Trump Sent People To A Hellish Torture Prison. But He Got Our Triple Ax Murderer Back!
I know, we're so picky. He's a *US Citizen* triple ax murderer, and that's what matters.
Last Friday, Donald Trump’s El Salvador torture prison problem sort of went away when all of the more than 250 Venezuelan men whom Trump sent to the notorious CECOT prison were released from the prison that America had no way to get any of them out of, and then flown to Venezuela. Now that they’ve been released, several are sharing with journalists their accounts of torture and terrible conditions at the prison.
In exchange, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro released 10 American citizens he had been holding in hopes of having some leverage for some kind of deal with the US. Or at least nine of the Americans had been imprisoned as leverage; Maduro also sent along Dahud Hanid Ortiz, a man with dual American and Venezuelan citizenship, who was serving a 30-year sentence for the brutal 2016 ax murders of three people in Madrid, Spain.
See? Trump was right! Foreign countries are sending their criminals here! It’s just that he’s the one bringing them in, on ICE’s chartered Gulfstream jet.
Also, let’s not forget how Trump lied at every opportunity that Joe Biden was allowing all the worst murderers and criminals into the US, when the reality is that Trump actually released violent crimers from custody, both during his first presidency and now. Trump abandoned previous administrations’ focus on arresting and deporting violent criminal aliens, and instead wants to scoop up and deport everyone without papers. The easiest way to do that is by going after Abuela and the folks who attend their court appearances. That actually makes America far less safe.
Your Tax Dollars At Work, Paying For Torture
As of the weekend, the men the administration whisked off to CECOT with no due process, accusing them without evidence of being Tren de Aragua gang members, are now no longer in prison. We suppose now there can’t be any contempt of court charges against administration officials for ignoring every last court order in the case, since no matter how illegal the flights to El Salvador were, the men are now free, just suffering PTSD.
Among them are the two men who had been granted refugee status in the US before ICE decided their tattoos meant they had to be gang members, which they were not. Another of those freed was Andry Hernández Romero, the gay makeup artist ICE accused of being a TdA member because he had an autism awareness tattoo honoring his younger brother. As the AP reports,
Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., posted on social media Friday night: “We have been in touch with Andry Hernández Romero’s legal team and they have confirmed he is out of CECOT and back in Venezuela. We are grateful he is alive and are engaged with both the State Department and his team.”
So once again, we see that Trump’s Justice Department was lying all along when it told federal courts that the people it sent to CECOT (and paid El Salvador $6 million to imprison) were no longer under any US jurisdiction, and would be in the torture prison for the rest of their lives — a fate they deserved for their many crimes, none of which the administration ever identified.
Now that they’ve been released, in a deal partly negotiated by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, several of the former prisoners have told reporters about the torture and abusive treatment they faced while in CECOT. Their accounts match what Kilmar Abrego Garcia said about the prison after he was brought back to the US to face fake human trafficking charges.
In a Washington Post story (gift link), three of the former prisoners told reporters about what one of the men described as a “horror movie” at the prison. One, Julio González Jr., said he had agreed to be deported to Venezuela, but instead was sent to CECOT without being told that’s where he was being flown. On arrival, they saw blood on the floors, presumably from other men who’d gotten off the plane before them. They were ordered at gunpoint to kneel with their foreheads pressed to the floor.
A guard wearing a hood told the men, “Welcome to El Salvador, you sons of bitches,” although the Post decorously hides the bad word with dashes because it might offend readers — some of whom explained in the comments that the men deserved to be tortured because of their heinous crimes (again, most were never charged with anything).
The three men described regular beatings with wooden bats, being cut off from communicating with the outside world, and collective punishment for minor rule infractions.
Joen Suárez, 23, was taken several times to a dark room known as La Isla — or “the island” — and beaten, kicked and insulted. Angel Blanco Marin, 22, said he was hit so hard he lost half of a molar. He asked for painkillers and medical attention but was given none for more than a month.
All three of the men, now with their families in Venezuela, denied any gang connections, and neither US nor Salvadoran officials have offered any evidence to show they’re gang members or “terrorists.”
At CECOT, the detainees said, Venezuelans were held in cells of nine to 15 people with metal benches for beds — thin mattresses were brought in for photographs and then taken away — and water buckets for drinking and bathing. “It looked like a cage,” González said.
On the first day, Blanco vomited and had no way to clean his shirt for several days, he said. Eventually the detainees said they were given soap and toothpaste, but not regularly.
The prison has no outside exercise yards, and only a few cells even got sunlight through windows. When the prisoners attempted a hunger strike, the guards abused them more, and some prisoners had rubber bullets and plastic riot-control rounds shot at them. González said that if they asked for a lawyer, guards would tell them, “That word doesn’t exist here.”
Remember, plenty of MAGA folks think that would be a great idea here, too, because all undocumented migrants are murderers who never granted any due process to their victims. That’s also the position of the Trump administration any time they aren’t actually speaking to a judge.
In a statement, Homeland Security’s Goebbels clone Tricia McLaughlin refused to comment on the accusations of torture or mistreatment. Instead, she clicked the heels of her jackboots together, heiled Trump, and repeated the bullshit lie that the US had
deported “nearly 300 Tren de Aragua and MS-13 terrorists” to CECOT, “where they no longer pose a threat to the American people.”
“Once again the media is falling all over themselves to defend criminal illegal gang members. […] We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”
Did anyone get back to her to ask her to explain what “victims” she was talking about, considering that the administration has yet to link the men with any specific alleged crimes? WaPo didn’t say. Seems like a missed opportunity for at least a follow-up question.
God Bless Trump For Getting Our Ax (Or Machete And Iron Bar) Murderer Back
In exchange for the men who’d been sent without due process to CECOT, then miraculously released in defiance of how that was totally impossible, Venezuela released 10 Americans it had been holding, most of them on made-up charges because the Venezuelan government is just as honest as Trump. They included “37-year-old Lucas Hunter, whose family says he was kidnapped in January by Venezuelan border guards from inside Colombia, where he was vacationing.” The guy was kite surfing. Also brought back to the US was Wilbert Castaneda, who was arrested in Caracas last year and initially accused of trying to foment a coup against Maduro, although the Venezuelan government later dropped that claim.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio took a moment away from his side gig of bringing Donald Trump Diet Cokes and hailed Trump for returning the Americans, in a statement that without the least bit of irony condemned the Venezuelan government for having “arrested and jailed U.S. nationals under highly questionable circumstances and without proper due process.” He crowed that “Every wrongfully detained American in Venezuela is now free and back in our homeland.”
Not mentioned by Rubio was the teensy detail that one of those brought back to the US was convicted triple ax murderer Dahud Hanid Ortiz. A dual citizen of America and Venezuela and a US Army veteran, Hanid Ortiz was sentenced last year to 30 years in prison in Venezuela for attacking and killing three people with an ax in a Madrid attorney’s office in 2016. He committed the murders in revenge for the attorney’s having had an affair with Hanid Ortiz’s wife. The lawyer, Víctor Salas, wasn’t in the office at the time, but Hanid Ortiz, posing as a client, “beat and axed a lawyer's assistant (Maritza Osorio), an employee (Elisa Consuegra), and one of the clients (Jhon Pepe Castillo) to death in the office” (Google translation). Then he set the office on fire and fled, eventually returning to Germany, where he lived at the time. Hanid Ortizwas arrested in Venezuela in 2018, but jurisdictional squabbles delayed his prosecution; after four attempts to try him, he was finally convicted by a Venezuelan court in 2024.
We should note that while Spanish-language media reports say Hanid Ortiz committed the attacks with an ax (“hacha”), the New York Times, working from court records from Spain and Venezuela, reports that he killed one woman with a “large knife or machete” and that the other two victims were “likely killed with an iron bar.” Shame on Wonkette for its sensationalist headline.
The English edition of the Madrid paper El País reports that when Venezuelan Justice Minister Diosdado Cabello met with the former prisoners from CECOT, he told them, “We handed over some murderers for you,” although as of blogtime, Hanid Ortiz appears to be the only murderer sent to the US. The Times says it’s “not clear if he is free or in U.S. custody,” leaving Salas, the lawyer Hanid Ortiz targeted a decade ago, in fear that the killer will come after him, telling The Times, “I am completely defenseless right now. […] I believe Dahud has taken advantage of Venezuelan corruption and American negligence.”
Giselle Caso, who described herself as Ms. Consuegra’s best friend, said family and friends were appalled to see Mr. Hanid Ortiz in photos released by the State Department on Friday, smiling in civilian clothes, appearing to be prepared for a life of freedom.
“We want to know: Under what terms was this man released?” she said. “Is the United States going to make him serve out his prison term?”
“This is not a political prisoner,” she added.
El País adds that Hanid Ortiz’s ex-wife told German media that German law enforcement is working to make sure that he won’t be able to return to Germany if he’s let loose in the US. She also said,
“There is a well-founded suspicion that the man’s lawyer in Venezuela intentionally provided false information by not presenting him as a convicted murderer, but as a political prisoner or even a U.S. spy, with the aim of including him in the prisoner exchange.”
As of yet, the US government hasn’t acknowledged that one of the brave Americans brought home by Great Leader is a triple murderer, insisting that “privacy” prevented the release of any information about the released prisoners. For all we know, Trump may be planning to honor Hanid Ortiz for having a smart lawyer who helped him beat the system.
[AP / WaPo (gift link) / El País / NYT / ABC Madrid]
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Good grief, you dopes, try some fucking discernment. The fact that Ortiz got thrown into the mix, and the fact that Trump is treating this as a propaganda win, *doesn't* mean the other Americans held by Venezuela were also bad people or MAGAs.
By all accounts they were plain old tourists or business people (yes, evil enough maybe) scooped up for the purpose of having hostages to hold for leverage with America. And per at least one of the several sources I saw, the guy making the "OK" sign in the picture meant it in the old-fashioned OK sense, not the 4-chan white supremacy sense.
OT: DD and Spouse made it in time to say goodbye to a Very Good Dog. DD texted me, and said, “She raised her head, and looked at something behind me, and grinned. I think she was ready for the next adventure.”
I told her that was her dog’s gift to her, and it would stay with her. I’m so glad she held on so that they could say goodbye.