Inside El Salvador’s hellish supermax prison: Migrant detainees deported by Trump tell of harrowing abuse and torture

Warning: Some readers may find the content of this article distressing

“They kept hitting me in the stomach, and when I tried to breathe, I started to choke on the blood. My cellmates shouted for help, saying they were killing us, but the officers said they just wanted to make us suffer.”

The harrowing testimony of Daniel B., not his real name, is among dozens collected by human rights’ groups since the 252 Venezuelan migrants were repatriated from one of El Salvador’s most notorious prisons in July this year.

Five months earlier, they had been deported there from the US as part of Trump’s much publicised migration crackdown.

El Salvador’s maximum security Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) has become emblematic of strongman president Nayib Bukele’s brutal crackdown on organised crime in recent years. Bukele boasts of the project, sharing curated images of guards hauling shaven prisoners through the compound as evidence of his triumph over the gangs.

But Bukele’s prison goes beyond taking El Salvador’s most dangerous off the streets, monitoring groups warn. CECOT has been branded a “black hole of human rights” amid reports of overcrowding, arbitrary beatings and the denial of any contact with the outside world.

Prisoners are sent to CECOT with the expectation that they will never leave.

A rare insight into this bleak reality came when Human Rights Watch (HRW) spoke to many of those released back to Venezuela.

Its report published this week claimed that while inside the prison, detainees were subjected to sexual violence; beaten for requesting medical treatment; held in incommunicado detention; and given water for bathing and drinking containing vermin and worms.

CECOT was built in 2023 against the backdrop of Bukele’s ‘State of Exception’, a legal framework that allowed the president to suspend certain constitutional rights as part of a broader campaign against gang violence.

Decades of lawlessness in El Salvador forced an exodus of people north, often towards the United States. Politicians until now offered few solutions. That was until former advertising executive Bukele cracked down on the gang, and the homicide rate fell fast.

International observers, including Freedom House and Amnesty International, warn that Bukele’s policies have seen thousands of arbitrary detentions, the use of torture in detention centres, and hundreds of deaths under state custody.

A third of those detained under the State of Exception are estimated to be innocent, according to the Socorro Juridico Humanitario rights group.

The HRW report featured testimonies of Venezuelans deported to El Salvador from the United States in March and April. It includes harrowing accounts of alleged “systematic” abuse in custody over the next four months.

Gonzalo Y. said that when they landed in El Salvador they were taken off the plane and told to kneel with their heads down. When he tried to explain that he had a spinal condition affecting his mobility, he said he was struck in the neck with a baton. When they arrived at the prison, they were told to kneel again so that they could be shaved.

“One of the officers hit me on the legs with a baton, and I fell to the ground on my knees.” Another inmate said the prisoner director told them: “You have arrived in hell.”

The testimonies went on to corroborate past reports about the gruelling conditions inside the prison. Inmates are reportedly confined to cells for all but 30 minutes a day, forbidden from going outside, and made to sleep on steel beds without mattresses.

“The conditions were horrific,” said Julian G., a 29-year-old athlete: “There was mold, the floor was black and sticky, the toilets were filthy, it smelled of urine, and the water we had in the tanks—used both for bathing and for drinking—was yellow and had worms.”

Another detainee said they were never given a change of clothes. They said they were given soap once a week, but never enough to clean everything with.

Every former detainee, they said, reported serious physical and psychological abuse on a near-daily basis.

Three told the investigating rights groups that they had been subjected to sexual violence. One alleged four guards had sexually abused him and forced him to perform oral sex on one of them.

Most interviewees told HRW that medical staff at the prison provided little to no care. Thirty seven of the 40 former detainees said they fell ill during their time at CECOT.

Former detainees also spoke of the psychological trauma brought by life at the prison.

‘Flavio T.’ said that the “hardest part” of detention was that the guards “told us we would never get out of there, that our families had given us up for dead”.

Former detainees described a short-lived revolt against the guards in the form of a hunger strike. In May, inmates stopped eating for three days in the hopes of pressuring guards to stop the beatings.

On the first day, some also organised a “blood strike”, cutting themselves with a sharpened piece of aluminium found in a water tank and using the blood to write “we are migrants, not terrorists” on a bed sheet to be raised as a banner.

They said a government official promised there would be no more beatings, but they continued.

The detainees were finally released from CECOT prison in July. Two or three days before they left, they said guards brought in mattresses and dentists, cleaning them up for the world’s cameras.

Abigail Jackson, White House spokeswoman, told The Independent: “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. The mainstream media should spend their time and energy amplifying the stories of Angel Parents, whose innocent American children have tragically been murdered by vicious illegal aliens that President Trump is removing from the country.”