Julie Turkewitz

This is a very important and fair question.

Of course, we interviewed 40 of these men.

Their testimonies were consistent with each other's.

But we weren't inside the prison.

We couldn't speak to the guards.

We couldn't speak to officials in El Salvador.

And so we wanted somebody else to help us understand how much we should believe these testimonies.

And so we reached out to a nonprofit group of forensic experts and we provided them with a summary of the testimony as well as photographs of the injuries, in some cases, doctors' reports.

Correct.

And what they said was that the testimony and the other evidence that we provided were consistent and credible and they said that in their assessment, much of the abuse that was described met the United Nations definition of torture.

It's a good question.

And I think that many of us following the story thought that these men might spend the rest of their lives in this prison.

But the Venezuelan government, which wanted the release of these men...

had a bargaining chip.

And that bargaining chip is that the government of Nicolas Maduro, the country's autocrat, had been detaining U.S.

citizens and U.S.

residents inside Venezuela over the last year.

And so by July had amassed a sort of group of 10 U.S.

prisoners and the government of Venezuela negotiated with the government of the United States the release of these 10 U.S.

citizens and residents in exchange for the freedom of these now 252 men who were in the Salvadoran prison.