Venezuelans deported from the U.S. to El Salvador suffered torture, abuse, and even sexual violence during their imprisonment at CECOT, reports the NGO HRW.
“The cases of torture and ill-treatment of Venezuelans in El Salvador were not isolated incidents committed only by a few abusive guards or riot police, but [also] systematic human rights violations,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a statement issued Wednesday entitled “They Arrived in Hell: Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans at El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).”
The HRW report, prepared in collaboration with the NGO Cristosal, warns that these migrants have also been victims of “forced disappearances and other serious human rights violations.”
Between March and April, some 252 Venezuelans arrived in El Salvador without any evidence being presented of their links to criminal gangs, following an agreement between the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and his Salvadoran counterpart, Nayib Bukele.
The document states that these prisoners were transferred to CECOT in El Salvador despite evidence of “serious violations in Salvadoran prisons”.
HRW accused the Trump Administration of being “complicit in torture, enforced disappearance and other abuses” and demanded that US authorities “end deportations to El Salvador and any other country where people are at risk of being tortured.”
“The Trump Administration paid El Salvador millions of dollars to arbitrarily detain Venezuelans, who were then subjected almost daily to brutal beatings by Salvadoran security forces… it is complicit in these abuses and should stop sending people to El Salvador or any other country where they risk being tortured,” said Juanita Goebertus, director of the Americas Division of HRW.
Venezuelans deported to El Salvador
HRW and Cristosal researchers interviewed 40 of the Venezuelans who were detained at CECOT and another 150 people, including family members and lawyers.
The report notes that approximately half of the Venezuelans sent to CECOT had no criminal convictions and only 3 percent had been convicted in the U.S. for a violent or potentially violent crime.
According to information obtained by the NGO, the US government recently provided at least $4.7 million (€4 million) to San Salvador to cover, among other things, the costs of detaining these individuals.
‘They arrived in hell’
“The nightmare began as soon as I was taken off the plane,” says the report, which quotes Gonzalo, a 26-year-old from Zulia state, Venezuela, who said that a guard hit him on the back of the neck with a stick as he got off the plane.
Those interviewed by HRW and Cristosal reported that the guards periodically beat them with kicks, punches, and batons.
“They would take us all out of the cell, put us in a search position, kneeling, handcuffed behind our backs with our arms above our heads, and beat us with batons, kicks and punches, and then leave us kneeling for 30 or 40 minutes,” said another Venezuelan prisoner, Tirso Z.
Claiming to be frequently beaten by the guards, another Venezuelan prisoner, José Mora, stated that “[The guards] tortured us physically and psychologically.”
“When we protested, they shot us point-blank with rubber bullets, right inside the cell… we were like chickens or rats locked up… and they shot us with rubber bullets,” he added.