On Friday, July 18, Pastor Vladimir López – a Salvadoran inmate, forty, short, of which much more is known, but it does drag an 85 -year sentence – he stopped in front of the 252 Venezuelans arrested in the center of the confinement of terrorism (Cecot) of El Salvador and said: “I could not be the day of his arrival, but I can be the day of his departure.” They returned home. Arturo Suárez-Terjo He broke down and the pastor too. It was the one who all this time read the Bible countless times, blessed them countless occasions, helped them reduce the tedium of a cell and made them believe that there was freedom inside each man. Arturo was freed from a few beating that he would have to take for the crime of singing in one of the most feared prisons in the world.
In the Cecot it was forbidden to sing, which became the most overwhelming punishment for Arturo, a 33 -year -old musician, with the artistic name of Suarezvzla, who was recording his theme TXTEO The day when the authorities of the Customs Immigration and Control Service (ICE) broke into a Raleigh house, North Carolina, and loaded with a group of 10 Venezuelans, including Arturo.
On more than one occasion, CECOT officers went to Arturo for daring to sing letters. They only allowed it when Pastor López arrived to module 8 In the mornings or afternoons, and he was looking for him to accompany him with praise. There is one in particular that says: “That nothing kills your faith, that nothing makes you doubt, because there is already very little for you to return to your home.”
Arturo wrote it with a soap on the metal surface of his bunk, where he slept for 125 days without sheets, pillows or mattress, with his back attached to the brass and shoes under the neck. In cell 31 there were eight, that they came to know each other so much, so intimately, that Arturo says that they not only became family, but there they lost their modesty.
Sometimes Arturo did some exercises, or started talking to cell partners. Other times I sang. He had told himself that, despite the blows, he was not going to stop doing it. I could almost never sleep during the day. “The guards were bothered to see us sleeping,” he says on his back in his home in Caracas. “I spent singing, and so my life was glad and I was glad the rest.” As soon as they left the cell of seven meters long by four wide, not even to sunbathe, except on two occasions when representatives of the Red Cross visited, which could see their bodies beaten, bruised and riddled.
While out of the CECOT, people wondered what it was from the hundreds of Venezuelans sent to the Salvadoran prison after the contract of 6 million dollars signed between the presidents Nayib Bukele and Donald Trump, the days passed slow for them, who had no television, or clock that marked their time. They learned if it was day or if it was night in the sun that entered jail, but they knew little or almost anything from the outside world, they did not even suspect that their relatives became their main rescuers, demanding at all times the return, or the confirmation of whether they were alive or dead.
“But the officers told us that the world had forgotten us,” says Arturo.
The guards woke up to the hundreds of detainees from module 8 at four in the morning, made them bathe, gave them breakfast (rice, beans and tortillas), then lunch (pasta and tortilla) and then dinner (rice, beans and tortillas). With those Arturo tortillas he learned to make crafts. From the Cecot he managed to get a heart that carved with tortillas and toothpaste, and in which the names of Nathali and Nahiara, his wife and daughter, whom he misses so much and those who remain in Chile, the country where Arturo left in 2018. Always looking to make music, always singing.
The arrest
This was grabbed that night that now seems so far away. ICE and FBI officers broke out on February 8 without a court order where a video clip filmed. Arturo didn’t know exactly what was happening. He had arrived in the United States on September 2, 2024 through the San Ysidro border port, in California, through the CBP One application, with which almost one million people entered the country and that Trump deactivated on his first day as president.
“I am aware that it was not a legal status, but a legal entrance to the country,” says Arturo, who made a living painting houses or cutting grass while living in the United States. That night in Raleigh, he knew that something strange was to come, but never ended up in a maximum security prison in El Salvador.
First they took him to a place where they had it incommunicado for five days. Then to a Georgia detention center and then to the Valley, Texas, where on March 15 Arturo boarded a plane that, as far as they knew, went to Venezuela. He gave time to call his wife to Chile to tell him that they were finally going to deport him. At that point, it was already better to be in your country than in the hands of ICE. Arturo even requested the voluntary exit, but they ignored him. He was being accused, like the rest, of belonging to the criminal band Train de Aragua. The proof of this were his tattoos.
“I never saw a judge, or a migration lawyer, I only saw an ICE officer who asked him many questions until I overwhelm him, and at one point he hit the table and said: ‘Look, I’m going to talk to you without lies, right now what they want is results,” he says.
The three planes where they distributed at 252 Venezuelan migrants “That they left above the order of a judge to reverse the deportation that the Republican Administration carried out appealing to the Law of Enemies of 1798, after considering them” enemies of the country ” – First they reached a military base that, according to Arturo, still do not know where they were, because they did not let them raise the windows of the aircraft.
Then, in about 20 minutes, they landed at their final destination: “The worst destination they could give us: El Salvador,” he says. “When we raised the windows we saw a sea of military, police, and we saw the flag. I imagined that they took us for the Cecot.” Arturo did not ignore the Central American country. He even says he admired Bukele “for what he was doing at security level.”
“Even I was hitting me”
Initially they refused to go down, but Arturo and the rest forced them to descend from the spouses and the blows. The young musician had time to see how some women inside the aircraft cried and recommended that they go down for their good. Then they got on a bus. “An officer told me a few words that baffled me. He told me: ‘Here you are going to stay 90 years.’ I lost hope, what I did was snuggle and ask God to the life of my daughter and my wife came a man who loved them as much as me.”
They never stopped blowing them, “Clean fist,” says Arturo. An officer gave him one so strong in the center of the face that broke his mirrors, and Arturo, Miope, had to see blurry all those months, in which the headaches caused by his bad vision became unusual episodes of migraine.
Upon arrival at the CECOT, they shaved their hair, undressed in front of everyone and hooked their inmate uniform. They were the new inmates of the megacárcel of 116 hectares, with 256 cells and ability to house about 40,000 prisoners. They were immediately installed in module 8, “which became our house for four months,” says Arturo.
At that time there were moments of great tiredness, like the one in which they made a hunger strike for three days, or a blood strike. They cut themselves with the brass of the beds and began to leave marks of their hands on the walls, or to write the scream for help, or phrases in the style: “We are Venezuelans, not terrorists.” The last disturbance was the worst. Shouting and struggles broke the padlocks of nine cells and the Salvadoran guards repressed them with blows. “There the regime became five times worse, they hit us to speak, to bathe. Even to be born they hit me,” says Arturo.
Fifteen days before their exit from jail, they were measured by the sizes of clothing and shoes. “We deduced that it was because our departure came.” On July 17, they gave Gillette razor machines. The next day, they raised them early and made them bathe. Then they led them to a bus, and a Venezuelan officer told them: “What happened, chammos?” It was the confirmation that they returned to Venezuela. “There we started screaming for joy, we knew we were already getting out of that hell.”
The return home
About seven o’clock on July 18, they landed at the Simón Bolívar International Airport, in Maiquetía, After being exchanged by 10 Americans arrested in the South American country. The negotiation to three parts implied other concessions: Washington returned Venezuela to seven children who had been separated from their parents, and Caracas released 80 political prisoners. Nicolás Maduro, who has noted in his favor the release of young people, He received them with bombs. He said it was “the perfect day for Venezuela.”
After almost 48 hours held by the authorities of his country to make all kinds of physical and psychological exams, his three brothers were waiting for Arturo: “He had time without seeing them,” he says. “When I hugged them, I felt at home, I felt safe.”
In the house of Caracas, behind a colorful poster that says “Welcome Arturo”, the musician sings the theme Love and controlby the mythical Panamanian singer -songwriter Rubén Blades. “It’s the song that asked me most in the CECOT,” he says. Arturo knew after his arrival home that Blades himself, also a lawyer, expressed himself publicly about his case, denouncing “the arbitrary way as the law is sometimes applied.”
Arturo is glad to know, and he is glad to know that the world had not really forgotten, as that guard told him. Now he is resting, catching up, even learning to sleep again in a bed with a mattress. “I have been difficult for me to sleep in bed, I come accustomed to sleeping in brass.”
He says that he cannot see the photos or videos of the CECOT, or his own, for which his relatives identified him before confirming his name in the list filtered by CBS News, which the US government never officially published. He says he cries, that he “part of the soul” to see them, see them. The United States does not plan to return, ever. “There my rights violated me,” he says. “To President Donald Trump I tell him to change his hate speech, that he sees that migrants are more than a plague, migrants often leave our country pushed by the need and to fulfill our dreams. I forgive him, that he asks for forgive him to daddy God.”
At the moment, his family gave him the money to make the new lenses, and he already has them, he can see the most clear world, with other eyes.
