Nov. 12 (UPI) — Dozens of Venezuelans incarcerated in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT — terrorism confinement mega prison — after being deported from the United States were tortured and subjected to other serious human rights abuses, according to a report out Wednesday.
Titled “You Have Arrived in Hell,” the 81 page report by Human Rights Watch and regional human rights organization Cristosal details the treatment of 40 Venezuelans during four months of incommunicado detention in the maximum security facility this year.
The men were among 252 Venezuelans flown to El Salavador in March and April by U.S. authorities, most of them on the basis of allegations by the U.S. and El Salvadorean governments that they were “terrorists” in the Tren de Aragua organized crime gang, designated a foreign terrorist group by Washington.
Detainees told HRW of constant beatings from the moment they were taken off the plane, being held in inhumane conditions, insufficient food, poor hygiene and sanitation, limited access to health care and medicine and zero recreation or education provision.
Three said they suffered sexual violence and several reported being severely beaten, apparently as punishment for speaking with the International Committee of the Red Cross when the charity visited CECOT in May.
The ill-treatment did not constitute isolated incidents by rogue guards or riot police, but rather systematic violations “designed to subjugate, humiliate, and discipline detainees,” Human Rights Watch and Cristosal said.
“The brutality and repeated nature of the abuses also appear to indicate that guards and riot police acted on the belief that their superiors either supported or, at the very least, tolerated their abusive acts,” they added.
Human Rights Watch and Cristosal said that contrary to the allegations the men were terrorists, only 3% of them had U.S. convictions for violent or potentially violent offenses, half had no U.S. criminal record at all and many had clean records in their home country of Venezuela or other Latin American countries.
The report said the human rights abuses in El Salvadorean prison were well known — including by the State Department which had criticized security and law enforcement in the countrty — but the Trump administration sent the Venezuelans, including dozens of asylum seekers, there anyway.
“The Trump administration paid El Salvador millions of dollars to arbitrarily detain Venezuelans who were then abused by Salvadoran security forces on a near-daily basis,” said HRW Americas director Juanita Goebertus.
“The Trump administration is complicit in torture, enforced disappearance, and other grave violations, and should stop sending people to El Salvador or any other country where they face a risk of torture,” she said.
Cristosal executive director Noah Bullock, said the Trump administration was guilty 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. But I don’t know if they knew how far it would go and how terrible the horrors of torture are,” he said.
HRW and Cristosal also called for an independent investigation by the U.S. Justice Department and warned that U.S. complicity in the violations drew parallels with the human rights abuses meted out to Iraqis by U.S. military and intelligence personnel in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraqib prison in the Iraq War.