Tag: torture

US and Ecuadorian militaries burn homes and torture workers in “Operation Total Extermination”

The US-Ecuadorian joint military operation launched March 3, ostensibly against drug cartels, has turned Ecuador into a proving ground for unleashing military violence upon every country in the hemisphere in furtherance of US hegemony.

Neither the Pentagon nor the Ecuadorian Ministry of Defense, which has dubbed the onslaught “Operation Total Extermination,” have reported casualty figures.

Subsequent reports, however, have made clear that the Pentagon and Ecuadorian forces are following a scorched-earth policy aimed not at cartels but civilians, akin to that employed by the military dictatorships in Central and South America over the last century.

Last Friday, the Ecuadorian Armed Forces boasted on social media that “Ecuador and the US destroyed” the training grounds and a vacation home of the Border Commands—a drug trafficking group formed by former Colombian FARC-EP guerrilla fighters along the Colombian-Ecuadorian border.

The announcement included aerial videos showing military helicopters bombing rural properties and rustic homes in the northeast town of Santa Rosa, Sucumbíos Province. “During the subsequent search, weapons and other evidence linked to illegal activities were found,” the publication claims.

The US Southern Command, the branch of the US armed forces that oversees forces in Latin America, issued an accompanying statement indicating the US and Ecuador had launched “lethal kinetic operations against Designated Terrorist Organizations.”

Sean Parnell, chief Pentagon spokesman, added: “At the request of Ecuador, the Department of War executed targeted action to advance our shared objective of dismantling narco-terrorist networks.”

The following day, Saturday, President Daniel Noboa shook hands with Donald Trump at the “Shield of the Americas Summit” in Miami, where the fascist American president announced a “brand new military coalition” against drug cartels. “The only way to defeat these enemies is by unleashing the power of our militaries,” he declared.

To capture drug traffickers, Trump might have simply called for the arrest of Noboa himself, whose billionaire family’s Noboa Trading Co. has been caught shipping cocaine to the Balkans in crates with bananas sold under the Bonita label.

Instead, in real time, the true character of this coalition was shown in Sucumbíos, where local news reporters were informing Saturday that the US and Ecuadorian militaries had bombed the homes of peasants and small farmers and tortured agricultural workers who deny any illegal activities.

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Prosecutor Investigating U.S. Boat Strikes and Claims of Torture Was Murdered in Ecuador

Alexandra Bravo, the prosecutor assigned to investigate U.S. strikes on three Ecuadorian boats and the 36 survivors’ subsequent accounts of torture and kidnapping, was shot dead in the coastal city of Manta last month. According to police, on June 14 a hitman aboard a black motorcycle opened fire on Bravo as she and her sister were leaving a café at about 11 a.m. Bravo’s sister, who jumped to protect her, was also killed in the attack.

Upon arriving at the crime scene, officers say they found five 9mm shell casings and Bravo’s injured driver, but no sign of the police detail that had been assigned to protect her. The Police Directorate, which operates entirely under the executive branch, has launched a probe to determine if there’d been an internal security breach.

Bravo is the 26th member of Ecuador’s justice system to be assassinated since 2020 and the second individual investigating state crimes murdered that week. Besides her usual caseload of homicide and organized crime, Bravo had been working the Fiorella, Negra Francisca, and Don Maca cases—a series of drone attacks on civilian fishing ships exposed by Drop Site in April. Two of the boat’s crews returned home and reported being abducted, blindfolded, and starved for eight days by American gunmen in U.S. military uniforms aboard a U.S.-flagged patrol ship, before being abandoned in El Salvador. The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances endorsed the calls for an investigation, demanding that the U.S. provide information on the whereabouts of the eight still-missing men and any involvement in the matter by April 27. To date, the United States has not responded.

Under Ecuador’s right-wing president Daniel Noboa—a Miami-born billionaire often characterized as a “U.S.-backed dictator”—the country has become a central testing ground for Operation Southern Spear, Washington’s extrajudicial bombing campaign purporting to target “narco-terrorists,” which has killed 221 people to date. There is no evidence that many of the victims, including those in Bravo’s investigation, had engaged in drug trafficking.

“I can’t make any assertion regarding it being a political assassination, but evidently, when a prosecutor is killed it’s because of the investigation they’re conducting,” Fernando Bastias, a renowned human rights attorney with Ecuador’s CDH and member of the Geneva-based World Organization Against Torture, told Drop Site, “That’s something we’ve learned from our experience in Ecuador.”

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Federal Judge Makes Unprecedented Move In Maduro Torture Case

Well, here’s something that doesn’t happen too often.  

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Darrin P. Gayles in Miami awarded $314 million in damages to three U.S. citizens who were imprisoned and tortured by Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela before being freed in a 2023 prisoner swap.

The three men were Jerrel Kenemore, a Texas computer scientist who’d moved to neighboring Colombia to be with a woman he met. He was kidnapped by paramilitaries in 2022 while visiting a grocery store near the Venezuela-Colombia border and held for over 600 days before being charged with “espionage” and “counterintelligence activities.” He claims he was beaten, held in harsh conditions, and degraded constantly. 

Edgar Jose Marval was detained for just over 120 days, but allegedly suffered the most abuse. He was beaten repeatedly until his back was broken, had his genitals electrocuted, and was tortured psychologically with made-up threats to his children. Jason Saad, the third hostage, was detained for 560 days and was subjected to similar treatment, but we don’t have quite as many details on him.   

If you’ll remember, Joe Biden handed Alex Saab — Maduro’s bagman — over in exchange for these Americans. While I’m glad they did make it back to the United States safely, I’d like to remind everyone that Donald Trump brought every single remaining U.S. hostage back home from Venezuela about a year ago, with the help of El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, and made no concessions to Maduro. As a matter of fact, six months later, he scooped him up and put him in jail. But I digress. 

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Photo of bound Palestinian detainee corroborates Israeli torture reports, say rights groups

An Israeli soldier’s photo of a Palestinian man from Gaza stripped to his underwear, blindfolded and bound face-down to an iron rod corroborates extensive reporting on Israeli torture of Palestinians in detention and itself may constitute a war crime, rights groups have said.

The image was shared on a now-deleted personal social media account, with the Hebrew-language caption “good morning”. It was brought to wider public attention by a Palestinian writer and activist who goes by Tamer.

“Both abusive treatment of detainees and the public sharing of humiliating or degrading images of them can constitute war crimes,” said Oneg Ben Dror from the prisoner and detainees department at Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI).

The photo “confirms what thousands of testimonies from Palestinian detainees have exposed, and what we and other organisations have been reporting for nearly three years now,” she added. “Israeli detention facilities are torture camps for Palestinians.”

Israel’s military confirmed the authenticity of the photo. “The incident does not align with IDF values and regulations,” a spokesperson said, adding that an inquiry was under way.

Holding and photographing the man semi-naked also broke international law, said Sari Bashi, the executive director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel. “There is no security justification for holding a detainee in his underwear,” she said. “Forced nudity followed by capturing and sharing sexualised images on social media is a form of sexual violence and also a war crime.”

After the photo was widely shared on social media at least two mothers claimed the bound man as their son, highlighting the painful limbo of Palestinian families searching for loved ones missing since their detention by Israeli forces, Bashi added.

“This is not the first time Israeli soldiers have published humiliating photos of Palestinian detainees while depriving families of information or access to them. It has become a grotesque and unlawful way for families to get information about their loved ones.”

Rana Abu Nasser is sure the photo shows her son Osama, who was seized with his one-year-old son in March, near the shifting “yellow line” that marks the boundary of Israeli military control in Gaza. “I know the details of his body,” she told Reuters. “He has swelling in his foot and scars on his leg – the same swelling on his left leg I saw in the picture.”

Joudeh al-Ghoul wept the first time she saw the photo, instantly sure it was her son Amin, missing since his arrest in November 2023, when he was trying to travel from southern Gaza to the north. “It’s him, his hair and chin. He is ​my son. A mother’s heart can recognise her son. ​I hugged the mobile phone and started crying,” she said. “He is my son, my soul, my life.”

The Israeli military declined to comment on whether the detainee had been identified or given medical support, and whether his family in Gaza had been notified.

For seven months at the start of the war the Israeli military refused to provide basic information about the status of people detained in Gaza, in effect implementing a policy of forced disappearance.

From May 2024 Israel provided an email address for enquires about Palestinians from Gaza, but that provided only a partial, limited improvement. Israeli authorities had denied holding hundreds of missing Palestinians whose arrest was confirmed by witness testimony, the rights group HaMoked said this year.

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Venezuelan Activists: Helicoide Torture Complex Still Active Despite Regime Claims of ‘Shutdown’

The Venezuelan non-governmental human rights organization Justice, Encounter, and Forgiveness (JEP) said this week that the Venezuelan socialist regime’s largest and most infamous torture complex, the Helicoide (“The Helix”), remains operational despite the regime’s claims.

The Helicoide is a structure in southern Caracas’s San Agustín parish built in the 1950s during the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, originally conceived as the world’s first drive-thru shopping mall. The plans never materialized following Pérez Jiménez’s downfall in 1958 and the building remained unfinished.

The Venezuelan socialist regime turned the facility into what has been largely described as the largest torture center in Latin America. Following the arrest of socialist dictator Nicolás Maduro by U.S. forces on January 3, “acting President” Delcy Rodriguez announced that the Helicoide would be shut down and “transformed” into a “cultural center” for local residents of San Agustín.

On Tuesday, over three months since the “shutdown” announcement, JEP explained that the Helicoide remains operational and at least 25 political prisoners are still unjustly detained in the complex.

“We understand that international statements are based on prior institutional commitments and information, but the reality of human rights demands that we compare these announcements with the actual situation of the people affected,” the statement read in part.

“Behind every statistic are families who are still waiting for answers today; therefore, it is not possible to consider a facility closed as long as there are citizens deprived of their liberty inside,” the statement continued.

JEP called upon the international community and organizations to continue monitoring the situation — calling all relevant authorities for transparency regarding the actual status of the Helicoide and the 25 political prisoners still detained at the center.

Hours after JEP published its statement, the organization further denounced that “unusual movements” were reported at the Helicoide, including reports about possible transfers of political prisoners at the complex to other unspecified locations.

“These events raise serious questions and reinforce the perception that last-minute decisions are being made to respond to pressure and international scrutiny, rather than to genuinely correct the reported violations,” JEP’s statement read.

“In the face of this situation, we reiterate that the 25 people deprived of liberty for political reasons who remain in the Helicoide must be released immediately,” the statement continued. “Their transfer to another detention center does not constitute a solution nor represent progress in human rights matters. What is required is their full and unconditional release.”

Following Maduro’s capture, the Venezuelan regime began releasing hundreds of political prisoners unjustly detained across several Venezuelan prisons — including former police officers that spent over 23 years imprisoned.

Although hundreds of political prisoners have been released in the first months of 2026, the Venezuelan non-government organization Foro Penal detailed on Wednesday that the Venezuelan socialist regime still holds at least 404 political prisoners as of Monday, June 1 — including at least one child aged between 14 and 17 years old.

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Global Sumud Flotilla Urges Probe of US Complicity in Members’ Abduction and Torture by Israel

Testimonies published Tuesday from activists, journalists, medical professionals, and others who took part in the latest international flotilla attempting to break Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza called for an investigation into US complicity in their illegal high-seas abduction and alleged torture, sexual assault, and other abuse by Israeli forces.

“As testimonies from the 428 participants illegally kidnapped by the Israeli regime continue to surface, the United States’ critical role in the abuses and torture of humanitarian volunteers and journalists has become undeniable,” Global Sumud Flotilla’s (GSF) media team said in a statement.

“This role goes beyond the State Department’s diplomatic shielding and the US Embassy’s refusal to assist American families seeking information,” GSF continued. “It includes the very ship on which volunteer participants were illegally detained and tortured, and the weapons used to inflict life-threatening trauma against them.”

That vessel, the amphibious landing ship INS Nahshon, was built by Bollinger Mississippi Shipbuilding in Louisiana and was fully financed by the US government. GSF activists first became aware of what they now call the “torture boat” when it was used to detain members of the previous Gaza-bound flotilla, dozens of whom required medical attention for broken ribs, noses, and other injuries inflicted by Israeli forces.

This time, according to GSF, “detained humanitarians, doctors, and journalists were processed one by one through a darkened shipping container. Inside, groups of three to five soldiers systematically brutalized each person who came through the door while those waiting outside listened to the screams.”

Flotilla participant Yassine Benjelloun described his mistreatment by his Israeli captors.

“All of a sudden I hear, ‘Welcome to Israel.’ And I start getting hit, like first hit on the head, second hit in the ribs, then I fall, then they kick me,” he said. “What lasts maybe three or five minutes seems like a lifetime. You don’t know that the door is going to open, and they’re going to kick you out.”

Dr. Jihan Alya Mohd Nordin, a Malaysian physician aboard the flotilla, documented 35 GSF members with fractured or dislocated bones, as well as severe head injuries including concussions and eye or ear trauma, and 14 cases of sexual assault.

“Being a doctor, the main aim is to reduce the sufferings of people,” Jihan said. “But when we cannot do anything to help them, it was the worst and most horrible feeling that I have. It was so devastating.”

Jihan said she was shoved, struck, punched, kicked, and choked by her captors, who forcibly stripped off her hijab.

In addition to the ship, the weapons used against the civilian flotilla members were also made in the USA.

“Stun grenades and metal-bearing projectile rounds were identified by manufacturer markings as products of Combined Tactical Systems (CTS), a brand of the Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based weapons manufacturer Combined Systems Inc. (CSI),” GSF said. “These weapons were fired at close range in enclosed spaces against participants who were sitting down or trying to sleep, a direct violation of the manufacturer’s own usage guidelines.”

GSF argues that “none of this was accidental.”

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Netanyahu: We Will Sue NYT for Exposé Alleging Sexual Torture in Israeli Prisons

Israel is planning to sue The New York Times over a shocking report that Israeli prison officials are sexually torturing Palestinian prisoners.

Opinion columnist Nicholas Kristof’s 3,500-word exposé graphically details mind-boggling cruelty, including genital mutilation and using dogs to rape prisoners.

Such a lawsuit won’t likely succeed in U.S. courts because the Constitution forbids it. Federal law generally forbids recognizing defamation judgments in foreign courts.

The exposé appeared one day before the Times reprised an official Israeli report that detailed Hamas’ rape and sexual torture of Israeli prisoners and hostages during and after the October 7, 2023 terror raid.

The Story

Palestinians told Kristof about sexual violence against men, women, and children by myriad Israeli assailants: “soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.”

Evidence does not show that leaders ordered the rapes, Kristof explained. But a UN report explained that sexual torture is “one of Israel’s ‘standard operating procedures’ and ‘a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.’” And the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has reported that “systematic sexual violence” is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”

Kristof spoke to 14 victims. 

A freelance journalist, Sami al-Sai, 46, told Kristof that Israeli guards raped him with a rubber baton and then a carrot. A sadistic woman guard, he told Kristof, “grabbed him by the penis and testicles and joked, ‘These are mine,’ and then squeezed until he screamed from pain.”

Noting that American tax money has made the U.S. government complicit in the sex crimes, Kristof also detailed a case from the Euro-Med report. It described the repeated rape of a 42-year-old woman, which Israeli soldiers photographed and said would be released if “she did not cooperate with Israeli intelligence.”

Yet abuse, Kristof reported, went beyond — way beyond — rape.

“Many reported that they often had their genitals yanked or were beaten on the testicles. Hand-held metal detectors were used to probe between men’s naked legs and then smashed into their private parts; some men had to have their testicles amputated by doctors after beatings, according to the Euro-Med monitor,” Kristof reported.

A farmer told Kristof that Israeli guards raped him three times with a metal baton. He invited the third assault by asking for a pen and paper to write a complaint. 

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Rare Survivors of Pacific Boat Strikes Allege U.S. Forces Kidnapped and Tortured Them

The extraordinary story you’re about to read, by Camila Lourdes Galarza, is a dark look into what it’s like to live and die on the other side of U.S. headlines. As we expand deeper into reporting on South and Central America, particularly with the hiring of our Latin America bureau chief José Luis Granados Ceja, this is the kind of journalism we hope to be bringing you more of. (Granados Ceja just returned from a reporting trip to Cuba; watch him discuss the situation there on Breaking Points.)

The last time Roxanna Mero heard from her husband Carlos was January 19. Calling from sea on an emergency line, he said an “American aircraft, two drones, and a blue patrol ship” had been circling La Fiorella, the Ecuadorian fishing boat he captained. The presence of an airplane worried him, given that Trump’s extrajudicial airstrikes across the Pacific and Caribbean have killed more than 170 people in 6 months, but a local coast guard had already inspected the vessel, found nothing and cleared them to continue.

The next day, the boat went up in smoke. The eight fishermen aboard have not been seen since.

Three independent accounts from relatives of the missing crew assert that eyewitnesses, on a nearby raft at the time of the incident, saw La Fiorella engulfed in flames. “They’ve been threatened not to speak to the press. They’re scared for their lives,” said Angelica Lourdes Mero, whose son and spouse are among the disappeared men.

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Bosnian War Criminal Who Tortured Serb Prisoners and Lied About it to Obtain U.S. Citizenship Sentenced to 30 Months in Federal Prison

A 53-year-old woman from Bosnia and Herzegovina who participated in the torture and abuse of Bosnian Serb civilian prisoners during the 1990s war has been sentenced to 30 months in federal prison after lying on her U.S. citizenship application to conceal her past atrocities.

As The Gateway Pundit previously reported, Nada Radovan Tomanić was arrested in West Virginia in 2023.

Tomanić was finally sentenced on April 8 in Connecticut.

She had pleaded guilty in November to one count of procuring U.S. citizenship contrary to law.

According to the Department of Justice, Tomanić served with the Zulfikar Special Unit of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early 1990s, including operations on Mt. Igman near Sarajevo.

Along with other unit members, she took part in the severe physical and psychological abuse of Bosnian Serb civilian prisoners held in detention facilities. The abuse included beatings and acts that amounted to torture and inhuman treatment, targeting victims based on their ethnicity and religion.

Tomanić entered the United States as a “refugee” in 1997.

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Israeli official organizes ‘prison tour’ for Jewish settlers to observe torture of Palestinians

Israeli prison authorities gave a tour of a maximum-security facility to Jewish settlers where they held a “Torah lesson” and observed the abuse of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli media reported on 23 February.

Kobi Yaakobi, head of Israel’s prison system, invited 20 members of the synagogue in Har Homa, an illegal West Bank settlement near Jerusalem, on a “safari” tour of Nitzan maximum-security prison.

Palestinian detainees, including alleged members of Hamas’s elite Nukhba forces, were handcuffed and forced to lie on the ground to be observed by the visitors. The Jewish settlers ate an “indulgent lunch” in front of the prisoners, who were fasting for the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

The settlers also “blessed” the prison guards.

Israel runs a “network of torture camps,” where rape, physical and psychological abuse, inhuman conditions, deliberate starvation, and denial of medical care are common, according to Israeli rights groups B’Tselem. 

“The transformation of prisons into a network of torture camps is part of the Israeli regime’s coordinated onslaught on Palestinian society, aimed at dismantling the Palestinian collective,” B’Tselem noted.

The Israel Prison Service (IPS) confirmed to Israeli media that its officers accompanied a “rabbi and his entourage” for a sermon and tour of a security prison. 

Yaakobi was appointed as IPS chief in January 2024 by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir. The IPS chief has helped Ben Gvir implement a policy to deliberately worsen the conditions of Palestinian prisoners.

Yaakobi is currently under investigation for allegedly helping suppress a probe into Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank.

As of November, at least 98 Palestinians have died in Israeli custody since October 2023, according to Israeli data.

However, the Physicians for Human Rights–Israel (PHR-I) says the real toll is likely substantially higher as hundreds of detainees from Gaza are missing.

On 8 February, Israel returned the bodies and human remains of 120 Palestinians to Gaza without providing any information about their identities or how they were killed.

The remains arrived at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City in plain white bags, where forensic teams examined them in an effort to determine their identities and notify grieving families.

“The International Committee of the Red Cross handed over 120 body bags containing 54 bodies as well as skull samples placed in 66 separate bags,” forensic official Omar Suleiman told Al Jazeera.

After Israel returned 120 Palestinian bodies in October, officials in Gaza accused it of stealing the organs of the victims.

Israel has a long history of stealing the organs of Palestinians.

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