To Hell and Back

EPISODE 321: We found the athlete Trump disappeared.

We’d been working on this episode since May — ever since we published our first investigation, with PTFO correspondent Paola Ramos, into what really happened to a professional soccer goalie and youth soccer coach named Jerce Reyes.

And how his Real Madrid tattoo, which we’ll explain, got him disappeared by our government earlier this year.

To be clear: Jerce is an innocent man without a criminal record. And yet he’d been imprisoned, in his home country of Venezuela, for protesting their autocratic president, Nicolas Maduro… and then Jerce got imprisoned, in a Salvadoran prison camp, by us. The United States. The country where Jerce was legally seeking asylum.

But you should also know that when we started reporting this, we had no idea that President Trump would also be actively threatening war against Venezuela, this month.

And that a bipartisan group of lawmakers would be simultaneously questioning his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, about whether the second strike of an alleged drug boat off the coast of Venezuela this fall constitutes a war crime.

But I did have some idea that FIFA — soccer’s global governing body — would be awarding its first-ever “Peace Prize” to Donald Trump, in Washington, with various Real Madrid stars watching, at this month’s 2026 World Cup draw.

All of which is to say that as we assessed this layer cake of sports, and human rights abuses, and outright corruption, it became clear that Jerce Reyes was absolutely the athlete we needed to find.

I am so glad that Paola returned to help us do exactly that.

YOUTUBE SPOILER ALERT:

Gracias,

Pablo