Photos of Luis missing a front tooth and Daniel’s nose with a visibly deviated septum are among the evidence included in the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report “You’ve Arrived in Hell,” released on Wednesday. The report reveals torture and other abuses against Venezuelans in the Confinement of Terrorism Center (CECOT), President Nayib Bukele’s mega-prison in El Salvador. Also included are images of the scars on Mateo’s hand and Carlos’ chest, the result of being shot at close range with rubber bullets while he was held in the cells of this prison.
The consequences are still visible nearly four months after 252 Venezuelan migrants survived the worst of the nightmare. US immigration authorities have detained them at different times, in various cities and under different circumstances – raids, arrests in their homes and while crossing the border – and on March 15 this year, President Donald Trump decided to send them to the dreaded prison in El Salvador, invoking the Alien Enemies Act and accusing them of being members of the criminal organization Tren de Aragua. They experienced horror, including daily beatings. Following an agreement between governments mediated by the Catholic Church, on 18 July they were finally sent back to Venezuela, a country that some of them had left long before, in some cases fleeing political persecution. In exchange for the Venezuelans, Nicolás Maduro’s government handed over 10 detained Americans to Washington.
HRW, relying on the NGO Cristosal, research centers, official documents and forensic specialists, reconstructed the Cecot torture system based on the testimonies of Venezuelans who spent four months and three days in a structure designed to make escape practically impossible. The report protects the identities of the 40 victims who were interviewed directly, as well as dozens of family members, friends and lawyers consulted to build the cases of 130 of the 252 Venezuelans the Trump administration sent to Central American prison. Their names were changed for fear of retaliation and because many of them have filed lawsuits against the governments of the United States and El Salvador.
Daniel’s nose was broken after participating in interviews conducted by International Red Cross personnel with a group of Venezuelan prisoners on May 7. They beat him with a truncheon and hit him on the nose, making him bleed profusely. “They kept hitting me in the stomach and when I tried to catch my breath I started choking on blood (…) My nose was crooked because of those blows,” he states in the report.
He wasn’t the only one. “After the interview, in the afternoon they came to take us out of the cell for a search and beat us again, telling us that it was because we had informed the Red Cross about the beatings,” said Félix D. “They only beat me for that, but in the afternoon some of my cellmates were beaten for the whole following week.” The psychological torture, however, was what affected them the most, says Flavio T: “The most difficult thing was that the guards told us that we would never get out of there, that our families gave us up for dead.” A phrase they often heard was that “the only way out of here (the Cecot) is in a black bag”; that is, dead. All 252 Venezuelans survived to tell their story.
The worst beatings
In the days preceding visits, such as the three Red Cross visits in May and June or that of US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem in March, they were provided with bedding, pillows and toiletries to improve their living conditions. After the visitors left, the items were taken away and the beatings intensified. Two or three days before their final transfer to Venezuela, their treatment improved again, but they were also subjected to the last beatings.
As soon as they got off the plane upon arrival, the guards started beating them. “(An) officer hit me in the face with a black truncheon, right in the mouth, and knocked out my front tooth,” said Luis S.. Other officers also punched him in the ribs and hit him in the right knee with a baton. “The doctor who examined me about a week later in prison told me that they had torn my knee ligament. They didn’t give me anything for my tooth,” he said, according to the report.
The investigation also documented sexual violence. One inmate, Mario J., said four guards sexually abused him when they took him to an isolation cell called “the island,” where those deemed to have broken the rules were routinely punished with further beatings, solitary confinement, and deprivation of food and water. “They played with their batons on my body,” he said. “They stuck the truncheons between my legs and rubbed them against my private parts.” Then they forced him to perform oral sex on one of the guards, groped him and called him a “faggot.” Another inmate, Nicolás, said he was sexually assaulted during the beatings. The officers grabbed his genitals and made sexually explicit comments. “They did this to a lot of us,” he said. “I don’t think others will tell you because it’s very intimate and embarrassing.”
HRW notes that “beatings and other abuse appear to be part of a practice designed to subjugate, humiliate and discipline detainees through the imposition of severe physical and psychological suffering.” According to HRW, the guards, both men and women, wore gray or black uniforms, kept their faces covered and identified themselves by nicknames such as Satán, El Tigre, El Cuervo, Vegeta and Pantera. And they had complete authority to treat the prisoners as they did. “The brutality and repeated nature of the abuse also appears to indicate that the guards and riot police acted in the belief that their superiors supported or, at the very least, tolerated their abusive acts,” the report states.
Limbo in three countries
According to Human Rights Watch, Cecot Prison fails to meet several standards of international human rights law and the Mandela Rules, which aim to ensure humane treatment of prisoners. Inaugurated by Nayib Bukele in January 2023 during a declared state of emergency, it has become a torture machine that is part of the Salvadoran president’s institutional apparatus. There is a history of serious human rights violations committed in this prison. “The United States sent the 252 Venezuelans to Cecot despite previous credible information that torture and other abuses had occurred in El Salvador’s prisons. This violates the principle of non-refoulement (which prohibits a country from deporting a person to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened) established, among others, in the Convention Against Torture,” the organization denounces.
Almost everything about the trial was irregular. The governments of the United States and El Salvador have refused to reveal information about the whereabouts of the 252 migrants, or their fate, to the point that their actions – or lack thereof – constitute the crime of enforced disappearance under international law, the report said. This crime occurs when a government detains a person and refuses to provide information about their whereabouts or fate, leaving them without legal protection and causing further suffering to their families. The detention of Venezuelan migrants at the Cecot facility also lacked any legal basis, making it arbitrary under international humanitarian law, HRW says.
Once detained at Cecot, the Venezuelans were unable to contact their families or their lawyers. Neither San Salvador nor Washington ever published an official list with the names of those affected, nor did they confirm the unofficial lists that were circulating. US immigration authorities had assured members of the group that they would be sent back to Venezuela. None of the interviewees were informed that their true destination was El Salvador.
A particular version of hell began for families, with no knowledge of the whereabouts of their loved ones and with bureaucracy transformed into an instrument of psychological torture. The names were deleted from the computer system containing the detainees’ locations shortly after the transfer to El Salvador and, apparently, “earlier than is standard ICE practice.” US lawyers representing some of them argue that immigration authorities never informed them of their clients’ relocation.
Families found themselves trapped in a system where, when they managed to speak to someone to ask for information at ICE offices or detention centers, officials’ responses were discouraging: either their loved one’s name wasn’t in the system, or their whereabouts were unknown, or no information could be provided to them. At best, they were told that their relative had been deported, even if they were not told where. For some, the only solution suggested was to contact “the Venezuelan embassy in the United States,” even though it has been closed for years.
Attempts to contact the Salvadoran presidential commissioner for human rights, Andrés Guzmán Caballero, via email produced only an automatic message: the request had been forwarded to the “competent institutions”. After that there was no further response.
The HWR points out that Salvadoran courts also refused to provide information on the whereabouts of the Venezuelans. Between March and July, Cristosal helped relatives of detainees file 76 habeas corpus petitions before the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court, without receiving a response. At the end of March, the General Directorate of Prisons of El Salvador informed this organization that the list of people affected by this measure had been declared confidential for the next seven years and therefore could not disclose their names. At the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, El Salvador said it had not detained the Venezuelans, but rather had “facilitated the use of Salvadoran prison infrastructure for the custody of persons detained within the judicial and law enforcement system of that other State,” meaning the United States.
With their release, for these men, only part of the nightmare is over. “I’m always on alert because every time I hear the sound of keys and handcuffs, it means they were coming to beat us,” Daniel B. told HRW. Detainees said they were left psychologically scarred by their experiences. In Venezuela, they underwent medical examinations, interviews with state media and background checks before being brought home. They received no psychological support to cope with the ongoing trauma. The report notes that two detainees said agents from the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service (SEBIN) visited their homes after their return. “I am currently living in fear,” said Félix D. According to the report, the officers said the visits were “part of a monitoring process.” They asked the released Venezuelans to record videos about their detention in the United States, the treatment they received, and asked them, among other things, whether they had connections to U.S. agencies seeking to “destabilize the government.”
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