Venezuelans deported by the US government to El Salvador being treated like terrorists. Photo: Philip Holsinger/Time.
As the days pass, new details are emerging about the abuses suffered by Venezuelan migrants who were transferred by the US government (under Donald Trump) to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.
The US magazine, Time, published an article this Friday, March 21, titled “What the Venezuelans Deported to El Salvador Experienced,” in which photojournalist Philip Holsinger documented the arrival of these migrants and shared his observations of the authorities’ controversial actions.
Holsinger asserted that the faces of the Venezuelans “were the faces of guys who in no way expected what they first saw—an ocean of soldiers and police, an entire army assembled to apprehend them.”
The photojournalist insisted that, for a Venezuelan torn from the US, it must have seemed dystopian to see police and soldiers stretching for miles in the darkness of the forest—a reference to their transfer to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT).
Upon entering the prison’s intake yard, Holsinger added, the prison director ordered hundreds of guards to demonstrate to the Venezuelans who was in control.
“The intake began with slaps. One young man sobbed when a guard pushed him to the floor. He said, “I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber.” I believed him. But maybe it’s only because he didn’t look like what I had expected—he wasn’t a tattooed monster,” reads the news piece.
He also explained that the Venezuelans were shackled at the ankles and wrists. “With each fall came a kick, a slap, a shove. The guards grabbed necks and pushed bodies into the sides of the buses as they forced the detainees forward. There was no blood, but the violence had rhythm, like a theater of fear. ”
Inside the intake room, he added, officials lunged at the Venezuelans with electric razors to hurriedly shave their heads. “The guy who claimed to be a barber began to whimper, folding his hands in prayer as his hair fell. He was slapped. The man asked for his mother, then buried his face in his chained hands and cried as he was slapped again,” he mentioned.
Next, they were stripped naked, and many began to cry. In Holsinger’s words, these men, within two hours, “aged ten years.” They were then crammed 80 at a time into cells with steel planks as bunks—no mattresses, sheets, pillows, phone calls, or visits.
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“It was exile to another world, a place so cold and far from home they may as well have been sent into space, nameless and forgotten. Holding my camera, it was as if I watched them become ghosts,” he concluded.
The Venezuelan migrants were sent by the US administration to the Central American country under the controversial Allien Enemies Act and with the approval of President Nayib Bukele, having been accused of belonging to the defunct Tren de Aragua criminal gang, a claim not substantiated by any evidence.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/JRE/SA
