Venezuelans sent by Trump to El Salvador endured systematic torture, report finds

More than 252 Venezuelans expelled to El Salvador under Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy suffered systematic and prolonged torture and abuse, including sexual assault, during their detention, according to a report published on Wednesday.

The report, compiled jointly by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Cristosal – a group investigating violations in Central America – says conditions at El Salvador’s sprawling “terrorist continent center” (Cecot) breached the UN’s standard minimal rules for the treatment of prisoners. It cites “inhumane prison conditions, including prolonged incommunicado detention, inadequate food” and other shortcomings.

The groups accuse the Trump administration of willful complicity in the suffering deportees endured after being flown to El Salvador in March and April, insisting that it ordered the men’s deportation while fully aware that they would be mistreated or even face threats to their lives.

They are calling an “independent investigation” by the US justice department, although they admit the prospect is unlikely. They are also demanding the Trump administration stop deporting third-country nationals to El Salvador.

US connivance in what is depicted as a systematic pattern of torture and human rights abuses evokes comparison with the scandal at Bahghdad’s Abu Ghraib facility during the “war on terror”, they say.

“We reached the conclusion that the Trump administration is complicit in systematic torture and enforced disappearances of the Venezuelans sent to El Salvador,” said Juanita Goebertus, HRW’s Americas director.

Citing previous state department reports recording harsh prison conditions in El Salvador, she added: “The administration knew that they were sending people to a place where they could be tortured and could be facing life-threatening risks.”

The Trump administration paid the Salvadorian regime of President Nayyib Bukele – who has styled himself as “the world coolest dictator” – $4.7m to cover the costs of the detention, the report says.

Noah Bullock, executive director of Cristosal – which was recently forced to suspend its operations in El Salvador – accused the Trump administration of “hir[ing] the Salvadorian prison system as a prop in a theatre of cruelty”.

“They wanted to demonstrate and send a message of brutality,” he said. “But I don’t know if they knew how far it would go and how terrible the horrors of torture are.”

The 81-page report paints a harrowing picture of the conditions suffered by the Venenzuelans, many of them asylum seekers from the authoritarian regime of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and roughly half having no criminal record, despite official accusations that the deportees were “terrorist” members of Tren de Aragua, an organized crime gang. Only 3% had been convicted in the US of a violent crime, according to the report.

“Detainees were subjected to constant beatings and other forms of ill-treatment, including some cases of sexual violence,” it says.

“Many of these abuses constitute torture under international human rights law.

“People held in Cecot said they were beaten from the moment they arrived in El Salvador and throughout their time in detention.

“These beatings and other abuses appear to be part of a practice designed to subjugate, humiliate, and discipline detainees through the imposition of grave physical and psychological suffering. Officers also appear to have acted on the belief that their superiors either supported or tolerated their abusive acts.”

According to one former inmate, identified in the report as Gonzalo Y, the facility’s director had a chilling for the new arrivals after their deportation from the US. “You have arrived in hell,” he told them, a sentence used as the report’s title.

The report, based on more than 200 interviews and “forensic” corroboration of the interviewees’ testimonies, details beatings being administered for minor infractions, such as talking too loudly, showering at the wrong time, or even asking for medical treatment.

Some inmates recounted being beaten following a visit by the International Committee of the Red Cross and on another occasion, after a visit by Kristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, who posted a video of herself standing outside a prison cell in which the incarcerated deportees were crammed.

The beatings following Noem’s visit were inflicted after the prisoners shouted demands to be freed on the grounds that they were not criminals or terrorists, according to Goebertus, who said Noem’s high-profile visit proved the administration’s awareness of the abuses occurring at Cecot.

“With Kristi Noem visiting directly and recording that video, the US government is very clearly complicit in the very serious and systematic torture that Venezuelans faced,” she said.

Three prisoners also recorded being sexually abused, with one man saying he was forced to perform oral sex on a guard. The report said sexual assaults were more widespread but were not reported due to the social stigma.

The men were freed in July as part of a deal with Maduro’s regime that included the release of 10 Americans and US residents who were being held in Venezuela.

Bullock said the Venezuelans’ treatment reflected “a broader pattern in Salvadorian prisons” that has seen 90,000 Salvadorians arbitrarily detained, disappeared and systematically tortured in the past three years.

“It’s caused the deaths of at least 420 people, according to our investigations, although we think it’s probably many more,” he said.

“There’s a large and very credible body of evidence that demonstrates that in Salvadorian prisons, the El Salvador government itself could be committing crimes against humanity – and that’s the prison system that the United States contracted to disappear the migrants into.”