A tattoo, an ear, a neck: Venezuelan mothers recognize their sons in images of alleged gang members sent to El Salvador

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.

“My son doesn’t even have a criminal record. He’s a good, hard-working boy,” says Mercedes Yamarte before breaking down in tears, in a video recorded by her nephew Jair Valera so the world would know that neither his cousin Melvin Yamarte nor the rest of the young men sent to El Salvador are criminals or part of any gang. “Our relatives voluntarily surrendered to the United States because they were in need, they were hungry, they had no jobs, they had no way to support themselves there. They surrendered, and what they [U.S. officials] did was deport them to El Salvador,” Valera asserts.

Mercedes was scrolling through TikTok when she came across the chilling video of a pack of shaven-headed men in inmate clothes entering the CECOT after Trump flouted a judge’s order and invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to carry out this immediate deportation. She couldn’t believe it was her son, but his physical appearance was unmistakable. Melvin, 29, appeared in one image kneeling, wearing a torn black shirt, with his head shaved. The other thing Mervin has, that no one else has, are the tattoos on his body: one says the name of his six-year-old daughter, another draws hands clasped in honor of his partner, and a third reads “Strong Like Mom,” a declaration of love for Mercedes. None of them suggest that Mervin belongs to any criminal group.

“His eyes screamed at me to help him,” his mother told the independent Venezuelan media outlet El Pitazo. “That image never leaves my mind. It’s as if he were saying to me, ‘What did I do wrong?’” Mercedes can’t deny that her world “shattered into a thousand pieces” after seeing her son in such conditions. “We are humble people and we don’t have any criminals in our midst. It’s taken us a lot of work to get the things that we have. Mervin didn’t have a father, but he had a fighting mother who worked hard for them. My children are the same; they don’t deserve this.”

In his native Zulia, Mervin, a soccer fan, had graduated from high school and had a job waterproofing roofs. In 2023, he began the journey through the Darién Jungle that millions of Venezuelans have also traveled over the past decade. Once in the United States, the young man settled in Dallas, Texas. Everything was going well until he told his mother that he had been detained on March 13 by immigration agents, who entered his apartment and also seized the four friends he lived with and with whom he had grown up in the town of Los Pescadores. He told her they had been made to sign some documents and that they would be deported. What they never imagined was that, instead of boarding a plane to Caracas, Mervin would land as a dangerous individual in El Salvador.

When Mercedes saw that her son was one of the more than 300 inmates sent to the Salvadoran mega-prison, the other mothers in the neighborhood also began to investigate, to find out if their children were among the group of deportees. Sadly, they spotted Ringo Rincón, Andy Javier Perozo and Edwuar Hernández. Now, in the video recorded from the doorway of a local house, all they can do is cry, uncertain about what will happen to each of them, their sons, none of whom are over 40 years old.

“My son doesn’t belong to Tren de Aragua either. He left looking for a good future for his daughter,” Yareli Herrera, Hernández’s mother, says in the video. “My son left looking for a good future, and look what they did to him, deceive him. That’s all they’ve done. These are good kids. They can check their background,” Perozo’s mother adds in tears. Rincón’s wife, with whom he has three children, barely manages to stammer that “he left in search of a good future” for his family. Then a muffled cry drowns out her voice.

These women aren’t the only ones now searching for their sons or husbands, horrified by the prospect that that they could be in El Salvador. Mirelys Casique has also appeared in social media videos and in various media outlets asking for help to bring her son back home. Francisco García, 24, is part of the group that arrived in El Salvador over the weekend as part of Trump’s plan to clear the country of migrants with help from Bukele. The Salvadoran leader assured on X that the United States will pay a very low fee for these inmates — who for the moment will be held in jail for a period of one year — but that it means a very “high” fee for them.

Until Saturday, Casique thought that her son, a barber by trade, was going to be deported to Venezuela. The young man had called her to confirm that he would be expelled from the United States. It was his brothers who recognized him in one of the shocking photographs released by El Salvador. “It’s him, it’s him […] I’ve always shaved him since he was a baby, I recognize his features […] you can see the tattoo,” said the mother when she recognized him among the group of inmates, as she told BBC Mundo. “My children started searching the internet for all the information regarding the planes that had arrived in El Salvador, they looked for photographs in all the media […] they started zooming in on where they were sitting, in white uniforms, inside the prisons, and that’s where we recognized him by his ears, his neck.”

Other mothers have also felt the same shock upon discovering their children’s images circulating in the news or on social media. Carmen Reyes’s 19-year-old son was in the group. “He has no criminal record in Venezuela. His offense was for driving without a license; it’s not fair that they sent him to that horrible prison,” she told Telemundo. Others, like Mariela Villamazir, are unaware of their children’s whereabouts and only ask to know if they were also sent to El Salvador.

While White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insists these men are all “terrorists” and “heinous monsters” who were arrested to save “countless American lives,” the families of these young men maintain there is no evidence that they have a criminal record.

From the doorway of his house in the Los Pescadores neighborhood, Jair Valera, Melvin’s cousin, addressed Bukele in the video and asked him to look at how “he has made Venezuelan mothers desperate.” “The only thing we are asking from here in Maracaibo, Zulia State, is that you investigate the cases thoroughly; not everyone belongs to the Tren de Aragua. My cousin doesn’t belong to the Tren de Aragua.”

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