Salvadoran President accuses Paris Fashion Week of ‘glorifying criminals’
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San Salvador – Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele, criticised Paris Fashion Week on Sunday for "glorifying criminals", following a show which depicted, as a protest, prisoners held in El Salvador’s maximum-security mega-prison.
Mexican-born, US designer Willy Chavarria presented a show in Paris on Friday in which several tattooed men knelt, wearing white T-shirts and shorts.
This posture and attire are similar to that imposed on inmates at the Terrorism Confinement Centre (Cecot), the maximum-security prison built by Bukele to incarcerate gang members and where he imprisoned 252 Venezuelans deported by the US.
"This is the result of glorifying criminals in Paris. Whoever spares the wolf sacrifices the sheep," Bukele stated in a post on X, accompanied by a video of a young woman expressing fear about living in the French capital, without further explanation.
Bukele’s post was reposted by billionaire Elon Musk, owner of X, Tesla and SpaceX.
Human rights organisations have strongly criticised the detention of Venezuelans in Cecot, whom the US government, under President Donald Trump, accused of being members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang, without presenting evidence.
"We are ready to send them to Paris as soon as we receive the green light from the French government," Bukele quipped in an earlier post on Saturday, reacting to Chavarria’s show with models kneeling, hands behind their backs, on a red carpet.
In another post, the Salvadoran presidency stressed that the presentation "paid tribute to criminals imprisoned" in Cecot.
Bukele enjoys great popularity for his anti-gang campaign, but the state of emergency he imposed in March 2022 to carry it out is rejected by humanitarian groups because it allows arrests without warrants.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and local NGOs report that there are thousands of innocent people among the 87,000 detainees accused of being gang members or accomplices, as well as torture and approximately 400 deaths in prison.(AFP)
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