A Kite Surfer, Navy SEAL and Makeup Artist: Freed in a U.S.-Venezuela Swap

A kite surfer on a South American adventure. A Navy SEAL whose family said he had traveled south for romance. A gay makeup artist who fled north for a better life. A man who sold bicycle parts for meager wages in Venezuela, before leaving for the United States.

All of these men were part of a large-scale prisoner swap conducted Friday between the United States and Venezuela’s governments.

The deal exchanged 10 Americans and U.S. permanent residents seized by the Venezuelan government for 252 Venezuelan immigrants the United States had deported to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.

The men came from very different backgrounds. The American kite surfer, Lucas Hunter, 37, worked in finance in London and had gone on vacation in Colombia, where his family says he was nabbed by the Venezuelan authorities near the Colombia-Venezuela border. The Navy SEAL, Wilbert Castañeda, 37, spent his adult life in the U.S. military and had gone to Venezuela to see a romantic partner, according to his brother.

The Venezuelans, according to many of their families, had traveled to the United States for far different reasons. Many had trekked from South America through a dangerous jungle called the Darién Gap, seeking to escape an economic crisis and a repressive government.

The makeup artist, Andry Hernández Romero, fled persecution for his political opinions and sexual orientation, according to his lawyers. The seller of bicycle parts, Alirio Belloso, 30, left because he could not afford school supplies for his 8-year-old daughter or medicine for his diabetic mother, according to his wife.

But the Venezuelan and American men ended up in what some analysts and family members have described as unexpectedly similar circumstances. Over the last year they were detained and accused of trying to destabilize the country they had entered. Then they were incarcerated without due process or contact with their families.

In both cases, the leaders who detained the men — Presidents Trump and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela — said they were trying to protect their countries from foreign invaders. Mr. Trump, who campaigned on a promise to carry out mass deportations, has invoked a wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to detain and deport many of the Venezuelan men. Mr. Maduro, meanwhile, wants the United States to lift oil sanctions, and security analysts say he believed seizing Americans could help him persuade Washington to do that.

Human rights groups have accused both governments of forcible disappearance, in part because they have both refused to release the names of all of the detainees. The United Nations defines the practice, which has a long and dark history in Latin America, as a detention by state agents followed by a refusal “to give information on the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person.”

Now that the Venezuelans have been sent back to Venezuela and the Americans have landed in the United States, all will face the challenge of reintegration and trying to make sense of what happened to them and their families.

Mirelis Casique, the mother of Francisco García Casique, a 24-year-old barber, said that when she learned her son had been detained by the United States, “I felt like my world was falling apart.”

Ms. Casique only realized he had been sent to El Salvador when she saw him shackled and bowed in a video posted online by the Salvadoran president. Then she spent months wondering if she would ever hear from him again. “I never imagined that in the famous United States his rights would be violated like this,” she said.

On Friday, the two were briefly reunited in Caracas. They embraced and cried. “The nightmare is over,” she told him.

Liz Cathcart, the director of Hostage US, a nonprofit that supports American hostages and their families, said former prisoners often face medical issues, including malnutrition, muscle atrophy, vitamin deficiencies and dental problems — on top of major psychological traumas.

The Venezuelan men are being held at a hotel near the Caracas airport, undergoing medical checkups and being interviewed by officials, according to three of the men’s family members. The Americans made a brief stop in El Salvador on Friday, where they shook hands with President Nayib Bukele, before being flown to the United States.

In interviews in recent months, family members on both sides said they had quit jobs to work for the freedom of their loved ones and deal with the logistics of finding a missing person. Some in Venezuela said they had to scramble to make money to support their families, because their relative in the United States stopped sending wages.

“It’s very difficult on a daily basis,” said Sophie Hunter, the sister of the kite surfer, who said she had left her job at the United Nations to try to help her brother.

In Venezuela, Noemí Briceño, the wife of Mr. Belloso, said she had lived in a state of constant fear since he was sent to El Salvador in March.

All she wants to do now, she said, “is thank God that my husband is back, because he took away the worry and anxiety I was constantly experiencing. I didn’t know how he was, whether he was eating or not, or how they were treating him.”

In the United States, people returning home after a wrongful detention are typically offered the chance to a participate in a residential reintegration program, usually at a military base.

Six other Americans returned from Venezuelan prison after being released in late January, following a visit by a Trump administration official, the first public meeting between the two nations in years.

Three of the released Americans spoke at length with The New York Times about their detention, saying they had been confined to cement cells, beaten, pepper-sprayed and subjected to psychological torture.

It’s unclear what kind of help people returned to Venezuela will get. The economy there has only worsened over the last year and the government has been rounding up perceived opponents and throwing them in the same prison system that held the Americans.

Some of the men have marched against the government in the past, according to their families, and could face prison time.

Several of the Venezuelans had active political asylum cases pending in the United States, including Neri Alvarado, 25, a former psychology student.

Roughly half of the men released from Venezuelan detention on Friday were U.S. citizens, while the other half were legal permanent residents, according to the Venezuelan watchdog group Foro Penal.

Among the legal permanent residents was Renzo Huamanchumo, 48, a father of seven originally from Peru who had gone to Venezuela to visit his girlfriend’s family, said his aunt, Patricia Castillo.

Mr. Huamanchumo was detained last September trying to cross the Colombia-Venezuela border, she said.

For months, she said, his family didn’t know where he was — or whether he was alive. His mother — Ms. Castillo’s sister — is now traveling to Houston to see her son, who is being examined at a military hospital there.

Mr. Huamanchumo’s mother became severely depressed after his detention, his aunt said. Often unable to eat, her hair had begun to fall out.

“My sister’s pain will never, never be compensated,” Ms. Castillo said. “This news came at just the right time, when we thought she was going to collapse.”

Genevieve Glatsky contributed reporting from New York.

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