Arturo Suárez struggles to pinpoint the worst moment of his incarceration inside a prison the warden boasted was “a cemetery of the living dead”.
Was it the day inmates became so exasperated at being beaten by guards that they threatened to hang themselves with their sheets? “The only weapon we had was our own lives,” recalled the Venezuelan former detainee.
Was it when prisoners staged a “blood strike”, cutting their arms with broken pipes and smearing their bedclothes with crimson messages of despair? “SOS!” they wrote.
Or was rock bottom for Suárez when he turned 34 while stranded in a Central American penitentiary prison officers had claimed he would only leave in a body bag?
Suárez, a reggaeton musician known by the stage name SuarezVzla, was one of 252 Venezuelans who found themselves trapped inside El Salvador’s notorious “Cecot” terrorism confinement centre after becoming embroiled in Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade.
After 125 days behind bars, Suárez and the other detainees were freed on 18 July after a prisoner swap deal between Washington and Caracas. Since flying home to Venezuela, they have started to open up about their torment, offering a rare and disturbing glimpse of the human toll of President Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crackdown in El Salvador and Trump’s campaign against immigration.
Suárez said conditions inside the maximum security prison were so dire he and other inmates considered killing themselves. “My daughter’s really little and she needs me. But we’d made up our minds. We decided to put an end to this nightmare,” he said, although the prisoners stepped back from the brink.
Another detainee, Neiyerver Rengel, 27, described his panic after guards claimed he would probably spend 90 years there. “I felt shattered, destroyed,” said the Venezuelan barber, who was deported to Cecot after being captured in Irving, Texas.
Trump officials called the Venezuelans – many of whom had no criminal background – “heinous monsters” and “terrorists” but largely failed to produce proof, with many seemingly targeted simply for being Venezuelan and having tattoos.
Norman Eisen, the executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, which is helping Rengel sue the US government for $1.3m, called the “abduction” of scores of Venezuelans a stain on his country’s reputation. “It is shocking and shameful and every patriotic American should be disgusted by it,” said Eisen, who expected other freed prisoners to take legal action.
Suárez’s journey to one of the world’s harshest prisons began in Chile’s capital, Santiago, where the singer had moved after fleeing Venezuela’s economic collapse in 2016.
One day early last year, before deciding to migrate to the US, Suárez watched a viral YouTube video about the “mega-prison” by the Mexican influencer Luisito Comunica.
Bukele officials had invited Comunica to film inside Cecot as part of propaganda efforts to promote an anti-gang offensive that has seen 2% of the country’s adult population jailed since 2022. Suárez, then a fan of El Salvador’s social media-savvy president, was gripped. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could afford a package tour to go and visit Cecot?” he recalled joking to his wife. Little did the couple know that Suárez would soon be languishing in Cecot’s cage-like cells, sleeping on a metal bunk bed.
After entering the US in September 2024, Suárez worked odd jobs in North Carolina. In February, three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, he was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents and, in mid-March, put on a deportation flight, the destination of which was not revealed. When the plane landed, its passengers – who were instructed to keep its blinds closed – had no idea where they were. The penny dropped when one detainee disobeyed the order and spotted El Salvador’s flag outside. “That’s when we understood … where we were heading – to Cecot,” he said.
Suárez described the hours that followed as a blur of verbal abuse and beatings, as disoriented prisoners were frogmarched on to buses that took them to Cecot’s cell block eight.
Suárez said the men were forced to shave their heads and told by the warden: “Welcome to hell! Welcome to the cemetery of the living dead! You’ll leave here dead!”
As he was dragged off the bus, Suárez, who is shortsighted, said he asked a guard for help because his spectacles were falling off: “He told me to shut up, punched me [in the face] and broke my glasses.”
“What am I doing in Cecot?” Suárez recalled thinking. “I’m not a terrorist. I’ve never killed anyone. I make music.”
Rengel had almost identical memories of his arrival: “The police officers started saying we were going to die in El Salvador – that it was likely we’d spend 90 years there.”
Noah Bullock, the head of the El Salvador-focused human rights group Cristosal, said activists had heard very similar accounts from prisoners in other Salvadoran jails, suggesting such terror tactics were not merely the behaviour of “bad apple prison guards”. “There’s clearly a culture coming from the leadership of the prison system to inculcate the guards into operating this way, [into] using dehumanising and physical abuse in a systematic way.”
Suárez said the Venezuelans spent the next 16 weeks being woken at 4am, moved between cells holding between 10 and 19 people, and enduring a relentless campaign of physical and psychological abuse. “There’s no life in there,” he said. “The only good thing they did for us was give us a Bible. We sought solace in God and that’s why nobody took their own life.”
The musician tried to lift spirits by composing upbeat songs, such as Cell 31, which describes a message from God. “Be patient, my son. Your blessing will soon arrive,” its lyrics say.
The song became a prison anthem and Suárez said inmates sang it, one day in March, when the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, visited Cecot to pose by its packed cells. “We aren’t terrorists! We aren’t criminals! Help!” the Venezuelans bellowed. But their pleas were ignored and the mood grew increasingly desperate, as the inmates were deprived of contact with relatives, lawyers and even the sun. “There came a point where we had no motivation, no strength left,” Rengel said.
Only in mid-June was there a glimmer of hope when prisoners were given shampoo, razors and soap and measured for clothes. “They obviously wanted to hide what had happened from the world,” said Suárez, who sensed release might be close. One month later the men were free.
Suárez said he was determined to speak out now he was safely back in his home town of Caracas. “The truth must be … heard all over the world. Otherwise what they did to us will be ignored,” said the musician, who admitted he had once been an admirer of Bukele’s populist campaigns against political corruption and gangs. “Now I realise it’s just a complete farce because how can you negotiate with human lives? How can you use human beings as bargaining chips?” Suárez said.
A spokesperson for El Salvador’s government did not respond to questions about the prisoners’ allegations. Last week, the homeland security department’s assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, dismissed prisoners’ claims of abuses as “false sob stories”.
Suárez hoped never to set foot in El Salvador or the US again but said he forgave his captors. “And I hope they can forgive themselves,” he added. “And realise that while they might escape the justice of man they will never be able to escape divine justice.”
