Venezuela’s attorney general, Tarek Saab, said on Monday that his office would investigate El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, and two other officials for the alleged abuse of Venezuelans detained in the country.
More than 250 Venezuelans held in El Salvador’s notorious Cecot prison returned to Venezuela on Friday under the terms of a prisoner exchange agreed with the US.
Detainees suffered human rights abuses ranging from sexual abuse to beatings, were denied medical care or treated without anaesthesia and given food and water that made them ill, Saab said at a press conference.
As well as Bukele, Venezuela would investigate El Salvador’s justice minister, Gustavo Villatoro, and its head of prisons, Osiris Luna Meza, Saab said, after showing videos of former detainees recounting torture and showing injuries – including a missing molar, bruising and scars – they said were the result of the abuse.
Bukele’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the assertions made in the videos, but two of those shown speaking were identifiable as former Cecot detainees.
The Venezuelans were sent to El Salvador from the US in March after Donald Trump invoked the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang without normal immigration procedures.
The deportations drew fierce criticism from human rights groups and led to a legal battle with the Trump administration. Family members and lawyers of many of the men deny they had gang ties.
The former detainees arrived near Caracas on Friday, where some were reunited with their families, but they have not yet returned to their own homes.
Yajaira Fuenmayor, the mother of the returned detainee Alirio Guillermo Belloso, said on Sunday afternoon from her home in Maracaibo that she was preparing him arepas, traditional corn cakes, as a welcome.
“I can’t stop thinking of the hunger my son went through. I have a salad ready, some grilled arepas because he loves them, and there is fish in the refrigerator to fry,” she said.
The government said the men would be medically evaluated and interviewed before being released. It has always said the El Salvador detentions were illegal and that only seven of the men had serious criminal records.
The Venezuelan opposition has regularly criticised the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his government for holding activists and others in similar conditions in Venezuela.
The US said last week that 80 Venezuelans would be released from Venezuelan jails as part of the deal, under which 10 US citizens held in Venezuela were also to be freed.
Forty-eight Venezuelan political prisoners have so far been released, the legal rights advocacy group Foro Penal said earlier on Monday on X.
“We regret the absence of an official list that allows us to verify with more precision,” the group said, adding that some lists in circulation had included people not classed as political detainees, people who had already been released and even prisoners who had died. “At Foro Penal we remain in coordination with families working to verify other cases.”
The communications ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment about who was to be released and whether any of them would be subject to house arrest or other alternatives to detention.
The main opposition coalition in Venezuela cheered the release of the prisoners, but said on Sunday that nearly 1,000 people were still in jail in Venezuela for political reasons and that 12 others had been arrested in recent days in what it called a “revolving door” for political prisoners.