Column By Mike Bibb
From the files of “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up,” how many people out of a thousand know what an Eswatini is — or where it is?
Here’s a clue: it’s slightly larger than Graham County, and the above picture is its national emblem.
No, it’s not a suburb of Miami, Florida, or a delicacy served at a French restaurant in San Francisco.
Nor is it a famous car race — the “24 hours of Eswatini.”
It is, however, soon to be the home of a notorious Salvadoran drug dude.
And, it’s not even close to El Salvador. Actually, there’s a lot of water in between the two.
One more hint, it’s squeezed in between Mozambique and South Africa.
Give up?
Take a look at the image of Africa. See that tiny red dot? Yep, that’s Eswatini — a postage-stamp-sized country in southern Africa.
Which, I’m sure, is renowned for something. Every place is noteworthy for one thing or another.
Maybe Eswatini has exceptionally good prisons. For certain, Mr. Kilmar Abrego-Garcia may be the only Central American dope dealer inmate in the joint.
After he overcomes the language barrier and masters traditional Eswatini prison customs, he may come to like the place and even become a tribal chief of sorts.
It might show local folks the fun times to be had by snorting and shooting a little fentanyl. It’s the rage in the United States, killing about 100,000 people a year.
Possibly, Senior Abrego-Garcia will receive regular visits from Congressional Members in Washington. Nothing makes a prisoner seem more important than his friends from the Swamp dropping in to chat about the good old days and bring him a sack lunch of street tacos.
Undoubtedly, Eswatini’s influence in the United Nations is about to skyrocket. The Big Three — the United States, China, and Russia — are getting ready to find out what playing second fiddle feels like.
Can the Olympic Games be far behind? Possibly, a Global Climate Change Conference? That is, if there’s an airport available to land the dignitaries’ planes.
All of which proves that the mouse who roars the loudest gets the biggest chunk of cheese.
Viva, Eswatini!
The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author.
Editor’s Note from the Associated Press: Attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a Friday letter that they intend to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the African nation of Eswatini after he expressed a fear of deportation to Uganda.
The Salvadoran man lived in Maryland for more than a decade before he was mistakenly deported to El Salvador earlier this year. That set off a series of contentious court battles that have turned his case into a test of the limits of President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies.
Although Abrego Garcia immigrated to the U.S. illegally around 2011, when he was a teenager, he now has an American wife and child. A 2019 immigration court order barred his deportation to his native El Salvador, finding he had a credible fear of threats from gangs there. He was deported anyway in March — in what a government attorney said was an administrative error — and held in the country’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center.
