60 Minutes episode on brutal El Salvador prison, pulled from air by CBS, appears online | CBS
A 60 Minutes episode investigating a brutal prison in El Salvador that CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss pulled from the air Sunday was posted online Monday after appearing on a Canadian TV app.
The episode, which lasted approximately 14 minutes and was viewed by the Guardian, provides an in-depth look at the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (Cecot) prison in El Salvador. The mega opens with footage of the prison, showing the detainees being shackled upon arrival in El Salvador.
The episode aired on a streaming platform owned by Global TV, which owns the rights to 60 Minutes in Canada.
“The first thing he told us was that we would never see the light of day or night again. He said: ‘Welcome to hell,'” said Luis Muñoz Pinto, a Venezuelan college student currently living in Colombia who spoke on the episode.
He went to the US to seek asylum and was arrested in 2024 during his appointment at US Customs and Border Protection in California.
“They looked at me and said I was a danger to society,” Pinto recalled. He told reporter Sharyn Alfonsi that he had no criminal record. “I’ve never even had a traffic ticket.”
The episode was scheduled to air on Sunday, but CBS canceled it, saying the episode “needed additional reporting” and “will air on a future broadcast.” The removal of the segment sparked backlash both within and outside CBS News.
Alfonsi issued a private note to his CBS colleagues on Sunday, stating that the episode “has been viewed five times and has been approved by both CBS lawyers and standards and practices. This is actually true. In my view, pulling it now, after all stringent internal controls have been met, is not an editorial decision, but a political one.”
On Monday, Weiss addressed the pulled episode in a statement to employees: “My job is to make sure all the stories we publish are the best they can be. Holding back stories that aren’t ready for whatever reason (for example, they lack adequate context or miss critical voices) happens every day in every newsroom. I look forward to publishing this important article when it’s ready.”
Elsewhere in the episode, Pinto details how the guards at Cecot treated him.
“Four guards caught me and beat me until it hurt. They smashed our faces against the wall. That’s when they broke one of my teeth,” he said.
Alfonsi draws attention to the poor conditions in the prison by showing pictures of half-dressed men with shaved heads lined up in rows in front of four rows of bunk beds. There are no pillows, pillows or blankets in the bunk beds. The lights are kept on 24 hours a day and detainees have no access to clean water.
Alfonsi pointed to a State Department report in 2023 that “speaks of torture and life-threatening prison conditions” in Cecot, saying: “But during his meeting with President Bukele at the White House this year, President Trump expressed his admiration for El Salvador’s prison system.”
The department is also interviewing Juan Pappier, deputy director of Human Rights Watch. He helped write an 81-page report detailing Cecot’s pattern of “systematic torture” and revealing that nearly half of the men in prison did not actually have a criminal history. Pappier said the study was based on information from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) own records. Alfonsi confirmed that 60 Minutes had independently verified Human Rights Watch’s allegations.
Venezuelan citizen and former Cecot prisoner William Losada tells Sánchez de Alfonsi what it was like to be sent to the “island”; a punishment chamber to which prisoners would be sent if they were forced to sit on their knees 24 hours a day.
“The island is a small room with no light, no ventilation, nothing. It’s a punishment cell where you can’t see your hand in front of your face. After they locked us up, they came every half hour and started beating us, and they hit our door with sticks to traumatize us,” he said.
The episode briefly touches on Kristi Noem’s visit to Cecot. Pinto claims that the Department of Homeland Security secretary did not speak to a single detainee during his visit. There is also a video of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying: “These are disgusting monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual predators, predators who have no right to be in this country, and they must be held accountable.”
The department also says DHS and the Salvadoran government declined to comment.
On Tuesday afternoon, a CBS News representative confirmed to the Guardian that Canadian broadcast partner Global TV “mistakenly aired” the Cecot episode.
“Although Global TV removed the episode from its app, the episode has since been posted on social and digital media. Paramount’s content protection team is in the process of routine takedown orders for the unaired and unauthorized episode,” the statement said.
Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren shared the episode online, saying: “Take a few minutes to watch what they don’t want you to see. This story must be told.”
The removal and subsequent leak of the episode comes amid ongoing turmoil between 60 Minutes and the Trump administration. On December 16, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “To those who think I’m close to the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me worse than ever since the so-called ‘takeover.’ If they’re friends, I hate to see my enemies!” A week before that, Trump blasted 60 Minutes for its interview with Marjorie Taylor Greene, whom he called “a very ill-prepared Traitor” and said of parent company Paramount: “THEY ARE NOT BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP.”
Larry Ellison this week submitted a $108.4 billion hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) through Paramount in an attempt to get WBD to back out of the deal announced last week with Netflix. The tech billionaire’s Skydance Media acquired Paramount Global earlier this year and then acquired Weiss’ independent media outlet The Free Press. He later appointed Weiss as editor-in-chief of CBS News.
