INa Recording Studio in downtown Santiago, where the dad she has never met once sang, a four-month-old girl nestled in her mother’s arms, nautical ears protecting her tiny ears from sound.
Nahiara Rubí Suárez Sánchez is just as unconscious of her father’s fate, a Venezuelan musician who languishes in a maximum security prison thousands of kilometers in El Salvador after being swept away in the anti-migrant crusade of Donald Trump.
Arturo Suárez Trejo, 33, is one of the more than 200 Venezuelan men sent to the Central Central Country of the United States, accused by the administration of Trump – without proof – of being terrorists, rapists and gang members.
More than a month later, the relatives of Suárez – who insist that he is innocent – remain completely in ignorance in his place, his well -being or how long he could be trapped behind bars.
“Right now, I have no idea what is happening to him – I just ask God that he is fine,” said Suárez’s wife, 27, another Venezuelan called Nathali Sánchez, who lives with their child in the capital of Chile. “If something happens to my husband, I will hold Donald Trump and (president of El Salvador) Nayib Bukele responsible.”
The criticisms have criticized Trump’s decision to banish asylum seekers and immigrants in a prison in authoritarian foreign land as part of a disturbing democratic return period in one of the largest democracies in the world. “This is the beginning of an American state terror policy,” recently warned the historian and author Timothy Snyder.
For the relatives of Suárez, politics represents an emotional punch which follows years of difficulties after, like nearly 8 million Venezuelans, fleeing economic and political disorders in their South American homeland.
“(It’s) Foutu, guy,” said Denys Zambrano, a rapper known as Nyan who became one of Suárez’s best friends in Santiago after migrating different parts of Venezuela.
Suárez’s older brother Nelson said that they had left Venezuela in 2016 after joining anti -government demonstrations that swept the country in the midst of food shortages and hyperinflation. For the government of Nicolás Maduro, the brothers and sisters were threatened by armed pro-regime gangs called coleectivos.
“It was a really difficult period,” recalls Nelson Suárez, 35, whose brother moved to Cartagena and Bogotá, Colombia, before moving to Chile, where hundreds of thousands of uprooted venezuelans have migrated in the last decade. Nelson Suárez went north in the United States.
In Santiago, Arturo Suárez built a new life, fixing the refrigerators while he was chasing his dream of becoming a famous songwriter-interpreter, under the stage name is Suarezvzla. He became a relentless promoter of Venezuelan music, founding an event entitled Urban Fresh to enhance reggaeton and the stars of the trap. “Arturo is my mentor,” said Mariangeca Camacho, 20, a dancer and singer who fled Venezuela with her parents at the age of 14 and whose career he helped.
During a concert, he met his future wife.
But the meeting with both ends was a struggle, especially after the cocovated pandemic, the economy of Chile hammered. Last May, Suárez decided to join her brother in North Carolina and embarked on a five-month odyssey in the United States which involved crossing the treacherous jungles of the Darién gap between Colombia and Panama.
Sánchez, who was pregnant, decided not to risk the journey after making a miscarriage the previous year and stayed in Santiago. Before leaving for their shoe apartment, looking through the Andes, Suárez wrote a message to her “lioness” and his child to be born on a whiteboard hanging above his bed “soon, we will be together again,” he said. “I love you both in my whole life.”
In September, after two months of plowing in a Mexico City tortilla, Suárez reached the southern border, crossing San Diego after making an immigration appointment on the smartphone application of the Biden era called CBP One. From there, he made a conviction for New Bern, in North Carolina, where he found work like a man with all the man, mowed lawns and cleaning pools to support the baby Nahiara, born in early December.
But Suárez’s American dream quickly collapsed. In February, three weeks after the inauguration of Trump, he was held by immigration officials while he was making a clip in Raleigh. After a visit to an Atlanta detention center, he was transferred to Texas and then – to the horror of his family – sent to Salvador after being informed that he was expelled in Venezuela.
On March 16, 24 hours after Suárez was incarcerated at the Bukele (CECOC) terrorism containment center, Sánchez spotted her shaved head in a propaganda photo published by the government of the country of Central America. She recognized it because of tattoos on the neck and thigh and a childhood scar on her scalp. “I felt like the world collapsed on me,” said Sánchez. Since then, she has heard nothing and, in her darkest moments, fears that he is not even alive yet.
“We have lost all communication,” said Krubick Izarra, 26, a music producer who is the godmother of the couple’s child.
The deportations of Trump’s Salvador – that activists call forced disappearances – have sincere echoes in Latin America, where such tactics were common during dictatorships supported by the United States in the 1970s and 80s.
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In Santiago, a brutalist museum commemorates the hundreds of people animated in detention during the 17 -year diet of Gen Augusto Pinochet – Most never returning. “No one believed in Chile, people could disappear,” says an entry into an image book displayed in an exhibition hall on the dungeons of the dictatorship.
Half a century later, activists say that dozens of Venezuelans sent to Salvador are found in a similar vacuum, deprived of contacts with their families and lawyers, without regular procedure and, in most cases, having never been condemned for any crime.
“It is a legal black hole – and in this legal black hole, I think it is unlikely that families expect a legal remedy,” said Noah Bullock, director of Cristals, a rights for the last three years to denounce the fate of the 85,000 Salvadoral citizens. At least 368 of them died as a result of torture, according to the crystal count.
Bullock believed that the fate of prisoners such as Suárez was based on whether he was “politically viable” for Trump and Bukele to keep them behind bars, despite growing evidence of their innocence. “The only option for them, I think, is public advocacy and sufficient political pressure for their freedom,” he said.
Making noise is something that the musician friends from Suárez to Santiago are good.
One evening last week, they gathered in a rehearsal room to practice their last concert and defend a man whom they called a joyful dreamer, good heart and teetotal whose only crime was to look for a better life.
“Arturo has never injured anyone – and he is certainly not a terrorist,” said Heberth Veliz, a 29 -year -old musician who suspected that his friend had been targeted because of his many tattoos, who include a tribute to his deceased mother, a card from Venezuela, a palm tree, music notes and expression “the future will be brilliant”.
Veliz, whose body is also covered with tattoos, said he had trouble containing his anger when he saw the American president on television trace Suárez as “the worst of the worst”. “I want to jump on the screen and slap him so that he stops talking about nonsense.” Shut up, Trump! You don’t know what you’re talking about! “” He fulfilled, although he admitted that he was not surprised by the treatment of his friend. “Everyone knows that the most ruthless people wear costumes and links,” he said.
Shepherd Baby Nahiara in a pink shawl, Sánchez said she was determined to stay strong for the good of her daughter and her husband absent. “It is up to me to be the pillar of the family now,” she said, promising to continue to denounce the capture of her husband. “When he comes out, I want him to see that I have not abandoned – and I want him to feel proud.”
Speaking from the United States, Nelson Suárez said he thought Trump used innocent Venezuelans such as his brother as “guinea pigs” to show himself at his base. He felt “morally and psychologically broken” by his disappearance.
“I always wanted my brother to become known worldwide,” said Suárez. “But not like that, do you know?”
