source: WOLA (8. august 2025)
TRIGGER WARNING: this article contains violence torture and rape
Freed Venezuelan men tell of what they endured in El Salvador
In the weeks since their July 18 release after four months’ captivity in El Salvador’s Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT) mega-prison, some of the 252 Venezuelan migrants whom the Trump administration sent there have been sharing their stories with U.S. media outlets. What they have revealed about the abuses they suffered there is more serious and alarming than expected, given the very high international profile that their cases received and the financial support that the U.S. government provided El Salvador for holding them in the prison.
Reporters from the Washington Post spoke with 16 of the former captives who are now home in Venezuela following a prisoner swap that released 10 U.S. citizens from Venezuelan jails. A team from ProPublica, the Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News talked to nine of the men.
Their matching accounts reported systematic abuse, torture, and inhumane conditions at the CECOT, some fitting well within the definition of crimes against humanity. Former detainees described constant beatings, sexual assault, denial of medical care, and torture in an isolation cell known as “La Isla.” They reported overcrowding, 24-hour lighting, exposure to feces, and psychological torment, such as being told they would only ever leave the prison “in a black bag.”
The violent treatment began as soon as the men arrived in San Salvador aboard three Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor planes on March 15. An ICE agent aboard a plane appeared to cheer the brutality. ProPublica reported:
Salvadoran police boarded the planes and began forcing the shackled men off — shoving them, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with their batons. Five said they saw flight attendants crying at the sight.
“This will teach you not to enter our country illegally,” Colmenares said one ICE official told him in Spanish. He wanted to explain that wasn’t true in his case but could tell there was no point.
As depicted in an initial video that the Salvadoran government shared on social media, guards forced the shackled men to run from the planes to waiting buses, and then to the prison. One prisoner told ProPublica that “the shackles were so tight that he couldn’t walk as fast as the guards wanted, so they beat him until he passed out and dragged him the rest of the way.” Frengel Reyes, who ICE had detained in Florida, told local public radio that “he was kicked in the ribs and saw others being kicked in the face. He said he still feels the pain in his abdomen months later.”
Upon their arrival at the CECOT, the facility’s director addressed the men. The Washington Post reported:
Here, the director said, the men would have no rights—no right to a lawyer, no access to the sun. They would not eat chicken or meat for the rest of their lives.
“The only way that you will leave,” he said, according to multiple detainees, “is inside a black bag.”
The guards’ beatings, ProPublica reported, “were random, severe, and constant. Guards lashed out at them with their fists and batons. They kicked them while wearing heavy work boots and shot them at close range with rubber pellets.”
Florida Public Radio added:
Every morning, guards woke the prisoners at about 3 or 4 o’clock, he [Frengel Reyes] said, and made them kneel on the floor for hours. The food made people sick, but they were beaten if they didn’t finish their meals, he said.
“You were beaten for practically everything,” Reyes said.
Marco Jesús Basulto Salinas, who had Temporary Protected Status when ICE detained him, told the Washington Post that medical personnel were no help. “The doctor would watch us get beaten and then ask us, ‘How are you feeling?’ with a smile,” Basulto said. “It was the most perverse form of humiliation.”
Andry Hernández Romero, the gay makeup artist whose case received the most attention during the men’s four months in captivity, told the Washington Post of sexual abuse at the hands of the CECOT guards.
Disobeying rules proved costly. When Hernández’s head ached from the heat, he tried to cool down by bathing. He forgot to tell his friends to watch for guards.
“Get up, piece of sh–,” an officer told him, he said. He was taken to La Isla, where a tiny hole in the ceiling provided only a needle of light and almost no air.
Four men entered and began touching him with their clubs and putting them between his legs. One forced Hernández to perform oral sex on him, he said.
“If that’s how they treated us, knowing we were just migrants, I don’t even want to imagine how they treat the regular inmates—the ones who’ve actually committed crimes,” Hernández told the Guardian. “President Donald Trump and President Nayib Bukele must face the consequences of everything we went through in that prison. International authorities need to take action.”
(Hernández appeared poised and positive in a 15-minute interview with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller, posted on August 7. “We entered as 252 strangers, and left as 252 brothers,” Hernández said of his fellow former prisoners.)
U.S. State Department spokesperson Natalia Molano sought to deny any U.S. government responsibility for what happened to the men that it handed over to the Salvadoran government, paying it $6 million to help fund their captivity. ProPublica reported, “If there are complaints now that the men have returned to Venezuela, she said, ‘the United States is not involved in the conversation.’”
“An international panel is preparing a report on El Salvador and investigating whether any of those crimes were committed,” the Washington Post noted, quoting the view of veteran human rights lawyer Santiago Cantón, a member of the panel, that “there are reasonable grounds for an investigation by the International Criminal Court.”
Underscoring the recklessness of the Trump administration’s handling of the entire matter, the New York Times reported on the State Department’s discovery that one of the ten men whom it had requested Venezuela to release was wanted in Spain for committing a 2016 triple murder. Dahud Hanid Ortiz appeared smiling in a photo with a U.S. diplomat, holding a U.S. flag along with the other released captives. The Times revealed an email in which Michael Kozak, the career diplomat currently running the State Department’s Western Hemisphere Bureau, wrote, “Well then we probably should not have asked for him. Can we now extradite him to Spain? We did get the S.O.B. released.”
