar around the bottom — “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 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.
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.
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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