As Advertised: The Spiked ‘60 Minutes’ Piece on Salvadoran Jail Was Quite Stupid

On Monday night, the now-infamous 60 Minutes segment pulled by editor-in-chief Bari Weiss seemed to have self-deported and aired up in Canada on Global TV, one of its broadcast networks. With it now available to the masses (thanks to social media), we can now give it a full viewing and not a she-said, she-said between Weiss and correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi. Spoiler alert: the piece was biased as hell, lacking the balance and nuance Weiss asked for.

Between the two sympathetic interview subjects, the use of a far-left so-called human rights group, lying about the administration’s lack of responses to comment requests, and chatting it up with Berkeley students, Alfonsi’s piece had it all.

Alfonsi opened with snide commentaries and lamenting the two interviewed “described torture, sexual, and physical abuse inside CENCOT”:

 

The person above was Luis Munoz Pinto, whom Alfonsi said is a Colombian national and “was a college student in repressive Venezuela and hoped to seek asylum in the United States in 2024,” and “waited in Mexico until his scheduled appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in California,” which she said was merely CBP arresting Pinto and shipping him off to hell.

Asked if he had a criminal record, Pinto insisted he had “nothing” and not “even...a traffic ticket,” which was enough for Alfonsi to declare him squeaky clean.

“He says he spent six months locked up in the U.S. waiting for a decision on his asylum case when he was deported, one of 252 Venezuelans sent to CECOT between March and April. Inside, he says their hands and feet were tied, forced to their knees, their heads were shaved,” she added.

What followed were more soundbites from Pinto (who, of course, didn’t speak any English):

PINTO [VOICE OF TRANSLATOR]: There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating and vomiting on themselves. When you get there, you already know you’re in hell. You don’t need anyone else to tell you.

ALFONSI: He says the guards began savagely beating them with their fists and batons. [TO PINTO] Tell me about what they did to you personally.

PINTO [VOICE OF TRANSLATOR]: Four guards grabbed me and they beat me until I bled to the point of agony. They knocked our faces against the wall. That was when they broke one of my teeth.

Having led with the shock value to degrade the administration, Alfonsi finally gave backstory to “CECOT...build in 2022 as a key part of Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s sweeping anti-gang crackdown” and “designed to hold 40,000 inmates” with “cramped cells where metal bunks are stacked four high” plus “no mattresses or sheets” or “access to the outdoors.”

Predictably holding up the Biden administration’s denunciations of CECOT and Bukele being granted an April visit to the White House, Alfonsi conceded the U.S. had sent illegal immigrants there as part of “a deal to pay El Salvador $4.7 million to house Venezuelan deportees[.]”

In this portion of the story was what Alfonsi probably thought passed as presenting the other side as she ran sound of President Trump from Bukele’s April 14 visit as well as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defending the CECOT deal on April 17.

Later in the story, she claimed “[t]he Department of Homeland Security declined our request for an interview and referred all questions about CECOT to El Salvador,” but Axios’s Sara Fischer reported Monday night that the “[White House], State Dept and DHS all provided on record comment in response to CBS News journalists’ request for comment ahead of the segment.”

Seeing as how “[n]one of those comments made the air,” we can say Alfonsi and her team are guilty of a pants-on-fire lie.

Instead, Alfonsi gave wide latitude to an Americas expert with the Soros-funded Human Rights Watch, which are the same people who want you to believe Gazans are the ones being slaughtered in a genocide by Israelis, not the other way around (click “expand”):

ALFONSI [TO PAPPIER]: The U.S. government said these people are the worst of the worst.

PAPPIER: These people are migrants, and the sad reality is that the U.S. government tried to make an example out of them. 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.

ALFONSI: Juan Pappier is a deputy director at the nonprofit Human Rights Watch. In an 81-page report released in November, the organization concluded there was systematic torture and other abuses at SCOTT, and that nearly half of the Venezuelans the U.S. sent there had no criminal history. Only eight of the men had been convicted of a violent or potentially violent offense. [TO PAPPIER] How do you know they weren’t gang members?

PAPPIER: We cross referenced federal databases, databases in all 50 states in the United States, and also obtained criminal records in Venezuela and in the countries where these people lived. And the information we obtained in the United States is based on data provided by ICE.

ALFONSI [TO PAPPIER]: So, ICE’s own records said?

PAPPIER: ICE’s own records say that only three precent of them had been sentenced for a violent or potentially violent crime.

ALFONSI: 60 Minutes reviewed the available ICE data. It confirms the findings of Human Rights Watch. It shows 70 men had pending criminal charges in the U.S., which could include immigration violations. We don’t know because the Department of Homeland Security has never released a complete list of the names or criminal histories of the men it sent to CECOT. Rapid deportations have been a key part of the Trump administration’s immigration overhaul. The administration considers anyone who crosses the border illegally to be a criminal. Illegal crossings are now at a historic low, but some immigration attorneys say the administration has used flawed criteria to justify deportations.

Following some translator-aided sound from their second tailor-made case of injustice and disturbing allegations of having his genitals twisted, Alfonsi huffed about Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s spring visit to CECOT with gang members behind her in prison cells.

On this, Weiss called out there tiny snippet as incomplete: “We can report that she took pictures and video there with MS-13 gang members, not TdA members, with no comment from her or her staff about what her goal on that trip was, or what she saw there, or if she had or has concerns about the treatment of detainees like the ones in our piece.”

The liberal media defenders out there think allowing such odious figures the chance to explain themselves isn’t journalism but open partisanship.

Alfonsi further showed her cards in how this story was laundered through both this Soros group and students at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center and their lefty adviser Alexa Koenig.

She teamed up with the second group to play amateur Sherlock Holmes (click “expand”):

 

ALFONSI [TO PAPPIER]: There were men standing behind her, heavily tattooed. Who are those men? Do we know?

PAPPIER: We know that those men in her video are not Venezuelans. They are Salvadorans probably accused of being gang leaders, and probably people who have been in jail for many, many years in El Salvador.

ALFONSI: Human Rights Watch was able to confirm that with the help of this intrepid team of students at UC Berkeley’s Human Rights Center.

UC BERKELEY STUDENT #1: All the visible men have either an MS on their chest or a 13 or an ES for El Salvador, and all those gangs are associated with El Salvador.

ALFONSI [TO UC BERKELEY STUDENT #1]: Not the Venezuelans?

UC BERKELEY STUDENT #1: Yeah

ALFONSI: To help verify the deportees’ stories for Human Rights Watch, the team of students combed through open source data for weeks. Students are trained in advanced techniques and follow strict international standards for obtaining digital evidence that can be used in courts. Analyzing satellite imagery, they mapped the prison, and identified the building where the Venezuelans were held. And remember all those influencers who filmed inside CECOT? One toured an isolation cell. These are the rooms of solitary confinement that matched the description of the so-called island where the deportees described being tortured.

SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER: And they get absolutely nothing to use to sleep or to rest. Just pure concrete.

ALFONSI: A show and tell the armory confirmed CECOT had the weapons the Venezuelans say guards used on them.

UC BERKELEY STUDENT #2: What we did see in these videos was the use of the Ti batons on prisoners. Additionally, we also saw the use of painful body positions.

ALFONSI [TO UC BERKELEY STUDENT #2]: They were showing that off in the videos?

UC BERKELEY STUDENT #2: And they do that. It’s sort of a practice.

ALFONSI: But it was this interview with the prison warden that proved to be most helpful.

CECOT PRISON WARDEN [VOICE OF TRANSLATOR]: The light system is 24 hours a day.

UC BERKELEY STUDENT #2: One of the questions that we had was, are the lights on 24/7? He said, yes, they are. So, he’s talking about how hot it can get in the prison. So, there’s this sort of Pride around the poor conditions and around the suffering.

ALFONSI: Using extreme temperatures or light to disorient inmates is also prohibited under UN standards.

HUMAN RIGHTS CENTER CO-FACULTY DIRECTOR ALEXA KOENIG: I think one of the things that the work of this team has really shown is that a lot of these stories can be believed.

ALFONSI: Alexa Koenig is the director of Berkeley’s Investigations Lab, which trains students to research war crimes and human rights violations,

KOENIG: And it’s those little details that I think then if you can bring that together with the physical evidence, I think you have the strongest possible case for accountability, whether it’s in court of public opinion or at some point in a court of law.

Weiss tore into this field trip in her email: “I also think that the ensuing analysis form the Berkeley students is strange. The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?”

Having wasted over 13 minutes of our time on a grim prison at least some Americans are unlikely to shed any tears over, Alfonsi offered the lie about DHS ignoring her and ended by revealing 252 Venezuelan men who spent time at CECOT were released and “sent back to Caracas in exchange for 10 Americans that had been imprisoned in Venezuela” while other illegal immigrants could be deported “to other so-called third countries” with “well-documented histories of torturing prisoners.”

To see the relevant transcript from Global TV on December 22, click here.