Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. For four months, hundreds of men from Venezuela said they endured physical abuse, mental abuse, and sexual abuse. inside a notorious prison.
Today, what my colleague Julie Turkowitz found actually happened inside that prison and why many now see it as perhaps the darkest chapter of all in President Trump's program of mass deportation. It's Monday, December 8th. Julie, you have spent the past many months investigating the plight of these roughly 200 Venezuelan nationals who were deported by the Trump administration from the U.S.
to a prison in El Salvador. And along the way, you have... broke story after story about who they are, what they did or didn't do. And now you bring us your latest investigation. So tell us what animated that latest probe and what you found.
So I think that so many listeners remember back in March when these 250 or so Venezuelan men were put on planes to this foreign prison in El Salvador, accused summarily without trials of being terrorists. And then... in a very, very public way, taken off the planes, bent at the waist, shackled, shaved, and put in this maximum security prison in El Salvador.
Right. It was the most indelible image in President Trump's mass deportation campaign because it felt the most unfamiliar and kind of brutal.
Absolutely. And I think that it was meant to send a message. This is what will happen to you if you come to the United States illegally. And after that, the men disappeared. They did not have access to lawyers. They did not have access to family members. There were family members in Caracas, in the United States, marching, asking for some kind of information. about their loved ones.
You had courtroom tussles in the United States with lawyers trying to get these folks back to the U.S. or at the very least try and find some kind of information about what had happened to them.
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Chapter 2: What happened to the Venezuelan men deported to El Salvador?
Right. And so it began to feel like a pretty endless black box.
Correct. Correct. And then over the summer, there is a breakthrough. And we start to hear that there are talks happening between the U.S. government and the Venezuelan government, in which the U.S. government is considering releasing these 250-some men from this Salvadoran prison. And one day in July, this is exactly what happens. These men are released and sent to Venezuela.
And finally, we have the opportunity to find out what actually happened to these men on the inside. So I immediately begin speaking with... a team of reporters who I work with who are inside Venezuela. And I ask them to race out and begin to document the reunions of these men with their family members.
And from there, all of us as a team, three Venezuelan reporters, a Venezuelan photographer, and myself, we begin these sort of methodical interviews of these men, talking to them about their experiences and what they experienced.
lived through on the inside we start collecting and cross-referencing their stories going back doing follow-up interviews to confirm timelines facts narratives in general we start photographing their injuries their physical conditions talking to them about the after effects of what they experienced gathering medical reports from doctors they've seen
And what emerges is this pretty clear and very consistent account of widespread abuse among the men inside the prison. The abuse that they describe is physical. It is psychological. At times, it is sexual abuse. And in many cases, the men describe it as torture. And by the time we finish the reporting, as a team, we have interviewed 40 of these men.
Tell us about one of these men that you spoke to whose story is very consistent with what you heard from all 40.
Sure. Luis Edison Chacon is a young man from Venezuela whose story is really representative, I think, of the stories of so many of these men. He is a father of three. He comes to the United States from Venezuela in 2023. He comes with his family. Like so many of these guys, he says that he's fleeing a really bad economic situation.
And also that he is following this flow of people that came up through the Darien Gap. Right. And he's working in Milwaukee. He is working for Uber as an Uber Eats driver.
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Chapter 3: What were the conditions inside the notorious Salvadoran prison?
One of them talked about sort of trying to tighten their seatbelts in this feeble attempt to stay on the plane. And then, of course, being forced off. of the airplane, and these guards are just bending these guys at the waist, slamming them down the stairs, against vehicles, onto buses, and bringing them into this feared prison where they are forced to their knees, where they are shaved.
And eventually thrown into these prison cells, which have these four plank metal beds that someone described as a sort of living morgue. And Luis specifically recalls being told, This is hell? You will leave here only in a body bag.
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So, Julie, what are the conditions that Luis and the rest of these Venezuelans find in this prison?
So the men are divided into cell blocks, approximately 10 men in each cell. They are given bunk beds, metal, most often without any kinds of mattress or sheet. The water is a sort of open cistern. They're supposed to use that water to drink as well as to bathe.
They're supposed to drink their bathing water. Correct.
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Chapter 4: How did the Trump administration justify the deportations?
Being kicked and dragged. And it also means restraint positions.
Many of the men spoke about a position they called the grua position, the crane position. They were forced to kneel for hours and handcuffed behind their backs and then at times lifted by the handcuffs to put pressure on their shoulders and backs and sometimes also stomped on their feet and hands while in this position.
It sounds like torture.
This abuse goes on for months. And they talk about getting to points of extreme psychological desperation. And one day, they sort of start to crack. And they decide that they're going to stop eating and ask for better treatment. And they decide that they want to write their messages. They take some metal from the beds.
And cut themselves and using their own blood, write on the sheets messages like, we are not criminals, we are migrants. And they hang these sheets everywhere. from what they called the piping in the cells.
I mean, they are that despondent that they are writing messages of protest in their own blood. That's how far gone the situation has become.
Exactly. I don't think that they believed they had any other options. And this was something. But what happens next is an even bigger rebellion. In May, there's a guard search of one of the cells. And during this search, officials beat... A man so badly that he is bleeding from head to toe, according to Luis.
And we got tired because we were living something that we couldn't believe.
And this sets off so much anger that some of the inmates dislodge metal parts from their bed and use the metal parts to open cell doors. And for a moment, some of these men have this taste of something like freedom. Then, of course, they immediately realize that they are completely outmatched by the guards.
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