America’s Outsourced Cruelty: Venezuelans Tortured in El Salvador’s Prison

When a U.S. government jet carrying 252 Venezuelan migrants landed in El Salvador last March, the men were told by a prison warden, “You have arrived in hell.” They weren’t exaggerating… According to a searing 81-page investigation by Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Cristosal, the deportees, many with no criminal record, were subjected to systematic torture, sexual abuse, starvation, and psychological torment inside El Salvador’s notorious Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), a “mega-prison” run under President Nayib Bukele’s ongoing state of emergency.

The new report accuses the Trump administration of willful complicity, claiming U.S. officials knowingly sent detainees to a facility long condemned for human-rights abuses.

“The administration knew they were sending people to a place where they could be tortured,” said Juanita Goebertus, HRW’s Americas Director. “This was not a rogue operation, it was policy.”

A Theatre of Cruelty

Between March and April 2025, the Venezuelans, some asylum seekers, were expelled under the archaic Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime statute rarely invoked in modern times. In return, Washington reportedly paid $4.7 million to the Bukele government to detain them, effectively outsourcing immigration detention to one of the harshest prison systems in the hemisphere. Democracy Forward filed a suit in May 2025 to compel the production of documents regarding the Trump Administration’s agreement to disappear people to El Salvadorian Prisons.

Inside CECOT, detainees endured beatings, near-starvation diets, sleep deprivation, sexual assault, and prolonged incommunicado confinement. Guards reportedly told prisoners they would “die here.”

A former inmate, identified only as Gonzalo Y, recalled:

“They beat us as soon as we stepped off the bus. We were told we were terrorists. We were not. We were hungry people.”

Echoes of Abu Ghraib

Human-rights advocates have drawn haunting parallels with the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, where U.S. personnel tortured and humiliated detainees two decades ago. Both cases involve systemic abuse, official denial, and government complicity in torture. But while Abu Ghraib occurred under U.S. control, the CECOT arrangement represents a newer, darker model: outsourced cruelty.

“CECOT has become the Trump administration’s Abu Ghraib by proxy,” said Noah Bullock, Cristosal’s Executive Director. “They hired the Salvadoran prison system as a prop in a theater of cruelty.”

The Human Toll and Legal Reckoning

Roughly half of the deported Venezuelans had no criminal convictions in the U.S., HRW found. Only 3 percent were convicted of violent crimes. Yet all were branded “terrorists” linked to the Tren de Aragua gang, a claim that rights groups say lacks evidence.

The abuses described include sexual violence, enforced disappearance, and psychological torture, which constitute violations of the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In a report dated March 25, 2025, Amnesty International warned that U.S. deportations to El Salvador “breach the principle of non-refoulement,” which forbids sending anyone to a country where they risk torture or death.

Meanwhile, Human Rights First has demanded a U.S. Justice Department investigation, calling the policy “a moral and legal catastrophe”.

International Outcry, Domestic Silence

According to an AP report from July 2025, Venezuela’s foreign ministry has announced an inquiry into what it called “crimes against humanity”. The attorney general’s office of Venezuela is said to have initiated an investigation into President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador, citing allegations of mistreatment and violations of human rights concerning Venezuelan migrants.

Yet Washington has largely remained silent. Analysts say accountability is unlikely, echoing the limited justice that followed Abu Ghraib, where most convictions targeted low-ranking soldiers rather than policymakers.

“We’ve seen this pattern before,” said a former U.N. rapporteur on torture. “When the U.S. is involved, accountability tends to stop at the water’s edge.”

A Legacy of Outsourced Suffering

The CECOT scandal underscores how migration policy and national security rhetoric can collide to devastating effect.

In Abu Ghraib, the U.S. tortured in its own name. In El Salvador, it allegedly outsourced that brutality, funding and facilitating torture while maintaining plausible deniability.

For survivors like Gonzalo Y, those distinctions mean little.

“They said America was the land of freedom,” he told HRW researchers. “But they sent us to hell.”

Report’s Implications, Context and Conclusion

The case exposes a stark clash between migration control and human rights protection. It reveals how the transfer of migrants to third countries, where they face a real risk of torture, constitutes a clear breach of international law. The report casts serious doubt on U.S. and Salvadoran assertions that those deported were dangerous criminals, citing evidence that many of the individuals swept up in these transfers were ordinary people with no proven ties to crime.

At the heart of the findings is El Salvador’s sprawling CECOT prison, portrayed not as a facility for justice but as a machinery of abuse. Its design and operation appear to entrench cruelty rather than safeguard detainees, amounting to what investigators describe as systematic and repeated torture.

The report’s implications reach far beyond this single case. It raises urgent questions about how nations collaborate on migration, detention, and deportation, and about the shared human rights responsibilities of sending, receiving, and transit states.

Ultimately, the findings in this report point to a network of violations, arbitrary detention, torture, denial of due process, and lack of transparency that demand immediate reform. The report calls on the governments of the United States, El Salvador, and Venezuela, along with international actors, to confront these abuses and ensure accountability before further harm is done.

IMAGE: Inside the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a 57-acre “mega-prison”, located over 40 miles east of the capital, San Salvador, in a rural region of the Tecoluca district. (Source: Secretaria de Prensa de la Presidencia in El Salvador)

Human Rights Watch and Cristosal reports…

US/El Salvador: Torture of Venezuelan Deportees
Stop Sending People to Face Danger; Ensure Accountability

• The Venezuelan nationals the US government sent to El Salvador in March and April were tortured and subjected to other abuses, including sexual violence.
• The cases of torture and ill-treatment of Venezuelans in El Salvador were not isolated incidents by rogue guards or riot police, but rather systematic violations.
• 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.

(Washington, DC) – The Venezuelan nationals the United States government sent to El Salvador in March and April 2025 were tortured and subjected to other abuses, including sexual violence, Human Rights Watch and Cristosal said in a report released today.

The 81-page report, “‘You Have Arrived in Hell’: Torture and Other Abuses Against Venezuelans in El Salvador’s Mega Prison,” provides a comprehensive account of the treatment of these people in El Salvador. In March and April 2025, the US government sent 252 Venezuelans, including dozens of asylum seekers, to the Center for Terrorism Confinement (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, CECOT) mega prison in El Salvador, despite credible reports of serious human rights abuses in El Salvador’s prisons. The Venezuelans were subject to refoulement—being sent to where they would face torture or persecution, arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, torture, inhumane detention conditions and, in some cases, sexual violence.

“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 Juanita Goebertus, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “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.”

Between March and September 2025, researchers interviewed 40 of the Venezuelans who had been held in CECOT, and 150 of their relatives, lawyers, and acquaintances. Researchers reviewed photographs of injuries, criminal record databases, documents related to these individuals’ immigration status in the United States, and data released by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on its deportations. Researchers also corroborated detainees’ allegations through forensic analyses provided by the Independent Forensic Expert Group and open-source research by the University of California, Berkeley Human Rights Center’s Investigation Lab.

Human Rights Watch and Cristosal requested information from the US and Salvadoran governments about these detentions, but received no response.

The US government reportedly provided at least US$4.7 million to El Salvador, including to cover the costs of detaining the men. Some Venezuelans sent to El Salvador had been seeking asylum in the United States after fleeing persecution in Venezuela.

Human Rights Watch and Cristosal found that roughly half the Venezuelans sent to CECOT had no criminal history, and only 3 percent had been convicted in the United States of a violent or potentially violent offense. Additional background checks showed that many had not been convicted of crimes in Venezuela or other Latin American countries where they had lived.

Relatives and lawyers said that at least 62 of the Venezuelans were removed amid their asylum process in the United States and despite having passed their initial “credible fear” screening, which gave them the right to a full hearing on their asylum claims before an immigration judge. Three said they had arrived in the United States after being fully vetted and processed through the Safe Mobility Offices program established by the US government.

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Source: https://21stcenturywire.com/2025/11/12/americas-outsourced-cruelty-venezuelans-tortured-in-el-salvadors-prison/