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Keeping Rage Alive
by Tim Miller
Andry is alive. And for now he is freed from a horrid detention center in El Salvador. Thank God.
This morning his mother is awaiting his arrival, supposedly today or tomorrow. They spoke by phone on Sunday for the first time in more than four months, according to his attorney. I cannot imagine her relief.
For 125 days Andry and hundreds of other men were held in a torture prison where they got a “beating for breakfast, for lunch, for dinner.” They had been kidnapped by our government and left in that hellhole to rot with no due process, no access to legal counsel, no phone call home. They were completely stripped of their humanity. In many cases their only crime was existing in Stephen Miller’s America while being Venezuelan. For some, their sin was having the wrong tattoo.
On Friday, these men were released, at long last, in what was described by the participating governments as a “prisoner exchange” between El Salvador and Venezuela. In reality this was a hostage swap between the United States and the Nicolás Maduro regime. A hostage swap in which the Americans were the villains, using a tactic previously deployed by despots like Putin, who imprisoned an American athlete for minor cannabis crimes in order to extract concessions from the earnest West.
It’s remarkable that our administration’s actions were so depraved that they somehow made Maduro seem like the good guy. We gave him a domestic public relations victory, so he can crow about the humanitarian aid he brought to Venezuelans who had been tortured by the capitalist American devil.
That is Marco Rubio’s legacy in this story. He became the despot enabler he claimed to hate. First by wrongfully imprisoning and permitting the abuse of people who, like his ancestors, had fled communism and come to America in the hope of finding freedom. And then by using them as pawns in a trade for Americans who had themselves been tortured in Venezuela. In the process, he handed a massive geopolitical win to the communist dictator whom he has said in the past should be toppled by military coup.
As for the pawns in this game of caudillo chess, we can at least have the comfort of knowing they survived. My sense is that there is cautious optimism among the families of the Venezuelans and their legal teams that these men will be treated better back in Venezuela than they may otherwise have been so that Maduro can look good and cash in on this political gift from the Americans.
Hopefully that turns out to be true. Because watching them deplane in Venezuela, knowing what our government had done to them, it was hard not to be overcome with emotion.
This video of a man named Ysqueibel, for one, took my breath away.
But as Andry’s lawyer Lindsay Toczylowski told us in our livestream following the hostage release Friday night: “If I had to sum up how I feel right now, I feel relief he won’t be sleeping in a torture prison tonight, but I have outrage at the situation.”
That sentiment resonated with me in a deep way. After spending months thinking about Andry, wondering about his well-being, worrying about how they must be treating him in that hell, I wanted to just feel joy that he could go home and be with his mother and friends.
But I couldn’t. What I felt, instead, was rage over how fucking outrageous it was that he was in this situation in the first place. It seems like the Germans should have invented a word in the ‘40s that sums up the feeling when a person survives fascist barbarity, but my search for such a term that describes that cyclone of emotion came up empty.
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