Accused gang members look out from their cell at the Counter Terrorism Confinement Center on Dec. 15, in Tecoluca, El Salvador.John Moore/Getty Images
A 60 Minutes segment on Venezuelan men who say they were tortured after being sent to a prison in El Salvador by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration surfaced on a Canadian broadcaster’s website despite being pulled from the show.
The 13-minute piece, by reporter Sharyn Alfonsi, was available on the website of Global TV on Monday afternoon and early evening. The previous day, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss ordered the story excluded from the broadcast just hours before airtime, drawing accusations of censorship.
The move follows months of criticism that CBS is going out of its way to curry favour with Mr. Trump and his supporters, including by installing Ms. Weiss, an anti-woke media personality, atop its news division.
The piece appeared to no longer be available on the Global site later on Monday evening. Representatives from Global and its owner, Corus Entertainment, did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.
Ms. Alfonsi’s work, which The Globe and Mail accessed before it was removed from the web, airs the accounts of two Venezuelans who say guards at the Centre for the Confinement of Terrorism – best known by its Spanish-language initials, CECOT – subjected them and hundreds of other men to physical abuse after they were taken to the prison from the U.S. as part of Mr. Trump’s mass deportation drive.
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One of the men who spoke to Ms. Alfonsi, Luis Munoz Pinto, said he was beaten by four guards shortly after arriving at CECOT. They knocked his face against the wall and broke his tooth, he recounted. Mr. Munoz Pinto said he was beaten many more times, including by guards who hit his genitals with their hands. He said prisoners were not given clean water and had to instead drink toilet and bathing water.
It was common for prisoners to be locked in a pitch-black isolation cell, he added. “They would take you there and beat you for hours and leave you locked in there for days,” he said in the broadcast.
Mr. Munoz Pinto said he has no criminal history, not even a traffic ticket, but was falsely accused of being a gangster based on his tattoos.
A second man, William Lozada Sanchez, recounted being forced to kneel on the floor for 24 hours at a time. Anyone who couldn’t do it, he said, was taken to an isolation cell named “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. After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half-hour,” Mr. Lozada Sanchez said in the piece.
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The segment casts doubt on the U.S. President’s insistence that the deported men were members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Citing research by Human Rights Watch, it reports that, of 252 Venezuelans taken to CECOT, nearly half had no criminal history and only eight had convictions for violent offences.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley also help corroborate the details about CECOT shared by detainees in the 60 Minutes report.
Ms. Alfonsi, in a note to CBS colleagues widely reported by U.S. media, said the story had already been cleared by CBS’s lawyers and its standards division before Ms. Weiss had it pulled. Ms. Alfonsi said Ms. Weiss wanted the story held because Trump administration officials had refused to be interviewed for it.
The reporter warned that such rationale meant the U.S. government could “veto” any story it wanted by simply not commenting.
“If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a ‘kill switch’ for any reporting they find inconvenient,” Ms. Alfonsi wrote, adding that Ms. Weiss’s decision was “a political one.”
Ms. Weiss, in a statement on Sunday, said she held the story because it was “not ready” and that she would “look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready.”
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In comments to a Monday morning editorial conference call also provided to U.S. media, Ms. Weiss reportedly offered another rationale, saying that the CECOT story was old news. “The public knows that Venezuelans have been subjected to horrific treatment at this prison,” she said. “We need to do more.”
CBS is already under fire for agreeing to pay US$16-million earlier this year to settle a lawsuit from Mr. Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris, his Democratic presidential rival in the 2024 election.
CBS’s owner, Paramount Global, recently merged with Skydance Media, a move that required federal government approval. During the approval process, David Ellison, Paramount Skydance’s chief executive, told the regulator that CBS would be friendlier to conservatives.
Mr. Ellison, whose father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is an adviser and donor to Mr. Trump, appointed Ms. Weiss as the head of CBS News after buying her news website, the Free Press.
Ms. Weiss, a former New York Times columnist, set up the Free Press in 2021 to counter what she viewed as left-of-centre biases in the media.
With a report from J. Kelly Nestruck