California, USA
[Traffickers] arrested at
filthy 'drop house' charged
Los Angeles - Three
Mexican men held dozens of illegal immigrants in
a squalid "drop house" in South Los Angeles,
where one woman was raped and others say they
were threatened with sexual assault, authorities
said Friday.
Jose Teul, 23,
Daniel Pena, 18, and Saul Mendez, 35, were
charged with harboring illegal immigrants at the
two-story home that immigration agents raided
Wednesday, said U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice.
The three were
arrested along with 57 immigrants, including
teenagers and toddlers, from Central and South
America, Kice said...
Kice said that an
agent involved in the raid described conditions
in the house as "utter squalor with trash and
food piled up two to three feet high inside..."
According to an
affidavit ICE filed in the case, Pena repeatedly
raped a woman who had been at the house since
last summer. The woman, now seven months
pregnant, said Pena threatened her with a gun.
Several other female
immigrants said Pena and Teul tried to rape
them, relenting only when the women's young
children began to cry, according to the
affidavit...
- The Associated
Press
May 17, 2008
Colombia
Turismo sexual de menores,
ahora por catálogo
Sex Tourism with Children: Now by Catalog
Mayor denounces the fact that catalogs are being
printed advertising underage girls from their
communities as prostitutes
According to Clímaco
Estrada, mayor of Baranoa, a city in the
department [state] of Atlántico, some parents in
poor neighborhoods allow their daughters to work
as prepagos (prostitutes).
This is the second
city in Atlántico that has detected cases of
girls between the ages of 14 and 17 who engage
in prostitution. In the city of Malambo, some
girls have been introduced into selling sex by
their mothers.
A number of these youth now suffer from sexually
transmitted diseases.
- Caracol News
May 15, 2008
See also:
Prepagos
“Prepagos"...
middle-class girls, often models, who work as
prostitutes. It has only really taken off in the
last few years. The University of Eafit,
supposedly the best university in the city, is
particularly known for this.
- Blog
Comtributor
A Colombian man talks
about Prepagos. (Video - In Spanish)
-
Video Commentator
LibertadLatina
note 1
More About 'Catalogs'
The
above story from
Baranoa, Colombia mentions that children
exploited in prostit-ution are being presented in
catalogs.
A
recent story from Mexico mentioned how the
Attorney General's office targeted a local
prosecutor in Ciudad Juarez who was selling
child prostitutes from a catalog.
|
…Catalogs of child
victims… are used by trafficking
networks…
In one
infamous case, a high official of the
prosecutor's office in Ciudad Juarez (on
the U.S. border) in the previous
administr-ation was found to have one of
these catalogs in his desk… He… was
selling the sexual services of these
children."
- Mexico's Former Special
Prosecutor for Violent Crimes Against Women - Aliacia
Elena Perez Duarte
Terra (Spain)
March 1, 2008 |
International trafficking rings take special
orders for children they have photo-graphed, and
then kidnap those children in Mexico for sale to
overseas buyers.
|
Guillermo
Gutier-rez, head of the National Found-ation
of Investig-ations of Stolen and
Disappeared Children: "There is also
what we call 'shopping from a catalog,'
which happens in poor, rural areas."
A few years ago… a clown ring… traveled
to remote indigenous villages in the
states of Guerrero, Oaxaca and Veracruz
to entertain children and take
their photographs…
A couple of months later, the clowns
return to the villages bearing gifts for
the children.
"They give pres-ents except to certain
ones, the ones selected in photographs,"
Gutierrez said. "To those they say 'Oh,
no! We've run out of toys, but there are
more in our van if you come with us.'"
The children follow and are locked
inside, not to be seen again, Gutierrez
said.
"These rings operate where there is
poverty, where people have no power or
political clout," Gutierrez said.
- Susana Hayward
San Antonio Express-News
April 9, 2000 |
LibertadLatina
note 2
In
regard to the term "prepagos" (literally
- prepaids)...
I
cannot vouch for the authenticity of the blog
and video commen-tator links above.
However...
A
good friend from Colombia once told me that many
middle-class women, who attend classes or hold
professional jobs such as accountants and
university professors... also work at night as
prostitutes, due to the fact that even people
earning a professional salary could not make
enough to live on in Colombia's big cities.
Prepago also refers to a phenomenon in Colombia
that is also seen in Japan, where middle class
teens seeking material goods sell sex while
maintaining an other-wise mundane middle class
lifestyle.
In
the context of the above story from
Baranoa, the term is
used to refer to underage girls from poor
neighborhoods, who are apparently forced into
prostitution for reasons of family economic
survival.
- Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
May 16, 2008
Florida, USA
Colombian paramilit-aries
appear in US courts
Miami - Fourteen
warlords from far-right paramilitary militias
suspected in Colom-bia of thousands of
atrocities began court appearances Wednes-day
around the United States on drug traffick-ing
charges.
...They could face
30-year prison terms after the Bush
administra-tion agreed not to seek life
sentences in exchange for extradition.
Colombian President
Alvaro Uribe said he decided to extradite the
men because they were still committing crimes
from Colom-bian prisons, not cooperating with
authorities and had failed to pay restitution to
victims.
The 14 include top
leaders of the notorious militias blamed for
modern Colombia's worst atrocities...
...President Uribe
said any assets seized as a result of U.S.
prosecutions would go to compensate victims in
Colombia. At least 160,000 people have
registered there as victims.
Thousands of
Colombians have lodged formal complaints of
"atrocious crimes" against the paramilitaries —
including murder, rape, forced disappearances
and kidnapping. Hundreds of mass graves are
thought to remain hidden in Colombia.
Much of the
suffering was the direct result of orders given
by the warlords now facing U.S. prosecution.
-
Curt Anderson
- The Associated
Press
May 15, 2008
See also:
Indigenous massacred
On Apr. 18, [2004]
rightwing [Colombian] paramilitaries... arrived
in the indigenous Wayuu community of Bahia
Portete, ...where they massacred at least 12
people. Another 30 people are [missing]. ...The
paramilitaries tortured children to get
information about their parents, raped young
girls, murdered children and elderly people and
destroyed the community's cemetery. The massacre
forced many of the community's remaining 580
residents to flee...
- Weekly News
Update on the Americas Issue #745
May 9, 2004
/ Welcome
