When Jerce Reyes Barrios first got to el Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT), he tried to keep track of how much time had passed. He reminded himself that nothing was forever. Even trapped without charge inside a Salvadoran prison infamous for brutal conditions and indefinite detention, he believed he would, someday, somehow, go home.
But as days turned into weeks, and then months, the time passed more slowly. In between routine beatings from guards, he read the Bible, the only book permitted to detainees. He asked God to give him as much patience as Job, whose faith is tested through a series of horrible disasters. Eventually, Reyes Barrios stopped counting the days.
“The only thing I can say is human rights don’t exist there,” Reyes Barrios told HuffPost on Tuesday. There were “beatings all the time,” he said. “If you didn’t eat, they would hit you. If you took a shower when it wasn’t time, they would beat you. If you spoke roughly to them, they would beat you.”
Reyes Barrios is one of 252 Venezuelans who migrated to the U.S., wound up in immigration detention, and were flown by the Trump administration in March to CECOT for indefinite detention without charge, under a multimillion-dollar deal between the U.S. and Salvadoran governments. Most of the men had no criminal history, but U.S. officials claimed, with scant evidence, that they were linked to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua.