Venezuelan musician Arturo Suárez-Trejo, released from Bukele’s mega-prison: ‘They told us the world had forgotten about us’

On Friday, July 18, Pastor Vladimir López — a short, forty-something Salvadoran inmate about whom not much else is known, other than that he is serving an 85-year sentence — stood before the 252 Venezuelans detained at the Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot) in El Salvador and told them: “I couldn’t be here on the day of your arrival, but I can joyfully be here on the day of your departure.” They were returning home. Arturo Suárez-Trejo burst into tears, and so did the pastor. He was the one who had read the Bible to them countless times, blessed them on countless occasions, helped them ease the tedium of a cell, and made them believe that there was freedom within every man. He saved Arturo from several beatings he would otherwise have been subjected to for the crime of singing in one of the most feared prisons in the world.

Singing was prohibited in the Cecot, which became the most crushing punishment for Arturo, a 33-year-old musician with the stage name SuarezVzla, who was recording his song TXTEO the day that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities raided a house in Raleigh, North Carolina, and took a group of 10 Venezuelans, including Arturo.

On more than one occasion, Cecot guards attacked Arturo for daring to sing some lyrics. They only allowed him to do so when Pastor López arrived at Module 8 in the morning or afternoon and sought him out to join him in worship. One in particular goes like this: “Let nothing kill your faith, let nothing make you doubt, because it won’t be long before you return home.”

Arturo wrote it with a piece of soap on the metal surface of his bunk, where he slept for 125 days without a mattress, sheets, or pillows, his back pressed against the metal and a pair of shoes tucked under his neck. In cell 31, there were eight of them, who came to know each other so well, so intimately, that Arturo says they not only became family, but lost their sense of modesty there.

Sometimes Arturo did a little exercise or talked with his cellmates. Other times he sang. He had told himself that, despite the beatings, he wouldn’t stop. He was almost never able to sleep during the day. “It bothered the guards to see us sleeping,” he says by phone, now back at his home in Caracas. “I spent my time singing, and that way I brightened my life a little and made it brighter for everyone else.” They rarely left their seven-meter-long by four-meter-wide cell, not even to get some sun, except on two occasions when representatives of the Red Cross visited them and saw their beaten and bruised bodies.

While outside the Cecot, people wondered what had become of the hundreds of Venezuelans sent to the Salvadoran prison following the $6 million contract signed between Presidents Nayib Bukele and Donald Trump, the days passed slowly for them, with no television or clock to tell them the time. They were aware if it was day or night by the sunlight shining into the prison, but they knew little or nothing about the outside world. They didn’t even suspect that their families had become their main advocates, constantly demanding their return or confirmation of whether they were alive or dead.

“The officials told us that the world had forgotten about us,” Arturo says.

The guards would wake up the hundreds of detainees in Module 8 at 4 a.m., make them bathe, give them breakfast (rice, beans, and tortillas), then lunch (pasta and tortillas), and then dinner (rice, beans, and tortillas). With those tortillas, Arturo learned to make crafts. In the Cecot, he managed to create a heart that he carved out of tortillas and toothpaste. On it are the names of Nathali and Nahiara, his wife and daughter, whom he misses dearly and who remain in Chile, the country Arturo left in 2018, always looking to make music, always singing.

The arrest

That’s how they caught him on that night that now seems so long ago. ICE and FBI agents raided the location where he was filming a music video on February 8, without a warrant. Arturo didn’t know exactly what was happening. He had arrived in the United States on September 2, 2024, through the San Ysidro border crossing in California, via the CBP One app, which was used by nearly a million people to enter the country and which Trump deactivated on the first day of his second term.

“I’m aware that it wasn’t legal status, but it was legal entry into the country,” says Arturo, who made a living painting houses or mowing lawns while living in the United States. That night in Raleigh, he knew something strange was coming, but had no notion that he would end up in a maximum-security prison in El Salvador.

First, they took him to a detention center in Georgia, then to a detention center in El Valle, Texas, where on March 15, Arturo boarded a plane that, as far as they knew, was headed to Venezuela. He had time to call his wife in Chile to tell her they were finally going to deport him. By then, it was better to be in his own country than in the hands of ICE. Arturo even requested voluntary departure, but they ignored him. He was accused, like the others, of belonging to the Tren de Aragua criminal gang. The proof of this was his tattoos.

“I never saw a judge or an immigration lawyer. I only saw an ICE officer, who I asked so many questions I overwhelmed him. At one point, he slammed his fist on the table and said, ‘Look, I’m going to tell you straight. Right now, what they want is results,’” he says.

The three planes carrying the 252 Venezuelan migrants — who departed despite a judge’s order to reverse the deportation carried out by the Republican administration under the 1798 Enemy Aliens Act, after deeming them “enemies of the country” — first arrived at a military base, the location of which, according to Arturo, they still don’t know because they weren’t allowed to raise the blinds on the aircraft windows.

Then, about 20 minutes later, they landed at their final destination: “The worst they could have given us: El Salvador,” he says. “When we looked out the windows, we saw a sea of soldiers and police, and we saw the flag. I imagined they were taking us to the Cecot.” Arturo was no stranger to the Central American country. He even says he admired Bukele “for what he was doing in terms of security.”

“They even beat me for being born”

At first, they refused to leave, but Arturo and the others were forced off the plane in handcuffs and beaten. The young musician had time to see some women inside the plane crying and urging them to get off for their own good. Then they boarded a bus. “An officer said something to me that disconcerted me. He said, ‘You’re going to be here for 90 years.’ That’s when I lost hope. All I did was curl up and pray to God that a man would come into my daughter’s and wife’s lives who would love them as much as I did.”

They never stopped beating them, “with their bare fists,” Arturo says. One officer hit him so hard in the center of his face that it broke his glasses, and Arturo, who is nearsighted, suffered blurred vision during those months in prison, during which the headaches caused by his poor eyesight turned into unbearable migraines.

Upon their arrival at Cecot, their hair was shaved, they were stripped naked in front of everyone, and they were given their prison uniforms. They were the newest inmates of the 116-hectare mega-prison, with 256 cells and a capacity to house some 40,000 prisoners. They were immediately installed in Module 8, “which became our home for four months,” says Arturo.

During that time, there were moments of great exhaustion, as when they went on a three-day hunger strike, or a “blood strike.” They cut themselves with the brass bed rails and began leaving handprints on the walls, or writing SOS cries for help, with phrases like, “We are Venezuelans, not terrorists.” The last riot was the worst. Shouting and struggling, they broke the locks on nine cells, and the Salvadoran guards beat them. “The regime got five times worse then; they beat us for speaking, for bathing. They even beat me for being born,” Arturo says.

Fifteen days before their release from prison, they were measured for clothing and shoe sizes. “We deduced it was because our release was coming up.” On July 17, they were given Gillette razors. The next day, they were woken up early and made to shower. Then they were led to a bus, and a Venezuelan officer said to them, “What happened, kids?” It was confirmation that they were returning to Venezuela. “That’s when we started shouting with joy; we knew we were almost out of that hellhole.”

The return home

At around 7:00 p.m. on July 18, they landed at Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía after being exchanged for 10 U.S. citizens detained in the South American country. The three-way negotiation involved other concessions: Washington returned seven children who had been separated from their parents to Venezuela, and Caracas released 80 political prisoners. Nicolás Maduro, who has claimed credit for the release of the young people, welcomed them with great fanfare. He said it was “the perfect day for Venezuela.”

After nearly 48 hours of being detained by the Venezuelan authorities for all kinds of physical and psychological examinations, Arturo’s three brothers were waiting for him: “I hadn’t seen them in a while,” he says. “When I hugged them, I felt at home, I felt safe.”

In his Caracas home, behind a colorful sign that reads “Welcome Arturo,” the musician sings the song Amor y control by legendary Panamanian singer-songwriter Rubén Blades. “It’s the song I was most frequently asked to sing at Cecot,” he says. Upon his arrival, Arturo learned that Blades himself, also a lawyer, had spoken publicly about his case, denouncing “the arbitrary way in which the law is sometimes applied.”

Arturo is glad to hear this, and glad to know that the world hadn’t truly forgotten them, as that guard told him. Now he’s resting, catching up, even learning to sleep in a bed with a mattress again. “It’s been hard for me to sleep in the bed; I’m used to sleeping on metal.”

He says he can’t look at the photos or videos from the Cecot, not even his own, which his relatives used to identify him before confirming his name on the list leaked by CBS News, which the U.S. government never officially published. He says he cries, that it “breaks his heart” to see himself, to see them. He doesn’t plan to return to the United States, ever. “My rights were violated there,” he says. “I tell President Donald Trump to change his hate speech, to see that migrants are more than a plague; migrants often leave our country driven by necessity and to fulfill our dreams. I forgive him, let him ask God for forgiveness.”

For now, his family gave him the money to get new glasses, and now he has them, he can see the world more clearly, with different eyes.

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