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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 – documents conditions at El Salvador’s sprawling “terrorist confinement center” (Cecot) that breached the UN’s standard minimum rules for the treatment of prisoners, citing inhumane prison conditions, prolonged incommunicado detention, inadequate food, and other severe 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 officials ordered the men’s deportation while fully aware they would be mistreated or face threats to their lives. They are calling for an independent investigation by the US Justice Department, though they acknowledge the prospect is unlikely, and are 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 Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib facility during the war on terror.
“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 that the administration knew it was sending people to a place where they could be tortured and could face life-threatening risks. The Trump administration paid the Salvadoran regime of President Nayib Bukele – who has styled himself as “the world’s coolest dictator” – $4.7 million to cover the costs of the detention, the report says.
The 81-page report paints a harrowing picture of the conditions suffered by the Venezuelans, many of them asylum seekers from the authoritarian regime of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro. Roughly half had 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, which 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.
