‘You Are All Terrorists’: Four Months in a Salvadoran PrisonThey said they were shackled, beaten, shot with rubber bullets and tear gassed until they passed out.
They said they were punished in a dark room called the island, where they were trampled, kicked and forced to kneel for hours.
One man said officers thrust his head into a tank of water to simulate drowning. Another said he was forced to perform oral sex on guards wearing hoods.
“‘You are all terrorists,’” Edwin Meléndez, 30, recalled being told by officers who added: “‘Terrorists must be treated like this.’”
In March and April, the Trump administration made the extraordinary decision to send 252 Venezuelan men to a notorious prison in El Salvador known as the Terrorism Confinement Center, saying they had infiltrated the United States in a form of “irregular warfare.”
In interviews, however, the men sent to the prison described frequent, intense physical and psychological abuse. Beyond the beatings, tear gas and trips to the isolation room, the men said they were mocked or ignored by medical personnel, forced to spend 24 hours a day under harsh lights and made to drink from wells of fetid water.
Luis Chacón, 26, from the Venezuelan state of Táchira, was one of several men who said the constant abuse at the prison led him to contemplate suicide. A father of three, he said he had been working as a driver for Uber Eats in Milwaukee before being detained and expelled to the prison. His low point there came in June, he said, on the day of his oldest child’s seventh birthday.
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