A tattoo, an ear, a neck: Venezuelan mothers recognize their sons in images of alleged gang members sent to El Salvador
Relatives of the deportees transferred by Trump to Nayib Bukele’s mega-prison deny that they are criminals: ‘Not everyone belongs to Tren de Aragua’
Several residents gather in front of a house in the Los Pescadores neighborhood, north of Maracaibo, in the Venezuelan state of Zulia. This is a place with unpaved streets, where one day there’s no water and the next everything gets flooded when it rains. It seems like a place everyone has thought about fleeing at some point. Along with the residents, there are several mothers who can’t stop crying. It’s Monday, March 17, and little by little, they have begun to discover traces of their children in the images released of the nearly 300 people sent to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) by the Donald Trump administration, which placed dozens of alleged members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang in the hands of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele. No one told these mothers that these were their sons, no one called them to confirm that they had been deported, but no one knows their children better than they do: they have been identifying them, little by little, by a tattoo, an ear, a neck, or the way their heads are shaved. Some cannot bear the horror.
