A segment on CBS’s 60 Minutes about the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelans was made available to viewers in Canada on Monday after being pulled in the U.S. a day before.
The roughly 13-minute feature focuses on El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) prison, where 252 Venezuelan men were deported in April, and shines a light on the conditions and treatment to which they were allegedly subjected while detained for four months.
“When you get there, you already know you’re in hell,” former prisoner Louise Munoz Pinto told 60 Minutes reporter Sharyn Alfonsi in the interview, viewed by National Post after it was shared widely online following its inadvertent and brief availability on Global TV’s app and website.
“You don’t need anyone else to tell you.”
CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, citing the need for additional reporting, had postponed its airing on Saturday, the day before it was scheduled to be broadcast, according to
“My job is to make sure that all stories we publish are the best they can be,” she said in a statement. “Holding stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason — that they lack sufficient context, say, or that they are missing critical voices — happens every day in every newsroom.”
In a leaked internal memo obtained by
, Weiss detailed a need for voices from Donald Trump’s administration to make the story more balanced.
“If we run the piece as is, we’d be doing our viewers a disservice,” she wrote.
But Alfonsi, in a letter sent to colleagues on Sunday and obtained by the
, said the “story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices.”
She defended the reporting team’s efforts to get GOP officials on the record and said their silence was “a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.”
Alfonsi also alleged Weiss’s decision is “not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
Trump and 60 Minutes have a well-documented history, highlighted most recently by a $16-million settlement to his lawsuit against CBS. The president alleged the show deceptively edited the responses of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris in a way that harmed his election prospects in the 2024 election.
After the settlement, the Federal Communications Commission approved the acquisition of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, by Skydance Media, a company owned by the family of Larry and David Ellison, avowed Trump supporters. The Ellisons then acquired Weiss’s media startup, the Free Press, and made her the head of CBS News.
Trump maintains he doesn’t have a cozy relationship with the network.
“For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before,” he wrote on
last week. “If they are friends, I‘d hate to see my enemies!”
National Post has contacted CBS News and Global parent company Corus Entertainment for comment on the segment and its publication in Canada.
‘Welcome to hell’
The piece itself explores life inside the maximum security prison in Tecoluca through the eyes of two deportees who say they were labelled as terrorists and gang members allegedly without due process.
Louise Munoz Pinto, a Venezuelan college student, told Alfonsi he had no criminal record and was seeking asylum in the U.S. when he was detained for six months before being deported along with the others. He thought they were being sent back to Venezuela but landed in El Salvador.
“When we got there, the CECOT director was talking to us. The first thing he told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again.”
“He said, ‘Welcome to hell. I’ll make sure you never leave.’”
Prisoners’ heads were shaved, their hands and feet allegedly bound, they were forced to their knees and some were beaten with fists and batons.
“There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves,” recounted Pinto, who said four guards allegedly beat him until he bled and broke one of his teeth by slamming his face against the wall.
Venezuelan national William Lazada Sanchez told Alfonsi they were made to stay kneeling for 24 hours, with failure resulting in a prisoner being placed in an isolation cell referred to as “the island.”
“The island is a little room where there’s no light, no ventilation, nothing. It’s a cell for punishment where you can’t see your hand in front of your face,” Sanchez said.
The Trump administration has defended its deportations, alleging the men were all dangerous criminals.
But Alfonsi cited a report from Human Rights Watch on CECOT that found that nearly half had no criminal history and only eight had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offence. ICE records reviewed by 60 Minutes confirmed that just three per cent had been sentenced.
“They sent them to a place where they were likely to be tortured to send migrants across Latin America the message that they should not come to the United States,” deputy director Juan Papier told Alfonsi.
El Salvador’s government also didn’t respond to her interview requests.
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