"You Have Arrived in Hell"
The United States removed Gonzalo and 251 other Venezuelans to El Salvador in March and April 2025. When the plane landed, officers forced him and others to kneel with their heads down, he said. He told one of them that he had a spine problem and could not keep his head low, but one officer struck him with a baton in the back of the neck. On a bus to the maximum-security prison known as the Center for Terrorism Confinement (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, CECOT), guards beat him again, he said.
“When we arrived at the entrance of CECOT, guards made us kneel so they could shave our heads,” Gonzalo said. “One of the officers hit me on the legs with a baton, and I fell to the ground on my knees.”
Everyone, he said, was subjected to the same treatment. “The prison director told us, ‘You have arrived in hell’. In CECOT, guards and riot police beat and abused the Venezuelans constantly. “The guards beat me many times, in the hallways of the prison module and in the punishment cell,” Gonzalo said. “They beat us almost every day.”
The Venezuelans were held incommunicado in the CECOT maximum-security prison for approximately four months, until July 18, when they were sent to Venezuela as part of a prisoner exchange between El Salvador and Venezuela.
https://www.hrw.org/report/2025/11/12/you-have-arrived-in-hell/torture-and-other-abuses-against-venezuelans-in-el
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/12/venezuelans-el-salvador-trump-torture-report
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