US EditionVenezuela’s Returning Migrants Allege Abuses in El Salvador’s ‘Hell’ Prison Where US Sent Them
EL SALVADOR, JUL 25 – The migrants were held without evidence of gang ties and freed after a prisoner swap; the U.S. paid $6 million to El Salvador for their detention, human rights groups reported widespread abuses.
- On July 23, 2025, Venezuelan migrant Carlos Uzcátegui was welcomed home in Lobatera after being deported from El Salvador by the U.S. government.
- The U.S. transferred 252 men to El Salvador in March 2024 under a crackdown, accusing them of gang ties without providing evidence.
- Uzcátegui and others spent four months in an El Salvador prison described as 'hell' and alleged to have endured physical and psychological abuse.
- Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said only seven men had pending legal cases, adding all deportees would have medical and background checks before returning home.
- Attorney General Tarek William Saab initiated an investigation against El Salvador's president based on deportees' allegations, while families shared emotional reunions.
113 Articles
113 Articles
Several of the Venezuelans who returned from the Center for the Confining of Terrorism (Cecot) to Venezuela were left with their wrists and ankles marked. Being stuck with their hands behind or walking down handcuffed and feet was part of the daily routine in the four months held in the Salvadoran prison, Nayib Bukele’s megacarcel. There they were sent by Donald Trump’s government resorting to an old law against foreign enemies: an infernal stop…
In mid-March, Washington had expelled more than 250 Venezuelans to El Salvador, where they sat in a notorious prison and were released in exchange for Americans detained in Venezuela.
By CNN en Español A Venezuelan migrant who was imprisoned at Cecot, El Salvador's maximum-security prison, said in an interview with CNN that he was "brutally beaten" there three days before being deported to Venezuela and that he has a hand injury. Luis Alfredo Núñez Falcón is one of more than 200 Venezuelan citizens sent in March by the Trump administration as part of its deportation policy to the prison built by the government of his colleagu…
(Mexico City=Yonhap News) Correspondent Lee Jae-rim = A Venezuelan national who was deported from the U.S. to El Salvador on grounds of being connected to a drug trafficking cartel without any special evidence...
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