“Tonight, you’ll hear from some of those men,” Alfonsi said in her intro. “They describe torture, sexual and physical abuse inside CECOT, one of El Salvador’s harshest prisons, where they say they endured four months of hell.”
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“The torture was never-ending. Interminable,” said Luis Munoz Pinto, one of the former detainees interviewed by Alfonsi. “There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating or vomiting on themselves.”
Alfonsi also interviewed a representative of Human Rights Watch, which published an 81-page report in November about abuses at the prison.
In a memo to colleagues on Sunday saying that Weiss had “spiked” the story, Alfonsi asserted that it was done for “political,” not editorial reasons.
Philippe Bolopion, executive director at Human Rights Watch, told CNN that Alfonsi’s allegation was troubling, “especially in light of pressures on press freedom in the US.”
“We look forward to the segment airing,” Bolopion said. “The evidence is clear regardless of what airs on 60 Minutes: the Trump administration disappeared these Venezuelan men to a mega trip scan prison in El Salvador where they were systematically tortured.”