A damning new Human Rights Watch report says 252 Venezuelans, many of them political refugees from socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro, that the Trump administration recently deported to an infamous mega-prison in El Salvador “were subjected to constant beatings and other forms of ill-treatment, including some cases of sexual violence. Many of these abuses constitute torture under international human rights law.”
So we station the giant aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford off the Venezuelan coast to put the fear of yet another Yanqui regime-change invasion in Latin America into Maduro, and then we send Venezuelan dissidents from that regime seeking asylum to a third country’s torture center, paying that country’s own strongman President Nayyib Bukele $4.7 million for the privilege.
Is that really a good look for a nation that supposedly wants to seem a shining City on a Hill as compared with the Maduro-led tyranny and corruption?
Roughly half of those deported had no criminal record anywhere, and only 3% had been convicted of a violent crime in the U.S., the report says.
This is despite Trump administration accusations that the deportees were “terrorist” members of Tren de Aragua, an organized crime gang.
The 252 prisoners weren’t just beaten and tortured from time to time after they were flown in at U.S. taxpayer expense to El Salvador’s sprawling “terrorist continent center” (CECOT). Many were beaten essentially all day, every day, the report says, “from the moment they arrived in El Salvador and throughout their time in detention. … 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.”
“You have arrived in hell,” the torture facility’s director told inmates as they entered his prison. That sentence became the title of the Human Rights Watch report, which compares the compound to the Abu Ghraib torture center during the American occupation of Iraq.
Beatings were meted out specifically after a visit earlier this year by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who posted a video of herself outside a prison cell crammed with shirtless inmates. When the prisoners shouted to her demands that they be freed because they were not criminals or terrorists, they were later tortured, according to interviews in the report.
When asked for comment on the torture report, the White House refused to address the issue. Asked specifically about the beatings, administration spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people by removing dangerous criminal and terrorist illegal aliens who pose a threat to the American public.”
That might indeed be a good idea, but it doesn’t seem to be one particularly being put to use here.
Prisoners in El Salvador are kept in conditions that do not meet United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, also known as the “Mandela Rules.” And all of these prisoners were later swapped back to Venezuela, where none wanted to return, by the Salvadoran government in exchange for Salvadorans being held there.
“We are not terrorists, we were migrants,” one of them said. “We went to the United States to seek protection and the chance at a better future, but we ended up in a prison in a country we didn’t even know, treated worse than animals.”
We join Human Rights Watch in calling on the U.S government to end all transfers of third-country nationals to El Salvador.
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