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Indigenous & Latina Women & Children's Human
Rights News from the Americas |
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Latin America - Sexual Exploitation
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On the night of September 23, 1991,
the São Bartolomeu--one of the small steamboats that ply the
Amazonian rivers--sails to Laranjal do Jari in the northern reaches of
Brazil. The voyage lasts three days and two nights.
The passengers lie in hammocks hooked up to poles.
Besides passengers, the boat transports goods through the riverine
regions. This voyage, however, has a shipment of special merchandise: a
lot of girls who, without knowing it, are destined to become
prostitutes. Such a shipment is special, but not truly exceptional for
the boats that navigate these rivers.
Twelve girls--among them, Ana Meire Lima da Silva,
age 15, and Miriam Ferreira dos Santos, 14--make up part of the cargo.
They were persuaded to go with promises of work in a restaurant or
luncheonette.
These girls were naive," says Elaine, a more
experienced prostitute who was involved in the ruse but is convinced
that she did nothing bad. "They knew nothing."
A terrible reception awaited them. Bucho de Bode
("Goat Belly"), a brothel owner, met them at the port. As the ship
docked, Ana Meire remembers hearing catcalls from men on the
footbridges: "Hmm, some fresh meat... She's for me... She turns me on...
I'm going to suck you up whole."
This welcome is part of a ritual. Each time that
girls debark at the port, there is a true festival. That night, all the
men argued among themselves over who would have the privilege of being
the first to eat the "fresh meat." New arrivals are highly valued by
clients. In this unhealthly atmosphere, prostitutes rapidly lose value,
which, in the words of one pimp, demands a constant "resupply of goods."
When clients tire of a product, the moment has arrived to sell the girls
according to the rule of "transfer." The girls move, therefore, from one
region to another, from one garimpo-- mining community--to the
next.
I invite the reader to share with me the voyage
along these routes of trafficking in people, which will lead us into the
secrets of child prostitution found throughout Brazil. The Brazilian
Center for Childhood and Adolescence (CBIA) of the Ministry of Social
Services estimates that there are 500,000 girl prostitutes in the
country.
The setting of this particular voyage is exotic,
unknown and largely inaccessible: the legal Amazon in the northwest of
Brazil, which comprises close to 61 percent of the national territory.
The Amazon has been a magnet for migration, which has changed the face
of the region with extraordinary speed. Men and women with fair skin and
blonde hair, from the South, mix with Amazonian mestizos, producing a
mixture of skin colors, foods and expressions. Most of these migrants
are looking for land; others are attracted by gold. According to the
most recent census, Amazonia registered the highest rate of population
growth in the country: the state of Roraima (9.1 percent), Rondônia (7.9
percent), Mato Grosso (5.4 percent), and Pará (3.4 percent).
Protected by nature and difficult to access by
land or by air (there have been countless airplane accidents), the
Amazonian jungle creates states within a state. The law is dictated
there by those who are the boldest, the best armed, and have the best
pistoleiros (hired guns). The traffic in girls forced into prostitution
is testimony to the chaotic and inhumane character of this migration.
The girls are attracted by the promise of licit
employment, but then are sent to work in night clubs in these faraway,
inaccessible places, and kept captive like prisoners. Even the more
experienced girls, who are not new to prostitution, are tricked. By
contrast with the more naive girls, they know that they are going to
sell their bodies, but they have little idea of the regime of slavery
that awaits them.
Everything rests upon the debt--a bottomless pit.
From the moment the girl arrives at the club, she is told that she owes
money: her plane or boat ticket, which can be as much as $100. She
cannot leave until this debt is paid off. The debt grows with the
purchase of clothes, perfumes, medicine and food furnished by the club
owner at an arbitrary price.
Without the girls realizing it, the owner keeps
track of their expenditures using as a base the value of a gram of gold.
The debt snowballs, especially when the girls fall sick--a common
occurrence in this region ravaged by malaria. During the time they
cannot "work," the debt piles up. Money from clients does not pass
through the girls' hands; it goes, instead, directly to the cashbox.
In the majority of cases, the debt cannot be
repaid, and escape attempts are severely punished. The girl regains her
freedom only if she is sick, pregnant, or can no longer attract clients.
Occasionally, a client will pay for a girl's release. Luísa Ribeiro
Soares, a prostitute in Laranjal do Jari, received help from a lover who
wanted to live with her. He helped pay her debt by buying back her
"transfer," the equivalent of the certificate of emancipation given to
slaves in the last century. In this milieu, the power to buy freedom
bestows great importance on the pimps.
Many paths lead to prostitution. "Misery pushes
the girls into the street," says Lurdes au Bar Jardim, the director of
the Group of Female Prostitutes of the Center of Belem (GEMPAC). "They
have nothing to sell. They don't know how to read or write or cook. They
can sell the only valuable thing they possess: their body."
At times, the first step is linked to drug
trafficking. A number of girls have become addicted to "mela," a
kind of crack cocaine. "The girls are used as formiguinhas
(little ants)," says Captain Luiz Cláudio Azambuja, head of the
Department of Children and Adolescents of the military police of
Rondnia. "They carry the drugs to protect the adults." The girls start
by becoming addicted, and then they are used as formiguinhas and
prostitute themselves to feed their vice and to try to wipe out an
endless debt.
Another road to prostitution: a girl falls in love
with someone whom her family does not accept. As a consequence, the
family kicks her out. Without any skills, she has no alternative but to
sell her body to survive. This is what happened to Adriana Pereira Lima,
who works at a brothel in Laranjal do Jari. Her family rejected her
after she lost her virginity. The street recovered her. Today, Adriana
asks herself: "My dream is to have a husband, kids and a job. But where
can I work since I didn't go to school?"
Family problems drive many girls onto the street.
Of the 53 girls and adolescents that I interviewed, 50 came from broken
homes. Here are some numbers: 80 percent have no contact with their
father; the parents of 30 percent of the girls are dead; 35 percent say
they have suffered sexual abuse in the home and point to the step-father
as the principal abuser; and 50 percent say that alcoholism is a problem
in their family. The girls all dream of a happy family, but their hopes
are poignantly modest. When I asked one young girl to describe her ideal
father, she thought a long time before replying: "This father would only
hit me at certain times."
Francineide Luiza Cavalcanti, 14, is a product of
the disintegration of the family. "I left my home because of my
step-father," she says. "Each time my mom went out, he wanted to kiss
me. I complained to my mom, but she did nothing. So I left and didn't
come back. I prefer the street."
Indeed a number of girls consider prostitution an
avenue to freedom. They are fleeing the oppression of a patriarchal
household, where it is not uncommon for the family to be in conflict and
often violent. In some cases, the girls are trying to escape boring,
poorly paid jobs. They are seduced by the dream of having a room of
their own and earning more money.
Claudia Amaral, age 13, came to Beiradão to work
as a maid for a couple. She stayed in the city as a maid during the
daytime. At night, however, she came to the night club to realize her
deepest desire: to dance. Claudia convinces me that she truly doesn't
want to leave the brothel. She is happy dancing and meeting new people,
all of which gives her a sense of freedom. It is better, she says, than
the tiring work of a maid.
But the street is not an easy school. The girls
are obliged to submit to the depravations of their clients and the
blackmail of police officers who demand sex from the girls without
paying.
The girls sorely lack information. Of those 53
girls I interviewed, barely 15 percent use contraceptive methods and
just 5 percent regularly use condoms. Most of the girls did not have the
least idea how their bodies function or of the risks of pregnancy. Forty
percent had already self-induced abortions by the most rudimentary
methods--such as blows to the stomach, knitting needles, or
inappropriate medicine (such as quinine for malaria). Others had
abandoned their newborns in the hope that someone would pick the infants
up and care for them.
Violence is a common reality. Students at the
Federal University of Pará did a study in the garimpo zones in
1991. Their report contains the testimony of a man from Santare'm who
frequented the brothels during his travels. He describes the violence he
encountered: "The girls are submitted to all kinds of torture and
exploitation, regardless of their skin color. When they refuse, they are
mistreated--violently beaten, their hair cut with a machete, and
sometimes even killed. One girl demanded money from a john with whom
she'd just slept. She died from two gunshots in the vagina."
Ins Pinho de Carvalho, from the Pastoral Office of
Minors in Santarém, can no longer recall how many girls she has helped
liberate nor how many families have come to her in search of their
children. One case in particular made a strong impression on her. Ins
helped to free Lúcia Figueira, age 13, who was sent to the garimpos
in the Itaituba region.
After her release, Lúcia told Ins what had
happened to her. The night club owner was angry at her because of her
escape attempts. One day when he was more furious than usual, he tied
her to the back of his car and dragged her through the streets. "That
wasn't enough for him," Lúcia confided in Ins. "Afterwards, he put lemon
on my wounds."
This violence is sometimes turned inwards.
Self-mutilation--a cry for attention--is a common form of
self-punishment. Students from the Faculty of Pedagogy at the Federal
University of Mato Grosso did a study of the girls of Praca do Porto in
Cuiabá, under the direction of the psychologist Katia Marques. "When a
girl falls in love with a boy," says their report, "he becomes her
gigolo. She shares her earnings with him. However, the girls don't know
how to master their frustrations when they are in love and are treated
badly. For this reason, they beat themselves. They become totally
masochistic."
In this route of human trafficking, a virgin is
worth more than others. Maria Dalva Bandeira, a former teacher who
studied in her adolescence to become a nun, organizes a well- known
auction of virgins at La Casa da Dalva, a brothel in Imperatriz that
specializes in virgins. When a girl arrives who is still "sealed"--to
use the expression of the trade-- the whole city is told about it. The
person who pays the most has the right to be the first.
The men gather in the salon. Dalva then presents
the girl, who has been dressed up in new and seductive clothes, and has
had her face made up and her hair styled. Immediately after the
presentation, the girl returns to her room.
The auction then begins. The highest bid is
usually placed by a son of the fazendeiros--the rich landowners.
The following day is a big event for these rich young men. To deflower a
virgin is a mark of social status.
Along the row of brothels where the Casa da Dalva
is located, most of the prostitutes are young girls. The reason is
simple: by age 18, a prostitute is a finished woman, eaten away by
illnesses. It's necessary, then, to bring in new labor.
The garimpeiros--the gold diggers--call
women over 18 years "chickens," and younger girls "chicks." The
psychologist Maria Luiza Pinheiro, from the Brazilian Center for
Childhood and Adolescence, frequently travels the routes of this
traffic. She has often heard the men who chase the "chicks"say, "I had
myself one of 15 kilograms (33 pounds). It was good."
Just as I'm about to go home after talking to some
girls on a street in downtown Manaus, a child comes up to me and tugs at
my shirt sleeve.
"Mister, aren't you going to interview me?" she
asks. It is then that I realize that she is a little girl. Scarcely 12
years old, she already has a nom de guerre--Cristiane--like the
other prostitutes. Her real name is Edvalda Pereira da Silva. Like most
of the girls of the street, she has already been beaten up by the
police. She says that one of them kicked her in the stomach because she
had called him a "son of a bitch."
Edvalda knows what a condom is, but she doesn't
use them. "They say that if you don't use them, you'll catch a kind of
AIDS," she says, "but I don't believe it."
Edvalda has already learned some of the tricks of
the trade. Another girl has explained to her that she must be paid in
advance. Her price is 7,000 cruzeiros (nine dollars) a ve question:
"Little one, have you already done programs?"
Edvalda bursts out laughing. She says that her
mother works in Itamaraca'--a red-light zone--and she doesn't care if
Edvalda turns tricks. "I am different than the other prostitutes," she
adds. "Do you know why?"
I tell her that I don't have the faintest idea.
Her response takes me by surprise. She lifts up
her blouse, which is so big that it functions as a dress, and says
laughing: "I don't have breasts yet."
Edvalda and other girls I interviewed confirm the
suspicions of specialists, even though statistical studies have not yet
been done: the average age of the girls who fall into prostitution is
dropping. They are becoming younger at the same rate as the total number
of street kids is growing. Sex becomes an occasional source of revenue
even for children.
One obvious result is the girls' total ignorance
of the risks they run. The Ministry of Social Services carried out a
study in Manaus of women from 16 to 40 years old. They found that 80
percent of the women didn't know their own bodies and didn't understand
how one becomes pregnant or how to avoid it. One imagines, then, how
little is known by young girls like Edvalda.
To escape requires courage and above all
imagination. One war-like operation succeeded in freeing Maria Madalena
Costa de Oliveira. Her misadventure began on April 28, 1991, in
Altamira, when a couple, Walmir and Marisa, invited her to come work as
a domestic employee in Itaituba. She was told she would earn 30 grams of
gold per month.
On May 4, she arrived at the Miranda Hotel in
Itaituba. There she met five other girls. An unpleasant surprise was not
long in coming. Early in the morning, Walmir told the girls that they
would not be staying in the city, but would go to the garimpo. If
they wanted to bail out, it wasn't a problem. But first they had to pay
the debt they had incurred for their plane ticket and lodging. The girls
resigned themselves to going. They flew to Cuiú-Cuiú, where the pimp
Tampinha was waiting for them on the runway.
Then they encountered the second unpleaant
surprise of the trip: they had to work in the Matador night club. "Those
were infernal nights," recounts Maria Madalena. "They forced us to sleep
with several men. They made us perform homosexual acts and pose for
photos."
Three months later, Maria Madalena--accompanied by
her friends Tânia and Maria de Fátima--escaped with the help of two
garimpeiros. After two nights and a day on the run, they were hungry
and exhausted. They arrived at the plantation of Edmar Pereira, where
they asked for food. It was a bad idea: the landowner returned them to
his friend Tampinha for 49 grams of gold.
Maria Madalena didn't lose hope. In a letter to
her sister in Altamira, she detailed her predicament and called for
help. A sick prostitute left for Altamira with Maria Madalena's letter
hidden in her luggage. With this letter in hand, her sister Raimunda
Holanda looked for the judge Vera Araújo de Souza and for the federal
police.
On November 25, with the judge's court order, a
police commissioner left to look for Maria Madalena in Cuiú-Cuiú. As she
was leaving, Tampinha threatened the girl. "He said to me that if I told
anything, he would kill me," she says. "He said that if he wanted to, he
could kill me right there and bury me. That all he had to do was give
some gold to the police commissioner and everything would be forgotten."
The story of Maria Madalena sums up the climate of impunity that
envelopes the trafficking and slavery of women forced into prostitution.
Sister Dineva, from the Center for the Defense of
Minors in Cuiab&aaucte, the capital of Mato Grosso, gives me an example
of the cruelty of these power games: Jociane Silva dos Santos. Jociane
is just nine years old. She is an orphan. Her mother had already passed
away when her father died in December, 1991. At night, Jociane sleeps in
a government home for abandoned children in Mato Grosso. The home is not
very safe. Pimps keep watch in front of the building, waiting for the
girls with offers of "protection and money." In the daytime, Jociane
wanders around the plaza.
The street educators and Sister Dineva are worried
about Jociane. She is already hanging out with an older girl who has
decided to "sponsor" her. For all practical purposes, Jociane is ready
to enter the "market," negotiating what she has of highest value: her
virginity, an expensive commodity.
"I don't know how much longer we can maintain
control," laments the nun, as she points a finger at the girl who is
sponsoring Jocaine.
Jociane approaches us. I ask the usual questions:
the names of her father and mother, place of birth, workplace, childhood
memories, perception of violence, how she feels among these girls.
I ask her if she knows what AIDS is. She answers
yes. I persist: "What is it?"
"It's a sickness that comes from the river,"
Jociane replies. "They tell people not to drink this water because of
AIDS."
Mixing up AIDS and cholera highlights the
ignorance of children like Jociane and their inability to manage not
only their sex, but also their entire life. They collect trauma after
trauma, rejection after rejection.
I heard an utterance that best expressed the deep
scar left by child prostitution when I was doing research for an earlier
book at the Casa da Passagem, a shelter in Recife. After telling her
story, which was a tissue of trauma, frustration and violence, a young
girl asked: "Is it possible to be born a second time?" For the little
girls of the night, their first passage on this earth has been a tale of
misery.
###
Gilberto Dimentein is a Brazilian reporter for
Folha de São Paulo. He is author of Brazil: War on Children
(Latin Ameria Bureau/Monthly Review Press, 1991). This article is
adapted from his book Meninas da Noite (Editora Atica S.A.,
1992). Translated from the Portuguese by NACLA.
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See also related noted on Brazil's Crisis in child exploitation and
child sex auctions in Brazil |
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See also a translation of part of Gilberto Dimenstein's book on the
exploitation of indigenous girls and women in Brazil |
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Commentary
We at
LibertadLatina
join with humanity in expressing our complete outrage at the leaders
of the coup d'etat in Honduras. The leaders of the coup were not
justified in kidnapping the democratically elected president of the
nation and sending him into exile. The United Nations General
Assembly, the Organization of American States and U.S. President
Barak Obama, among many leaders of nations in the Americas, have all
joined in demanding that President
José Manuel Zelaya Rosales be returned to power.
Although the coup was approved by Honduran Supreme
Court and Congress, this only shows that the nation's democratic
institutions are weak. In Colombia, for example, President Álvaro
Uribe, a conservative, is seeking, just as did President Zelaya in
Honduras, to change the constitution to eliminate the current limits
on the number of terms that a president may serve. Yet nobody is
trying to overthrow Uribe for have proposed such an idea. The fact
that President Zelaya had set-up a popular referendum, to allow the
voters to decide the issue, was apparently too much democracy for
the coup plotters, so they pounced on Zelaya and raped democracy in
the process.
The independent press, including Feminist Radio
International Endeavor (FIRE), CIMAC Noticias in Mexico City, and
Indymedia Chiapas, have provided excellent coverage of the true
story that is taking place inside Honduras. Some of the key stories
are reprinted here.
The coup leaders have declared a state of siege, have
targeted human rights activists, and have used rifle fire to attack
unarmed protesters who are simply outraged that these cowards have
resorted to taking power by force.
Coups were a common power-grabbing tactic in Latin
America in the late 1900s. The region has since made significant
progress in moving towards democracy. This coup is just one of many
indicators that democracy is not a 'done deal' in all nations of the
Americas.
The conservative coup plotters will, consistent with
the emergent anti women's rights movement represented elsewhere in
Latin America (with whom they are apparently allied), not bode well
for women's equality.
We applaud the activism that we are seeing from brave
women and men in the face of this military repression. Just as
happened during the popular uprisings against dictators across Latin
America in the 1980s and 1990s, the coup leaders in Honduras are
using the tactics of the 'dirty wars' that lead to the murders and
rapes of tens of thousands of innocent civilians in Guatemala, El
Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Mexico and other nations of
Latin America.
Video from a number of sources shows the terrorism
with impunity that the coup's military supporters are using on
innocent protesters.
See especially this YouTube video posted on
Narco News web site that records the rifle fire of soldiers who were
shooting into crowds of protesters, as well as an interview with a
congressional representative as she visits wounded at a local
hospital and expresses her indignation at the coup.
It is an act of cowardice for the current Honduran
coup government to block CCN in Spanish, block the Internet, and
place Honduras in a stage of siege with a suspension of all
individual liberties. Given the repression that just occurred in the
aftermath of presidential elections in Iran, the world community has
very little tolerance for such illegal behavior in Honduras.
Coup leaders, return President Zelaya to his elected
position.
Nobody elected you.
Your corrupt government is not wanted and it will not
stand!
End impunity now!
Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
July 3, 2009
Honduras
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Banner:
"Feminists in Resistance; Coup
leaders get out!
Photo: CIMAC
Noticias |
Urge mayor presión a golpistas: feministas hondureñas
Lideresa pro-vida,
designada canciller por golpistas
Ante el Estado de
Emergencia en Honduras, feministas y luchadoras sociales lanzaron un
llamado a la comunidad internacional para que pronuncien una condena
más enérgica contra lo que denominaron gobierno usurpador; “nos
están disparando, golpeando, violentando todos nuestros derechos”,
denunciaron…
Honduran Feminists Urge Greater International
Pressure Against Coup Leaders
A female pro-life
leader has been appointed foreign affairs chancellor by the usurpers
In the face of the state of siege that has been declared in
Honduras, feminists and social activists have launched an appeal to
the international community to deliver a strong condemnation against
what they termed a usurper government. They state that: “We are
being shot, beaten, and they are violating all of our rights.”
In a telephone
interview with CIMAC Noticias, Hilda Rivera, coordinator of the
Center for Women's Rights in Honduras, said that support from Latin
America and the global community is urgently needed. Yesterday, the
National Congress of Honduras approved a State of Emergency,
temporarily suspending individual liberties...
"...We are urging
more pressure from the world community, because the situation is
becoming more violent here” says Rivera.
"Policemen and
soldiers are shooting and beating us. It is urgent that the
government not be given additional time [to consider ultimatums to
step down]. We have put up with four days of bullets, beatings and
rain. There is a general tiredness in the population. Nonetheless,
the violence is increasing, so we are standing up to fight.”
Rivera stated that
the coup is a serious setback for the entire society, and
particularly for women, who’s rights were already restricted. With
this coup, the problem is magnified...
Until now, "within
the feminist movement we have not anticipated everything that may
happen, but we are clear in our understanding that, with this ‘law
of the strongest,’ we can be detained, they can raid our offices and
homes, and we cannot assemble. It is of grave concern to us that we
have important issues on our agenda that are threatened by the coup,
such as the legalization of emergency contraception." ...
A central concern
for Rivera is the safety of human rights defenders. “The government
has already begun to ‘hunt’ various organization leaders by raiding
their houses and arresting them." The coup plotters know that
women do not falter in our struggle. There is a danger that
repression against feminist leaders may follow.
As an example that
the coup government is not interested in defending the rights of
women, Rivera cites the naming of the founder of
Provida [Pro Life] in Honduras as Foreign Affairs Chancellor.
Eco-feminist Daysi
Flores told Feminist International Radio (RIF) that the people are
afraid and outraged. They cannot come out of their homes. But, says
Flores, feminist resistance has been declared. Women’s rights are
going to continue to progress, and we are going to continue the
struggle.
Full English Translation
Gladis Torres Ruiz
CIMAC Noticias
News for Women
Mexico City
July 2, 2009
Honduras
Comunicado de grupos y
organizaciones del Movimiento de Mujeres y
Feminista de Honduras
A Las Organizaciones Internacionales, Cooperación Internacional,
Organismos de Derechos Humanos y a lLos Estados del Mundo
El día domingo 28
de Junio, el Presidente de la República José Manuel Zelaya Rosales,
fue agredido, secuestrado y enviado a la República de Costa Rica en
el avión presidencial, custodiado por cuerpos militares argumentando
que había violado la Constitución de la República por implementar
una consulta popular mediante una encuesta de opinión, donde se
consultara al pueblo si estaba de acuerdo o no que el 29 de
noviembre se colocara una cuarta urna para proponer una Asamblea
Nacional Constituyente, que tuviese como objetivo elaborar una nueva
Constitución con la plena participación ciudadana de los diferentes
actores sociales del país…
Statement By Feminist And Women¹s
Organizations From Honduras Following the Coup D‘Etat
To International Organizations, International Development Agencies,
Human Rights Institutions And To The States Of The World:
On Sunday, June 28,
2009 the democratically elected President of the Republic of
Honduras, José Manuel Zelaya Rosales, was assaulted, abducted and
sent to the Republic of Costa Rica in the presidential plane guarded
by the military...
The people are
peacefully expressing their rejection of the coup d’etat, demanding
the immediate reinstatement of President Zelaya, and a return to the
Rule of Law...
Given these
egregious series of events, we request the support of international
development agencies and the international community to demand the
reinstatement of the Rule of Law, to demand an end to the
prosecution of the members of the cabinet of President Manuel Zelaya
Rosales and leaders of social movements and the media, and an end to
all types of brutal violence and to prevent the imposition of
fascism in our country.
Most Honduran
citizens advocate for peace, solidarity and the respect of human
rights. We emphatically denounce the complicity shown in these
events by the Human Rights Commissioner of Honduras, Dr. Ramón
Custodio, before the regional and international human rights
organizations and the international community.
June 29, 2009
Tegucigalpa,
Honduras
Signed:
Centro
De Estudios De La Mujer Honduras (Cem-H) - The Women's Studies
Center
Centro
De Derechos De Mujeres (Cdm) - The Center for Women's Rights
Centro
De Estudios Y Accion Para El Desarrollo De Honduras (Cesadeh) -
The Center for Development Studies and Action of Honduras
Red De
Mujeres Jovenes (Redmuj) - The Young Women's Network
Acciones
Para El Desarrollo Poblacional (Adp) - Action for Population
Development
Red De Mujeres Adultas (Redmucr) -
The Adult Women's Network
Colectivo De Mujeres Universitarias (Cofemun)
- The Collective of University Women
Marcha Mundial De Las Mujeres, Comité
Nacional - Honduras Global Women's March - Honduras
Articulaciones Feminista De Redes
Locales - Articulation of Local Feminist Networks
Comisión De Mujer Pobladora
Articulaciones Feminista De Redes Locales - - Rural Women's
Commission - Articulation of Local Feminist Networks
Movimiento De Mujeres Socialistas, Las
Lolas - The Socialist Women's Movement, The Lolas
Convergencia De Mujeres De Honduras
Iniciativa Centroamericana De Seguimiento A Cairo Y Beijing - The
Honduran Convergence of the Central American Initiative to Follow-up
on Cairo and Beijing
Feministas Independientes -
Independent Feminists
Published by Feminist International Radio Endeavor (FIRE)
June 29, 2009
Honduras
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"Feminists in
Resistance" Photo: CIMAC
Noticias |
Vive Honduras una insurrección popular
contra usurpadores
Berta Cazares, candidata independiente a
la presidencia
México DF - Vivimos en Honduras una
insurrección popular, un levantamiento
con la decidida participación de las
mujeres, en contra de las fuerzas
armadas y el grupo oligárquico que
derrocó al presidente democráticamente
electo Manuel Zelaya, pero el costo es
alto y la situación de la población
civil, incluida la niñez, es crítica, la
vida cotidiana está alterada y la brutal
represión tiene como blanco principal a
la juventud…
Honduras
is Experiencing a Popular Uprising Against the Usurpers
An interview with Berta Cazares, independent candidate for
president
Honduras is living through a popular uprising, one that is being carried
out with the wholehearted participation of women against the armed
forces and the oligarchic group which overthrew democratically
elected President Manuel Zelaya. The cost has been high, and the situation
for civilians, including children, is critical. Everyday life has
changed, and the brutal repression is targeting our youth.
Bertha
Cazares Flores, an independent candidate for president of Honduras and
the
national leader of the Popular and Indigenous Organizations of
Honduras, described
the
situation in Honduras in a phone interview with CIMAC Noticias, three days after the military high command,
most of Congress and the Supreme Court overthrew the President and
his Cabinet…
Hundreds have been injured in the country, especially young people,
said
Cazares.
In the 'Progress City' (Ciudad Progreso) area, the repression was especially brutal,
perhaps because that area has historically been a center for social
struggles...
In
rural and indigenous areas of Honduras the situation is quite critical,
including in
[the town of] San Francisco de Ocaña, where, during the 1980s, the
Army used machine guns against the civilian population. "That's
where the resources should go, to see what is really happening there," Cazares says.
Cazares
added that the people continue to defy the siege, the curfew and the
ban on travel. There are military checkpoints throughout the
country. Hundreds of people from rural areas, teachers and
indigenous people, are moving toward to the capital...
Thursday
CIMAC: What
should we expect on Thursday, the day announced by Manuel Zelaya for
his
return to Honduras?
[The planned return date for President Zelaya has been pushed back
to Saturday since this story was written.
-
LL]
Cazares:
We
call upon social movements and organizations that defend
international human rights to come to Honduras in delegations, to
support the civilian population...
We hope
that [Mayan Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize laureate] Rigoberta Menchú,
along with other personalities such as Mirna Anaya, a judge on
the Supreme Court of El Salvador, and [Argentinean 1980 Nobel Peace
Prize leareate]
Adolfo Perez Esquivel will
arrive [to support President Zelaya].
Meanwhile, Berta is preparing - with an arrest warrant against her
and the knowledge that "assassination is a terrible thing in
Honduras" - for progress to be made today, Wednesday, when civic
organizations will protest against the coup at an army cordon, just three
blocks from the house that she one day hopes to govern from.
Full English Translation
Guadalupe Gomez Quintana
CIMAC Noticias
News for Women
Mexico City
July 1 2009
See
also:
Informan de batallones hondureños que se
niegan a reprimir al pueblo
Radio Progreso, pese a ser acallada por
los militares golpistas, confirmó en una de sus transmisiones
clandestinas que varios batallones de las Fuerzas Armadas de
Honduras, desde el lunes han roto con los golpistas y el gobierno de
facto, y han anunciado que permanecerán al margen de la represión al
pueblo de su país...
Honduran Army Battalions
Reject Repressing the Population
Honduran station Radio Progreso, despite
being shut-down by the coup leaders, has confirmed in one of its
clandestine transmissions that a number of battalions of the Armed
Forces of Honduras have, since Monday, June 29th, broken with the
organizers of the coup d'etat and the de facto government. They have
announced that they will remain on the sidelines of the
repression...
Radio La Primerísima
Managua, Nicaragua
June 30, 2009
Chile
 |
|
President
Michelle Bachelet of Chile, during a
June 23, 2009 visit
with U.S. President Barak Obama |
Bachelet Remueve a Jefe Policial
La presidenta de
Chile, Michelle Bachelet, removió al jefe de la policia de
investigaciones (civil), Arturo Herrera, tras una serie de denuncias
de corrupción, incluida una que involucró a policías con una red de
prostitución infantile…
Hace una semana, en
el aniversario 76 de la policía de investigaciones, Herrera lamentó
la relevancia dada por medios de difusión al caso de prostitución
infantil que involucró a un grupo de policías activos.
Bachelet Removes Police Chief
The
president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, has removed the chief of the
Investigations Police, Arturo Herrera, after a series of allegations
of corruption, including a case in which police officers were
allegedly involved with a child prostitution network.
Herrera
resigned the post three months before his scheduled retirement. He
did so after a telephone conversation with the president, held while
she was visiting Mexico.
Upon
her return to Chile the president accepted the resignation and
appointed as his replacement Marco Antonio Vasquez, now police chief
in the region of Bío Bío, 500 kilometers south of Santiago…
A week
ago, during the 76th anniversary of the Investigations
Police agency, Herrera lamented the importance that the media had
given to a case of child prostitution involving a group of police
officers.
www.ansa.it/ansalatina
June 29, 2009
See also:
Director of Chile's Investigation Police Steps
Down
Americas Quarterly
Online
June 26, 2009
See also:
LibertadLatina
Our January, 2006 news page, which contains
articles about Chile's first woman president, pediatrician Dr.
Michelle Bachelet, who along with her mother was imprisoned and
tortured by former dictator Agosto Pinochet's forces. Bachelet's
father, an air force general, was tortured to death under the
Pinochet regime.
Texas, USA, Mexico
Man handed 5 years in sex trafficking
A former registered
nurse was sentenced Wednesday to five years in prison for engaging
in what was the first and so far only federal sex-trafficking case
in San Antonio.
Brent Andrew
Stephens, 41, who surrendered his nursing license amid the criminal
case, pleaded guilty in March to conspiracy to harbor aliens for
financial gain and conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking by force,
fraud and coercion…
Stephens admitted
that he and his business partner, Timothy Gereb, planned to use
young Mexican women as escorts and in a massage parlor in May 2007.
The two paid
Stephens' personal assistant, Maria de Jesus “Jessica” Ochoa; her
sister, Consuelo Pilar Ochoa; and their mother, Isabel, to recruit
and smuggle females from Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to San Antonio.
The Ochoas smuggled
three victims, including two minors, and took them to Stephens. The
victims were given alcohol, threatened at gunpoint by Gereb and
warned not to return to Mexico, court documents state…
The victims told
agents that once they arrived in San Antonio, they were told they
would have to work as prostitutes for five years to pay the $3,000
smuggling fees…
Gereb, 50, was
sentenced earlier to 10 years in prison. Isabel Ochoa, 60, received
time served. Consuelo Ochoa, 34, was sentenced to 18 months for the
sex-trafficking case and 39 months for a separate drug case. Maria
Ochoa, 32, got 12 months and one day and is now out of jail.
Guillermo
Contreras
Express-New
June 25, 2009
Florida, USA
Lee County at Forefront of Slavery Fight
"We're light years
ahead of other communities," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Douglas
Molloy, who's prosecuted 20 slavery and human trafficking cases
throughout Southwest Florida over the past decade, freeing 50
victims. "Because of our united community efforts, we're in a place
most areas aspire to."
Those efforts
include a two-man team at the Lee County Sheriff's Office, a
multi-agency task force and a new command center at Florida Gulf
Coast University: The Esperanza Project.
"What's happening
at FGCU is electric - just electric," Molloy said.
One of a scant
handful of university-based human trafficking research centers in
the country, it opened eight months ago with $100,000 in seed money
from a federal anti-trafficking grant given to the Lee County
Sheriff's Office.
The center's name
means "hope" in Spanish. It's also the pseudonym of the 11-year-old
girl whose enslavement in Cape Coral became a galvanizing force as
Lee county's first high-profile victim.
In 2005, the girl
was discovered in Cape Coral, pregnant and bleeding. Born in
Guatemala, she was sold to a man who brought her here and forced her
into sexual and domestic slavery. She was repeatedly raped and
beaten during her two-year captivity. Molloy eventually sent her
captors to federal prison.
Her case sparked a
wave of questions and self-examination among law enforcement and
residents alike.
In short order, the
Sanibel chapter of Zonta International, a service group, made human
trafficking its signature cause.
The U.S. Department
of Justice awarded the Lee County Sheriff's Office a $450,000,
three-year grant to combat human trafficking.
By the end of 2005,
Molloy said authorities were working on more trafficking cases in
Southwest Florida than many entire state sees in a year…
"(The U.S.) spends
about about $23 million on this annually - that's not much at
all,"... "Estimates are there are about 17,000 [new] foreign-born
trafficking victims alone [each and every year] and 17,000 homicide
victims, and yet we solve 70 percent of the homicides and 1 percent
of trafficking cases." ...
The man in the No.
1 human trafficking job in Washington is Luis C. de Baca. The new
ambassador-at-large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons at
the State Department promises trafficking will be a priority of the
new administration as well - especially, of Secretary of State
Hilary Clinton...
Amy Bennett Williams
www.News-Press.com
June 28, 2009
Mexico
 |
|
Mexican Congressional Deputy
Maricela Contreras
speaks out about defects in trafficking law's
regulations |
Denuncian colusión de bandas y funcionarios para secuestrar
migrantes
México - La
presidenta de la Comisión de Equidad y Género de la Cámara de
Diputados, Maricela Contreras, denunció que bandas organizadas
coludidas con autoridades cometen la mayoría de los secuestros
contra migrantes en las zonas fronterizas.
Señaló que según el
Informe Especial sobre los casos de secuestro contra migrantes se
documentaron nueve mil 758 personas privadas de su libertad, y de
ese total en nueve mil 194 casos el delito fue cometido por ese tipo
de organizaciones criminales...
Congress Explores Allegations of Collusion
Between Criminal Gangs and Government Officials to Kidnap Migrants
According to the
Special Report, 9,758 persons were deprived of their liberty
In 9,194 cases,
the offense was committed by criminal organizations
The president of
the Commission on Equality and Gender of the Chamber of Deputies,
Maricela Contreras has reported that Mexican authorities have
colluded with organized gangs to commit the majority of kidnappings
targeting migrants in border regions.
Deputy Contreras
noted that a special report on cases of kidnappings against migrants
documented the fact that 9,758 people had been deprived of their
liberty, and that in 9,194 of these cases, organized crime was the
perpetrator...
The report states
that migrants who enter Mexico are subjected to extortion, robbery,
kidnapping, illegal searches, beatings, chases, being thrown off of
moving trains, rape, threats, psychological pressure and even
murder.
Contreras pointed
out that the assailants most often mentioned by victims are elements
of the Federal Preventive Police, military personnel and agents of
the National Institute for
Migration.
Data reported by
the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL)
indicates that along the southern border of Mexico, 70 per cent of
migrants are victims of violence. Some 60 percent of migrants suffer
some form of sexual abuse, including rape.
The CEPAL report
also emphasizes that the United States border with Mexico is also a
very dangerous region, where women migrants become victims of sexual
violence, forced prostitution, human trafficking and murder.
Deputy Contreras
denounced these human rights violations and called upon Mexican
society to not tolerate inefficiencies, incompetence and
complicity by govern-ment officials, behaviors that threaten the
lives and integrity of thousands of men and women who cross the
borders into Mexico...
Full English Translation
El Financiero
Online
With information
from Notimex / JOT
June 27, 2009
See also:
Mexico
20000 Migrants a Year Kidnapped in Mexico En Route to US
Some 20,000 of the
140,000 illegal migrants en route to the United States who travel
through
Mexico to find work and a better life are kidnapped each year
and subjected to rape, torture and murder, crimes that usually go
unpunished due to the corruption of the authorities, fear of
reprisals and distrust of authorities, according to Mexico’s
independent National Human Rights Commission.
Mexico City – More than 1,600
migrants, above all Central Americans en route to the United
States to find work, are kidnapped monthly and subjected to
humiliations that usually go unpunished due to the corruption of
the authorities, Mexico’s independent National Human Rights
Commission reported.
“The kidnapping of migrants has
become a continuous practice of worrying dimensions, generally
unpunished and with characteristics of extreme cruelty,”
commission chairman Jose Luis Soberanes said Monday at the
presentation of the report.
Between September
2008 and February 2009, the commission registered a total of 198
separate cases of mass kidnappings of migrants involving 9,758
victims...
EFE
June 17, 2009
Sitio Oficial de Maricela Contreras
Julián
-
Maricela
Contreras' official web site (In Spanish)
Maricela Contreras Julián en la
página oficial de la Cámara de Diputados
-
Maricela
Contreras' Congressional web site - In Spanish
Mexico
 |
|
Mexican Congressional Deputy
Maricela Contreras,
chairwoman of the national commission to combat
trafficking, speaks out about defects in the federal
regulations published by President Calderón that weaken
the nation's first federal anti-trafficking law |
Atorada, ley contra tráfico de personas
Señala diputada que Segob no incluyó fiscalía en el reglamento
La Comisión de
Equidad y Género de la Cámara de Diputados lamentó que a pesar de
que se han detectado redes de delincuencia organizada dedicadas a la
trata de personas en el país, el programa nacional de combate contra
este delito no podrá operar sino hasta 2011 debido a que no se ha
instalado la comisión encargada de su elaboración y no cuenta con
una partida presupuestal específica...
Mexico’s Law to Prevent and Punish Trafficking
in Persons is Stuck in the Mud
The Interior Department failed to include a role for the
special prosecutor for trafficking's office in the law’s published
regulations
The regulations as written will tie the hands of the
anti-trafficking law’s enforcement provisions until 2011
The
Commission on Equality and Gender of the Chamber of Deputies (the
lower house of Congress) regrets the fact that despite having
identified organized crime networks involved in human trafficking in
the country, the national program to combat this crime cannot begin
operating until 2011. The [unexpected] delay is due to the fact that
the commission responsible for standing-up these efforts does not
yet have a line item in the federal budget, and therefore it has not
been created.
Deputy
Maricela Contreras of the Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD)
and chairwoman of the anti-trafficking commission, noted that
another failure of the Department of the Interior (SEGOB)
in drafting the required federal regulations that will activate the
2008 anti-trafficking law is the fact that
SEGOB did not create a role
for the office of the Special Prosecutor for Crimes of Violence
Against Women and Trafficking (FEVIMTRA) [an office of the Attorney
General of the Republic] as one of the institutions responsible
for combating trafficking...
Contreras, as part of her analysis of the official anti-trafficking
regulations published on February 27, 2009 in the Official Gazette,
added that
the targeting of organized crime is also absent from the regulations.
"This situation is serious, because the regulations do not recognize
that the problem [of trafficking] originates with various forms of
criminal organizations, from disorganized bands that are just
starting up to the more highly structured trafficking networks and
mafias," says Contreras...
The
Joint Committee of Congress has made an appeal to President Calderón’s legal counsel requesting that the Executive
open the
official regulations for revision [to repair the many defects
within]. Presidential deputy legal counsel Javier Sanchez Arriaga
responded to Congress by stating that changing the regulations was a
responsibility of the Interior Department (Segob).
[And thus, nothing
was ever done to improve the regulations -
LL]
Full English
Translation
Liliana Alcántara
El
Universal
June
20 2009
See also:
The current regulations have no minimum
standards, nor do they integrate the work of
key federal agencies
Mexico City – Mexico City congressional
deputy Maricela Contreras, president of the
Commission on Equality and Gender of the
Chamber of Deputies, has declared that a
re-writing of the published Federal
Regulations that enable the 2008 Law to
Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons
is urgently needed,
given that there is an indifference
and unwillingness on the part of the federal
government
to stop this crime wave, [of human
trafficking - in defiance of the will of
Congress].
...Contreras, who had called for the
declaration, stated that "the published
rules were delivered late [after a 9 month
delay following the law’s passage, and after
four warning to President Calderón from
Congress -LL],
they are 'plain,' and they contain
omissions. The rules don’t provide any tools
to combat or prevent trafficking, much less
any provisions for the care of the victims,
who are mostly girls and women. For these
reasons, President Calderón should have the
rules revised, because in their current
state, they aren’t worth anything."
Full English
Translation
CIMAC Noticias
May 22, 2009
See
also:
|
¡Héroes!
Lea nuestra sección
sobre la lucha de varios congresistas y defensoras
de los derechos humanos para lograr obligar que el
Presidente Felipe Calderón
publica un reglamiento fuerte respladar a la nueva
ley: Prevenir y Sancionar la Trata de
Personas, de 2008, que hasta ahora es sigue
siendo una ley sin fuerzas.
Read our special section
about the brave work of advocates and congressional
leaders in Mexico to break-through the barriers of
impunity and achieve truly effective federal
regulations that will enforce the original
congress-ional intent of Mexico's 2008
Law to
Prevent and Punish Trafficking in Persons.
LibertadLatina
|
|
|
|
Mexico, Canada
Pedophile ring suspect caught in Mexico
A Canadian suspected of heading a North
American pedophilia ring has been arrested in Mexico in
possession of four million photographs and videos of children
shown naked or striking suggestive poses.
The suspect, Arthur Lelland Sayer, "was
caught red-handed at his home in Tijuana, Baja California (close to
the US border) with a large number of photos and videos that were
stored on over a dozen hard drives", Mexico City's public prosecutor
said in a statement on Thursday.
A Mexican police investigation is
ongoing to dismantle a major child pornography network and to "find
evidence that it is active in the three North American countries:
Mexico, the United States and Canada."
The crime ring was discovered by the
"cyber police" of Mexico's Public Safety Ministry, which arrested
the Canadian on Sunday along with agents from FEVIMTRA, a special
unit that combats human trafficking.
Agence France-Presse (AFP) June
27, 2009
Added:
June 28, 2009
 |
|
Cecilia Romero, head of Mexico's national
immigration service, says that sex tourism and pedophile
networks are "inevitable."
"El
turismo sexual es inevitable" -
Cecilia Romero del Instituto Nacional de Migración de
México
Photo: El
Universal |
LibertadLatina
Commentary
President Calderón, the Human Rights
Crisis at Mexico's Southern Border is Unacceptable
Our current series of articles covering the human rights emergency
facing women and girl migrants at Mexico's southern border responds
directly to the recent comments of Cecilia Romero, head of Mexico's
national immigration service (the
National Institute for Migration - INM). Director Romero stated in a
press interview with El Universal, a major Mexico City daily paper, that human
trafficking is "inevitable", and that, "the
existence of the smuggling of migrants, human trafficking, pedophile
networks, and the kidnappings and violence that affect thousands of
migrants are only
"evils of mankind"
that Mexico cannot eradicate.
We strongly disagree with Director Romero and others in the
leadership of Mexico's National Action Party, who habitually dismiss critical women's
rights issues, including the femicide murders in Ciudad Juarez, as being the
inevitable, and 'normal' results of male human behavior.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The citizens of Mexico, Mexico's Congress and the international
community need to hold the government of President Felipe Calderón accountable
for his allowing unending mass gender atrocities to occur on Mexico's southern
border with Guatemala and Belize.
In this hell-on-earth, an estimated 450 to 600 migrant women are
sexually assaulted each day, according to the International Organization for
Migration. Police response is almost non-existent. At times,
police are complicit in this criminal violence.
Mexico's southern border is also the largest zone on earth for
the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC), according to Save the
Children.
As Father
Luis Nieto states in the below article about Salvadoran mothers who must come to
Mexico's border to grieve for their raped and murdered daughters,
"We cannot keep quiet, we cannot be complicit in this."
We strongly agree with that sentiment. Silence is also violence.
The federal government of Mexico is not ignorant of this ongoing
catastrophe. The United Nations, the International Organization for Migration,
Save the Children, elements of the Catholic Church, the National Human Rights
Commission (CNDH) and many members of Congress have, for the last several years,
demanded action to end these atrocities.
Although INM director Cecilia Romero promised in February of 2007 that she
would "entirely
eliminate this terrible situation," no visible action
has been taken to do so as of June of 2009, 16 months after Romero made that
promise.
With the current economic slowdown and the expansion of
global
criminal sex trafficking operations, the rapes,
kidnappings and sexual enslavement of innocent migrants on that border is increasing with no end in sight.
As the United States Congress prepares to send over $400 million
dollars in largely military aid to Mexico as part of the Merida Initiative to
combat the drug cartels, we insist that human rights conditions be placed on
those and other U.S. foreign aid funds that are headed to Mexico.
Mexico must close down the mass rape, kidnapping, murder and
child sex trafficking gauntlet that exists with total impunity on its southern border.
We also want to see the estimated 4,000 mostly Mayan indigenous
children kidnapped from this region and sold to brothels in Tokyo, and also the
uncounted thousands of other indigenous child victims who have been sold to brothels in New York and
Madrid rescued, repatriated and then truly cared for.
Do you need money, President Calderón, to get these things done?
Or is a misogynist, 'socially conservative' ideology that is resurgent in Mexico, and that has
as its strongest voice the PAN political party, the real problem here?
Esta barbarie no será perdonado por
Dios!
This barbarity will not be pardoned by God!
If Mexico does not have control over this part of its own
territory, or if, as appears to actually be the case, the PAN's socially
conservative agenda won't allow it to defend innocent and vulnerable women and
children in crisis, consistent with their apathetic reaction to the femicide
murders in Ciudad Juarez, then perhaps an international force organized by the
Organization of American States, or by the United Nations needs to step-up to
the plate, offer to help Mexico, and take control of the situation.
This crisis in Mexico is the best example in the Americas of why
a new Global Plan of Action, as proposed by
Ecuadorian Minister
of Justice and Human Rights (Attorney
General)
Néstor Arbito
Chica
and diplomats gathered at the United Nations on May 13, 2009, is
needed to get around this impasse.
Somehow, the fact that the
government of Mexico is a signatory to the
Palermo Protocol, and the fact that
Mexico passed its 2009 U.S. Department of State Trafficking in Persons Report
evaluation with a relatively positive Level 2 Rating (as we also acknowledge State's strong
critique of corruption in Mexico), misses the point.
New and out-of-the box strategies are needed to oblige Mexico to
fulfill its international obligations to end this mass gender atrocity
once and for all.
It is not an impossible task.
The status quo today is... unacceptable!
End impunity
now!
Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
June 28, 2009
Mexico
 |
|
Salvadoran mothers gather to pray and
leave offerings and crosses for their family members who were
abused, kidnapped and murdered in the 'mugging and rape guantlet' at Mexico's southern border
region known as
'La Arrocera' - the Rice Cooker. |
Madres salvadoreñas depositan ofrendas en "La Arrocera"
El 80 porciento de los abusos cometidos contra los inmigrantes se
cometen en esta zona de Huixtla, Chiapas
Huixtla, Chiapas -
Los parientes de indocumentados fallecidos y desaparecidos visitaron
"La Arrocera" , un pequeño tramo de escasos cuatro kilómetros que
los indocumentados utilizan para evadir la caseta migratoria El
hueyate, en Huixtla...
Salvadoran mothers
leave offerings for their murdered children at
"The Rice Cooker"
80 percent of abuses against migrants occur in this area near the
city of Huixtla, Chiapas
Huixtla, Chiapas - relatives of deceased and missing undocumented
migrants visited "La Arrocera," a four kilometer long rural trail that
north-bound Central and South American migrants use to bypass the
Hueyate immigration
station in the city of Huixtla, Chiapas.
Under strict
security arrangements and with the support of Mexico's National
Commission on Human Rights (CNDH), members of the Committee of
Families of Deceased and Missing Migrants toured the area of "the
Rice Cooker" near Huixtla, a municipality in the state of Chiapas,
where dozens of men and women have been assaulted, raped and
murdered.
"The Rice
Cooker" is a
[rural] migrant trail where 80 percent of the assaults and homicides
in the region are committed, according to testimony gathered by the
Catholic Church and human rights organizations.
Even police will not
enter this zone unless they have several officers armed with
high-powered weapons.
Father
Luis Angel Nieto prayed for eternal rest for all of those
migrants who lost their lives here in their attempt to reach "the
American Dream."
For the second time
during the trip,
Father
Luis Nieto demanded that the Mexican authorities combat these
crimes, that for several years have sewn pain and fear.
"We cannot keep
quiet, we cannot be complicit in this," he said.
After prayer, the
Salvadorans planted dozens of crosses in memory of those who lost
their lives here and who were never identified.
During the
emotional ceremony, the mothers and fathers could not contain their
tears. The sadness and pain invaded their faces. Most knew the
true meaning of "the Rice Cooker".
Juan de Dios
Garcia Davish
Feb. 11, 2009
See also:
“Wall of Violence” on Mexico’s Southern
Border
Calderon’s
“two-faced” policy combines police, the military, gangs, and Los
Zetas [ex-military, who are now 'hit men' for the drug cartels] to fulfill US
mandate to deter Central American migration
... Wall
of Violence
“Migrants don’t have
rights in Mexico,” says Father Heyman Vazquez Medina, founder of El
Hogar de la Misericordia. “It’s ok to beat them, extort money from
them, rob them, sexually abuse them, murder them, and nothing
happens.
Central American
migrants’
legal security guarantees appear to
be repeatedly and permanently violated by individuals and groups of
people who rely on the protection, consent, tolerance, or
acquiescence of the State and who have the power of weapons,
money, police protection, corruption, and impunity. They have put a
price on the head of each migrant.”
Migrant shelter
staffers say those who abuse migrants operate with absolute
impunity... [Father Alejandro Solalinde
Guerra, the southern coordinator of the Catholic Church’s Human
Mobility Mission Migrants program]
recalls one case where a woman was kidnapped from one of the
shelters he oversees. Solalinde remained in contact with her family
throughout the ordeal. When she finally turned up in the United
States, she said that the group that kidnapped her forced her to
make several [pornographic movies]. When they finally brought her to
the US-Mexico border, they made her family pay thousands of dollars
in ransom. Solalinde offered to fly her back south and pay all of
her expenses if she filed a complaint with the government. The woman
refused, saying she never wanted to set foot in Mexico ever again.
Even when migrants
or human rights organizations do file complaints, they almost never
result in arrests or convictions. Solalinde says that almost every
time he calls the police because migrants have identified and
located their attackers, he can’t find a police force that will
arrest the suspects. They all say they don’t have jurisdiction in
immigration affairs...
...[Mercedes
Osuna of La Semilla del Sur, a Chiapas-based organization that works
primarily on indigenous issues]
explains that [after crossing into Mexico, to avoid a migration
station on the highway north], undocumented migrants must walk a
roundabout route through an area called la Arrocera. La Arrocera is
teeming with violent criminals who mug [and rape and kidnap]
migrants as they pass through. Osuna spoke with some migrants who
recently passed through la Arrocera. They told her that in la
Arrocera they saw uniformed Chiapas state police in marked vehicles
pick up and drop off people who mugged migrants. In la Arrocera, the
muggers are painfully thorough: migrants complained to Osuna of
being stripped searched. The assailants even checked their victims’
anuses and vaginas for hidden valuables.
Police don’t just
offer rides to assailants; they often are the assailants...
**
The “Wall of Violence” is fierce: El Hogar de la Misericordia [a
migrant shelter] estimates that 80% of all migrants who pass through
Chiapas state have been assaulted during their travels.
Approximately 30% of the women who come to El Hogar de la
Misericordia report being sexually assaulted in la Arrocera,
Chiapas, which is only one of many stops along the migrants’ route.
Fermina Rodriguez of the Fray [Friar] Matias de Cordova Human Rights
Center, which monitors human rights on Mexico’s southern border,
says, “When you talk to women, they consider rape to be part of the
price they pay to migrate.” ...
Kristen Bricker
My Word is My Weapon
Dec. 24, 2008
Panama
|
 |
|
A 'Genteleman's
Club' in Panama
Photo: Panama
Star |
The Sexual
Reality of the Country
Panama is not
only seen as a tax haven, but also a sexual paradise for tourists
where everything is available for the right price
Every country has a seedy side and Panama is no
exception. Like many other places in the world the sex industry is
thriving and attracting visitors.
For many
tourists that is one of Panama’s attractions. The so called
“gentlemen’s clubs” offer not only beautiful women willing to do
anything for the right price, but also the promise of forbidden
pleasures.
Technically
speaking sexual tourism is a crime, however there are Internet sites
where the would be traveler will not only have all the their
traveling arrangement taken care of, but also they throw into the
package a lovely companion of whatever sex and age depending on the
client’s preference...
Prostitution is
a big business and organized crime gangs regularly bring women from
Colombia, the Dominican Republic and other countries to work in the
sex industry.
They bring the
girls under false pretences promising them work. In reality the
human traffickers take away their passports and use them as
prostitutes in nightclubs and bars.
They are scared
and lonely, in a foreign country, with nowhere to run to. They are
terrified of the human traders and too afraid to go to the police
because they know they are going to be deported...
Perhaps the
worst part of the sex industry is the commercial sexual exploitation
of children through on-line pornography and actual prostitution.
The Public
Ministry is currently investigating 40 cases involving commercial
sexual exploitation of children and pornography...
Marijulia
Pujol Lloyd
Panama
Star
06-04-2009
Mexico
 |
|
Senators José Luis Máximo
García Zalvidea (left) and Rubén Velázquez, |
 |
|
Senators Lázaro Mazón (left) and
Francisco Javier Castellón Fonseca |
PRD pide a INM explicación por red de
lenocinio
Legisladores del
PRD pidieron la comparecencia de Cecilia Romero Castillo,
comisionada del Instituto Nacional de Migración (INM), por el caso
de mujeres sin papeles de Centroamérica prostituidas...
Legislators call
upon the Joint Committee of Congress to call immigration (INM)
director Cecilia Romero in to appear and explain apparent
involvement of INM agents
in
Yucatán
sex trafficking
network
Congressional
lawmakers from the Party of the Democratic Revolution [one of
Mexico’s three main political parties] have called for Cecilia
Romero Castillo, commissioner of the National Institute for
Migration (INM) to appear before Congress to explain the situation
of a case in which undocumented Central American women where
prostituted in [the state of Yucatán, with the alleged involvement
of immigration agents in criminal activity].
Senators
José Luis Máximo García Zalvidea,
Rubén Velázquez,
Lázaro Mazón and
Francisco Javier Castellón Fonseca presented an accord before
the Standing [joint] Committee of Congress to "invite" to the
commissioner of the INM to a meeting with legislative members of the
First Committee.
PRD legislators
want Romero to report on the performance of INM immigration officers
in the areas of human rights, and especially in the state of Yucatán,
“where a network dedicated to trafficking in persons and sexual
exploitation of women" [involving INM officers] has been discovered.
The PRD
congressional members have also asked the Standing Committee of
Congress to request that the Attorney General’s Special Prosecutor
for Crimes of Violence Against Women and Trafficking in Persons
(FEVIMTRA) investigate and take action against agents in the INM’s
Yucatán office for their involvement in human trafficking and sexual
exploitation.
The Standing
Committee was also asked to request from the National Commission on
Human Rights that it open an investigation into the case, and assist
the foreign national victims who have filed criminal complaints in
the case.
Jorge Ramos and
Ricardo Gomez
El Universal
Mexico City
June 17 2009
Colombia
 |
|
The 11 month police
operation was code named for this well known
Colombian novel |
Así operaba la red de trata de personas más poderosa del país,
desmantelada por la Policía
Un grupo de 20
investigadores de la Policía de Infancia y Adolescencia de Medellín
adelantó toda la investigación, que se inició en julio del año
pasado. Una joven de 18 años denunció su caso.
"Una amiga me dijo
que le estaban ofreciendo un trabajo en Bogotá y que nos iban a
pagar 300 o 400 mil pesos. Cuando nos presentamos nos subieron a un
bus, pero para el Urabá. Luego nos recogieron en un taxi, nos
quitaron los papeles y nos llevaron a una casa de citas. Allá un
señor nos dijo que ya sabíamos a qué íbamos, hasta que la ley nos
encontró como a los cinco días"...
Police dismantle the largest sex trafficking
network discovered to date in Colombia
A group of 20 police investigators from the Children and Adolescents
unit in the city of Medellin developed the entire investigation,
which began in July of 2008. An 18-year-old youth originally
reported to network to authorities.
"A
friend told me that she had been offered a job in [the capital city
of] Bogotá
that would pay 300 to 400 pesos [between $140 and $185 US dollars].
When we reported for work we were told to board a bus, but it was
bound for the city of Urabá. Then our employers picked us up in a
taxi, they took our identification and took us to a brothel. There,
a man told us that we knew what we were going to have to do. We were
rescued by the police 5 days later.” ...
The authorities arrested 69 people, including 17 women. Police
remain on the trail of another 28 suspects.
There were so many similar complaints from victims that
investigators had concluded that they were not dealing with two or
three people who induced women into prostitution, but a powerful
network. One that trafficked women from Medellin not only to other
cities in Antioquia department [state], but also to the capital,
Bogota , and to Cucuta, Cartagena, Santa Marta and towns in the
Magdalena Medio [the eastern-most region of Antioquia]. There are
also indications that the network had contacts abroad to traffic
women to Aruba and Venezuela...
"Send me another one like her and we will call the account even"
Police
intercepted communications between members of the network. They were
able to establish that eight people, which they called ‘The
Commission,’ sold women for amounts ranging from 30,000 to a million
Colombian pesos [between $14 and $467 US dollars].
One
intercepted communicated from a customer of the network [a brothel
owner] to a member of the ‘Commission stated: "You sent me a woman
for 30,000 pesos, but she was very ugly. Send me another one like
her and we’ll call the account even.” ...
After
the operation, code named 'Candida
Eréndida' [Innocent
Eréndira, a novel by famed Colombian Nobel
Literature Prize winner Gabriel
García Márquez],
police
distributed leaflets in the city of Medellin to
warn the public not to be taken in by these networks.
Police
continue to investigate the network’s
links abroad.
Full English Translation
www.eltiempo.com
June 26, 2009
Mexico, Guatemala
 |
|
Photo: CIMAC Noticias |
Niñez y prostitución en la frontera sur, el
costo de llegar a EU
Leticia, una vida entre ebrios, maras y policías
Segunda y última parte
Suchiate, Chiapas.
- Leticia, como miles de púberes y jóvenes en el submundo de la
explotación sexual infantil en México, sobrevive entre ebrios, en
esta zona de 700 kilómetros de frontera con Guatemala y Belice.
Tenía 12 años
cuando llegó sola a Chiapas por primera vez, con la ilusión de
continuar viaje y cruzar la frontera estadounidense en busca de un
mejor futuro. Ahora, en su sexto intento, trabaja en una cantina de
la zona. Apenas ha cumplido 14 años de edad...
The
Cost of Reaching
the U.S.; Children and
Prostitution at Mexico’s Southern
Border
Leticia at age 14: a life drinking, gangs and police
Second and last part
Suchiate, Chiapas state - Leticia, like many pre-teen and teenage
youth living in the underworld of child sexual exploitation in
Mexico, survives between bouts of
heavy
drinking here along Mexico’s 700 kilometer border with
Guatemala and Belize.
Leticia was
12-years-old when she came alone to Chiapas for the first time, with
the illusion of being able to reach and then cross the U.S. border
in search of a better future. Now, after her sixth attempt, she
works in a cantina (bar) in the area. She has just turned 14...
Unlike many of her
fellow teen prostitutes, Leticia did not have to sell her virginity,
a ‘service’ that customers are charged between $2,000 and $3,500
for. "I wanted to marry my boyfriend, but he abandoned me when he
learned that I was pregnant. I had an abortion at two months out of
disappointment," said Leticia, expressing with her child’s eyes a
false maturity that shows even more her clearly her helpless...
Leticia says that
many customers not only want to have sex, but they also want to
photograph her or record her on videotape or on cell phones in
exchange for an additional amount of money...
...The
Chiapas State’s Attorney has, during 2009, dismantled three gangs
dedicated to the sexual exploitation of minors in the cities of
Tapachula, Tuxtla Gutierrez and Rayón. At least 14 detainees facing
charges for procuring, criminal association and assault, among other
charges.
The children and
underage youth freed from these gangs had been forced to work in
sexual slavery for more than 12 hours each day. They had to bring
their enslavers $2,000 during that period. In exchange, they were
given one plate of rice and beans to eat. These facts are just the
tip of an ominous iceberg...
Full English Translation
Manuel de la Cruz
CIMAC Noticias
News for Women
Mexico City
June 25, 2009
LibertadLatina
Commentary
We at
LibertadLatina
once again applaud the
detailed, consistent and high quality reporting that CIMAC Noticias
in Mexico has provided on the critical issues affecting women and
girls in Mexico and across Latin America.
The global humanitarian organization Save the Children has
identified Mexico's southern border with Guatemala and Belize as
being the largest zone for the commercial sexual exploitation of
children (CSEC) in the entire world. We have long recognized this
fact, and accurate reporting in the Spanish language press, from
CIMAC and also mainstream Mexican newspapers has provided a window
into this nightmare.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) office in
Tapachula, Chiapas has estimated that between 450 to 600 women and girl
migrants who cross the border into southern Mexico are raped each
and every day, with little or no law enforcement reaction in response.
In Tapachula, a prostitution 'mega-center' in Chiapas state, over 50% of the 20,000
females working in prostitution are underage girls and youth who
have been forced by others or by economic necessity to accept a life
of sexual exploitation. Some 50% of them are from the Mayan majority
nation of Guatemala.
Chiapas, being a state located on this lawless border, is the only government entity
in the world that is not actually a nation to have established a direct relationship with
the United Nations to address human trafficking. This region's
crisis is indeed an emergency that requires the focused attention from the
world community.
President Felipe Calderón of Mexico has been less than enthusiastic
about fighting human trafficking, given his year-long effort to foot drag
on efforts to publish effective regulations to enable the nation's
first anti-trafficking law.
Now, Cecilia Romero, head of Mexico's immigration service (the
National Institute for Migration - INM), has stated that human
trafficking is "inevitable", and added that, "the
existence of the smuggling of migrants, human trafficking, pedophile
networks, and the kidnappings and violence that affect thousands of
migrants are only
"evils of mankind"
that Mexico cannot eradicate.
Women and children's rights and immigrant rights groups in Mexico
have been under-standably outraged by these comments. We join with
them in denouncing such a hands-off and dismissive approach to confronting the mass
gender atrocity of sexual exploitation and violence with impunity
that is now taking place across Mexico.
We remain especially concerned that Cecilia Romero, a former
congressional deputy, senator and
a long-time
activist and official in the National Action Party (PAN)
since 1982, is, through
her statements about the 'inevitability' of sex trafficking,
effectively justifying such criminal sexual exploitation and the lack of
a Mexican federal response to that illegal enterprise. This policy
position is consistent with many other
statements and actions from
the socially conservative PAN, that actively seek to diminish the
independence and basic individual human rights of women.
It thus remains the responsibility of the international community to
address these issues in collaboration, and in solidarity with the
many elements of Mexican society who desire to be liberated from
this Taliban-like mass movement to repress the basic humanity of women and girls.
Members of Congress, and activists in organizations such as the
Teresa Ulloa's Mexico City based Latin America and Caribbean branch
of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, as well as brave
reporters like Lydia Cacho (who has been unjustly jailed and still faces
death threats for her activism), and news agencies such as CIMAC
Noticias (who's offices have been ransacked in the past for their
reporting on sexual exploitation), all deserve the support of the
international community, and they deserve our help.
We especially laud Teresa Ulloa and CIMAC Noticias for standing up
to denounce the exploitation of indigenous women and girls, who are
the primary target of many traffickers and rapists.
Let's give the advocates for women and girl's human rights in Mexico
the help that they need now, while there is still time to avert
an even more well organized war against women and girls than the one
that is happening today!
End impunity
now!
Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
June 26/27, 2009
See also:
Mexico vows to improve
migrant's treatment
Mexico City - Mexico's head
of migration [Cecilia Romero Castillo] on
Tuesday pledged to improve the agency's
detention centers in response to criticism
that Mexico fails to give Central American
immigrants the same respect it demands for
its own citizens in the United States....
The Mexican government has
acknowledged that many officials are bribed
by human smugglers. Migrants face abuse from
corrupt police as well as
violent gangs who wait on the southern
border to rob and assault them.
The government-funded
National Human Rights Commission, U.N. human
rights officials and other non-governmental
organiza-tions say they have documented
abuses.
The migration depart-ment's plan aims "to
entirely eliminate this terrible situation,"
Romero told a news conference.
[Yet as of June, 2009 they have failed to
act on this promise -
LL.]
Answering U.S. concerns,
President Felipe Calderon also has promised
to strengthen security on Mexico's southern
border to stop the tide of illegal migrants
- the majority of whom use Mexico as a way
station to the United States...
In January [2007], Mexico
detained more than 10,000 illegal migrants,
and
expects that number to increase to 205,000
by the end of [2007],
according to a report by the migration
department....
Lisa J. Adams
The
Associated Press
Feb. 28, 2007
Mexico, Guatemala
 |
|
Photo: CIMAC Noticias |
Leticia, de 14 años, sobrevive en la
explotación sexual
24 mil niñas y niños prostituidos u obligados a la pornografía
Primera de dos partes
Suchiate, Chiapas - Leticia es una niña centroamericana de 14 años,
sin documentos, a quien prostituyen en una cantina de este municipio
fronterizo con Guatemala.
Han pasado casi dos
años desde que dejó su país natal para migrar rumbo a Estados
Unidos. A pesar de las duras condiciones en que vive para lograr su
objetivo, no deja de intentarlo. Sabe que la deportación es casi
segura, según sus propias palabras, pero ni eso la detiene en su
idea de cruzar la frontera, alternativa que encontró ante la miseria
y el incierto futuro en su lugar de origen...
Leticia, Age 14, Survives in Sexual Exploitation
24,000 boys and girls forced into prostitution or pornography across
Mexico
First of two parts
Suchiate, Chiapas state – Leticia is a 14-year-old undocumented
Central American girl who is being prostituted in a Cantina (bar) in
this town on the Guatemalan border.
It has
been almost two years since Leticia left her native country to
migrate to the United States. Despite the harsh conditions she has
had to live through in order to achieve that goal, she will not give
up. She knows that her deportation from Mexico is almost certain, as
she herself says. But she will not be detained in her effort to
reach the U.S. border, seeking to find an alternative to the misery
and uncertain future that she faced in her homeland.
Leticia’s situation is no different than that of hundreds of
children who have been trapped by this border region’s commercial
sex networks, who have offered their victims “a way to make fast
money.”
They
are victims of exploitation of the international networks of
traffickers who grab them either before or after they cross the
border at the Suchiate River or along clandestine smuggling paths
that exist all along the border with Guatemala. Advocacy
organizations who fight on their behalf refer to them as “sex
slaves...”
The
director of the Movimiento Ciudadano de la Frontera Sur (Southern
Frontier Citizen’s Movement), Juan José González, notes that the
phenomenon of prostitution in the region has increased alarmingly.
These are not isolated cases, he says.
On the
streets, and in bars, clubs, schools and outside of shopping centers
in cities such as Suchiate, Tapachula, Cacahoatán, Tuxtla Chico and
Huixtla, it is common to find women [and girls] of different ages
engaged in prostitution...
For
now, while Leticia continues to be a victim of sexual exploitation,
the director of Mexico’s National Institute for Migration (INM),
Cecilia Romero, has recently told the newspaper El Universal that
the existence of smuggling of migrants, human trafficking, pedophile
networks, and the kidnappings and violence that affect thousands of
migrants are only
"evils of mankind"
that Mexico cannot eradicate.
Full English Translation
Manuel de la Cruz
CIMAC Noticias
News for Women
Mexico City
June 24, 2009
The United States, Mexico
 |
|
Joaquín Aguilar Méndez,
right, a former altar boy, has sued the Rev. Nicolás
Aguilar, shown in photo at left. (From a web site that
takes an opposing position in the case of
Nicolás Aguilar - in Spanish). |
Arquidiócesis de Puebla y Los Ángeles toleran
pederastia
México DF.-
Integrantes de la Red de Sobrevivientes de Abusos por Sacerdotes
(SNAP, por sus siglas en inglés) interpusieron una demanda contra
las arquidiócesis de Los Ángeles, California, y de Tehuacán, Puebla,
querella que involucra a los cardenales Roger Mahony y Norberto
Rivera, respectivamente, informa la Agencia NotieSe.
El ciudadano,
identificado como Juan Doe (“Juan Nadie”), abusado sexualmente en
1988 por el sacerdote mexicano Nicolás Aguilar, acusa a esas
instancias eclesiales y al Departamento de Educación de California
de negligencia en la protección a su persona, puesto que Aguilar
trabajó como profesor después de ser transferido de Tehuacán a Los
Ángeles por el entonces obispo local, Norberto Rivera...
CIMAC Noticias
News for Women
Mexico City
June 23, 2009
Charges of cross-border church abuses continue
Mexico City
- A victims’ group said Thursday that it was filing a new lawsuit in
Los Angeles, California, against Mexican and U.S. church officials
accused of sheltering a suspected pedophile priest.
The lawsuit accuses
Mexico City Cardinal Norberto Rivera of conspiring with Roman
Catholic officials in the United States to shelter Nicolas Aguilar,
a Mexican priest wanted in California for 19 felony counts of
committing lewd acts on a child.
This is the third
lawsuit filed by the group,
Survivor’s Network of Those Abused by Priests,
or SNAP, against the Catholic Church for allegedly protecting
Aguilar. Two previous lawsuits filed in Los Angeles against the
Mexican cardinal by Mexican citizens were dismissed in 2007.
This time, however,
the unnamed plaintiff is a U.S. citizen.
“In this case it
was a North American boy molested in North American territory,” said
Jose Bonilla, a lawyer for SNAP.
Bonilla said he was
“practically 100 percent sure” that the plaintiff, identified only
as John Doe, would have his day in court. “But it’s going to be a
long process,” he said.
In addition to
Cardinal Rivera, the lawsuit charges the archdiocese of Tehuacan in
the Mexican state of Puebla, where Rivera worked at the time, the
archdiocese of Los Angeles and the California Department of
Education with failing to protect the plaintiff from Rev. Aguilar.
Foreign Correspondency
June 18, 2009
Colombia
 |
|
Stella Cardenas, director of Fundacion
Renacer (the Rebirth Foundation) |
Insuficientes, Nuevas Sanciones Sobre Turismo Sexual Y Pornografía
Infantil En Colombia
Bogotá.- La muerte
de Yesid Torres, de apenas 15 años, conmovió a los habitantes de
Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, donde la explotación sexual va en
aumento. El menor de edad falleció a consecuencia de una sobredosis
de cocaína que consumió en el apartamento del italiano Paolo
Pravisani, pederasta de 72 años, quien lo había contratado para
proveerle servicios sexuales, informó la agencia Semlac…
New Sanctions on Child Pornography and Sexual Tourism in Colombia
are Insufficient
Bogota
.- The death of Yesid Torres, a boy who had just turned 15, shocked
the people of the city of Cartagena de Indias, where sexual
exploitation is increasing. The youth died from an overdose of
cocaine consumed in the apartment of Italian Paolo Pravisani, a 72
year old pedophile who had contracted Torres to provide sexual
services.
In
response to increasing levels of sexual exploitation, Colombian
lawmakers passed a law on June 10, 2009 that applies new penalties,
including a 20 year prison term for those who engage in producing
child pornography. The law also makes child sex tourism a crime.
The
legislation provides for prison sentences of 4 to 8 years for
persons who promote child sex tourism, without the possibility of
parole. The length of the sentence may be increased by half when the
victim is under 12 years of age.
Stella
Cardenas, director of Fundacion Renacer (the Rebirth Foundation),
notes that although the penalty for promoting child sex tourism
under the new law is higher than the 3 year sentence available under
the old law, the length of sentence is still too low. She adds that
the law fails to address cases of aggressors who sexually exploit
youth between the ages of 14 and 18 who have consented to engage in
[commercial] sex, often due to economic hardship.
CIMAC Noticias
News for Women
Mexico city
June 23, 2009
Véase también:
Luz Stella Cardenas
Luz Stella es la directora y fundadora de la
Fundación Renacer, una organización que trabaja con niños y niñas
víctimas de explotación sexual y ha atendido a lo largo de su
historia a más de quince mil niños de Bogotá, Cartagena y
Barranquilla. Desde 1988, su propósito fundamental ha sido combatir
la explotación sexual infantil y acompañar a las personas explotadas
sexualmente en su recuperación y realización personal...
Somos Más
Feb. 08, 2006
See also:
About Stella Cárdenas
Stella Cárdenas is
building new institutional protections against child prostitution
and pornography in Colombia by persuading the government to extend
the mandate of its ministry charged with protection of children, the
Ministry of Family Welfare... Stella and her Fundación Renacer
("Rebirth Foundation") contributed substantially to the passage of
Law 360. This law, passed in 1997, for the first time assigned
penalties–fines or jail sentences–for anyone who draws children into
prostitution...
Ashoka
International
2001
Mexico
 |
|
Mexico's immigration commissioner Cecilia
Romero |
El turismo sexual es inevitable: INM
Para la comisionada del Instituto Nacional de Migración, Cecilia
Romero, el turismo sexual, tráfico de personas, comercio de mujeres,
redes de pederastia, plagio y violencia contra miles de migrantes
son “males de la humanidad” que México no puede erradicar...
Mexico’s Immigration Chief: Sex Tourism is
Inevitable
According to Cecilia Romero, the commissioner of Mexico’s National
Migration Institute (immigration service), sex tourism, human
trafficking, female commercial sex work, pedophile networks, and the
kidnappings and violence that victimize thousands of migrants
[crossing Mexico to get to the U.S.] are
"evils of mankind" that
Mexico cannot eradicate.
Even if
such practices have triggered: 1) harsh reports [about Mexico] from the
U.S. Department of State and Mexico’s National Human Rights
Commission (CNDH);
2) complaints by foreign victims about their forced prostitution
and sex trafficking; and 3) complaints from [undocumented] Cuban
migrants who have been extorted for thousands of dollars in their quest to get
to Florida, Romero concludes that all of these problems have existed
since the origins of migration...
[Commenting on strong criticism of the INM and repeated calls for her
resignation,] Romero
argues that the National Migration Institute has implemented a
'purification' effort which has caused a number of problems to emerge
into the public spotlight.
The
immigration director noted that since her team arrived as part
of President Felipe Calderón’s government, she has accomplished
much, but she is also aware that those achievements will never be enough
[to solve the problems that exist].
Romero
said that the vast majority of complaints that have been submitted
[about official corruption] originate from within the INM itself. So far about 300 immigration officers have been reprimanded or removed.
"This shows that we are making progress, although I will never be
satisfied in our war against organized crime."
Romero
adds that when there is discussion about immigrants, the finger is
always pointed at the INM. But, she says, the criminal networks have state police, corrections officers and also immigration agents
on their payrolls. We are investigating and pursuing them. Romero
insists that her agency is taking action to get to the bottom of the
problem of corruption.
Jose Gerardo Mejia
El Universal
June 20 2009
LibertadLatina
Commentary
We appreciate the fact that
Cecilia Romero, the commissioner of Mexico’s National Migration
Institute, is a rare federal agency
director who is willing to be honest in expressing the Felipe Calderón Administration's
lack of interest in treating the mass gender atrocity of adult and
child sexual exploitation in that nation as a serious crisis requiring an
urgent response.
According to the traditional beliefs of Roman feudalism
that still prevail in Mexico, such behavior is, as
Director Romero says, simply "inevitable."
The hidden follow-on to that statement is: "If it is
inevitable, why do anything to fight it?"
So a nation like Mexico
ends up doing only the minimum necessary to placate the U.S. State
Department's Trafficking in Persons Office with the objective of
receiving a
reasonably good rating in the annual TIP report.
In other words, Romero is saying: Victims, don't
hold your breath as you wait for help. That help is not forthcoming from
President Calderón's federal government.
That is not a good enough answer!
Commissioner Romero's statement is consistent with
the lack of action that the Mexican public sees from its federal
government in regard to addressing modern human slavery and other
forms of violence against women.
We are especially concerned that this policy
position, stating that mass sexual violence and slavery is
inevitable, is consistent with other positions taken on women's
human rights issues
by President Calderón's National Action Party (PAN),
such as stating that the women who have been kidnapped, tortured,
raped and murdered by the hundreds in Ciudad Juarez caused their own
deaths because they wore immodest clothing and walked in bad parts
of town.
End impunity
now!
Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
June 23/24, 2009
See also:
LibertadLatina
Analysis of the political actions and
policies of Mexico's National Action Party
(PAN) in regard to their detrimental impact
on women's basic human rights
Colombia
El turismo sexual aumenta cada día más en el país
Bogotá - Las
cifras sobre turismo sexual en Colombia son alarmantes. Vender el
cuerpo a clientes que llegan de todas partes del mundo, se ha
convertido en uno de los mejores negocios en el país, siendo Cali
una de las primeras ciudades en la lista...
Sex tourism is increasing on a daily basis
Bogota - The figures on sexual tourism in
Colombia are alarming. To sell your body to customers who arrive
from all over the world has become one of the best businesses in the
nation, with Cali being the city at the top of the list.
According to a report of the Rebirth
Foundation (Foundation Renacer), in the past two years the
phenomenon has grown 53% in Cali, the capital of Valle del Cauca
department [state]. Minors form the majority of those involved in
the business.
The most appealing magnets for foreign
tourists who come to our nation are the bodies of girls between 12
and 14 years [who are sold to them in prostitution]. This business
generates huge profits for the mafia. Although 202 cases have been
documented during the past 24 months, these incidents have been reported
neither to the police for minors nor to the SIJIN (the Judicial
Investigations and Intelligence Service).
elpaisvallenato.com
June 21, 2009
LibertadLatina
Commentary
Colombia may indeed be a leader in efforts to combat modern human
trafficking. In the U.S. State Department's 2009 Trafficking in
Persons (TIP) report, Colombia received a 'Tier 1' rating, the
highest possible, to reward their efforts against human trafficking.
Yet Colombia's government and certain social elements contribute to
a large number of human rights abuses, especially those that
victimize Afro-Colombians in Indigenous peoples, who face
wanton murder, rape and displacement by the military
and
right wing paramilitary forces hell bent on stealing their land and
conducting their own perverted version of 'social cleansing.' Leftist guerillas are not innocent
either.
These abuses, including the forced conscription of underage
girls and accompanying sexual abuse perpetrated by illegal armed groups on both sides of the conflict
contribute to an environment where mass human trafficking is made
possible.
With an estimated 70,000 victims of human trafficking being created
annually, Colombia is right up there with Brazil, the Dominican
Republic and Argentina as one of the major nations involved in the illegal
trafficking of women and children for sexual exploitation.
We recommend that an index of trafficking behavior in these nations
that is separate from the annual TIP report be developed to assess
the true story 'on the ground' in the nations of the Americas.
Currently, the TIP rating system does not reflect the true intensity of the
problem.
End impunity
now!
Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
June 23, 2009
Colombia - The United States
 |
|
María is
keeping her identity hidden, for fear of reprisals.
Photo:
Helda Martínez/IPS |
Trafficking Victims’ Ordeal Never Over
Bogota - A
mixture of rage, impotence and terror is evident behind the sadness
in María’s eyes. It’s been five months since she escaped from her
captors in the United States, where she was taken under a false job
contract, and she still can’t shake off her fear…
According to the
available data, some 70,000 people fall victim to human trafficking
every year in Colombia, which ranks third in the number of victims
in Latin America, behind the Dominican Republic and Brazil.
…Statistics only
partially reflect the magnitude of the crime, because many of the
victims refuse to go to the police for fear traffickers will carry
out their threats, or that they will be shunned by their community,
or simply because they don’t realize just how severely their rights
have been violated…
…People do fall
for the bogus offers because they are in dire need of an opportunity
for a better life. That was what happened to María, a 40-year old
woman originally from the central province of Tolima, who was living
on the outskirts of Bogotá when she was captured by members of a
trafficking mafia.
She admitted to
IPS that she’s still scared her captors will find her or come after
her kids…
She’s also
filled with rage. In November 2008 she and her family carefully
examined the work contract before she decided to accept a job as a
domestic in the home of a wealthy Colombian family in the United
States…
But everything
changed when she arrived at her destination somewhere in the U.S. …
They took away her passport and other documents, then forced her to
work all day long, from 5 a.m. through midnight, with only half a
day’s rest on Sundays, and drastically reduced her meals, feeding
her a meager vegetable diet…
[A]
woman from El Salvador told María that what her "employers" were
doing was illegal, explained how to unblock the telephone, and gave
her an emergency number to phone the police for help.
But the police
merely forced her captors to give back her passport and admonished
them for how they were treating her.
That night,
María’s kidnappers scared her with all sorts of threats against her
and her family back in Colombia. They warned her that if she didn’t
sign a paper exonerating them from all responsibility, they would
report her to the police and accuse her of several offences, and she
would be thrown in jail for years.
She was finally
able to sneak out of the house while her kidnappers thought she was
sleeping, and was driven to a shelter for human trafficking victims
by the Salvadoran woman and her husband.
"There I started
to get better. I spoke several times with my children and the rest
of my family, and I came to realize that there are many people in
the same difficult situation as me. Two other Colombian women were
there with me, and another four had left the day I arrived," she
said…
Inter press Service (IPS)
June 10, 2009
LibertadLatina
Commentary
Ten years ago a Colombian woman caught in an
almost identical situation of domestic labor
slavery approached a hair dresser, asking
for help to escape her employer - a wealthy
Colombian diplomatic family living in the
Washington, DC region. I made good her
escape, and that of a friend who worked for
another diplomatic family from Colombia.
The victim's employer yelled and screamed at
her, made her work under constant verbal threats from 6 am
until midnight, forced her to cook, clean, mow the lawn and shovel the snow for a family of five
living in a big house on a large piece of
land, and forbade her to
leave the house alone. Only during one of
her 'supervised' visits to a local hair
salon was she able to contact a sympathetic
person willing to help. That person
contacted me.
This woman still lives in fear of her
employer, but has gotten married and has
brought her daughter to the U.S.
Many middle and upper class women across
Latin America employ domestic workers. A
very large number of these employers act in
a fashion that reflects extreme cruelty, and
is consistent with the manner in which
wealthy women in the Roman Empire treated
enslaved women in their homes.
We see the results of this attitude in the
Roman Empire through the example of the
poorly fed and frail servant girls, barely
given enough food to survive, whose
well-preserved bodies have been found in the
ruins of the houses of wealthy Romans who
lived in the city of Pompeii.
Many wealthy
and middle class women continue to treat
their 'hired help' in the same slave-like
fashion in one offshoot of the Roman Empire
known as modern Latin America. You just have to
watch a Mexican soap opera on a Spanish language TV
network anywhere in the world to confirm that
ugly fact.
As a
millionaire Greek business owner once explained to me, the fact that
Mediterranean cultures enslaved each other 'back and forth' for
millennia lead directly to the fact that there is no remorse for
slavery in Latin America. He told me that when he arrived in the
U.S. years ago, his biggest surprise was that white Americans felt
remorse for the past enslavement of African Americans.
That
remorse does not exist in the Mediter-ranean region. By extension
(and Spain is one of these Mediter-ranean cultures),
remorse for slavery does no exist among the
elites in Latin America.
So how can
the world depend upon the judgment, and trust the actions of such
elites to pass anti-trafficking laws and enforce them, when
tolerance for labor and sexual exploitation was and is built into
the very foundation of Latin American societies?
This is
why a new Global Plan of Action
against slavery, proposed by a number of
United Nations member countries, is needed, because... given the
existence of the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons
report or not, international legal instruments, and the threat of
U.S. economic sanctions will not break through the Roman wall of
impunity that enslaves Latin America's oppressed populations, and
especially the poor, the indigenous and the African descendent,
without engaging in out of the box thinking and action to end this
crisis.
In other
words, the modern anti-trafficking movement, and the actions of many
international and U.S. bodies assume that all nations want to
collaborate to end sex and labor trafficking. That sentiment
is true among some sectors of society in Latin America. But powerful
economic and political forces thrive through the exploitation of the
victims of modern human slavery, while ancient cultural and
religious traditions justify such inhumanity.
Mexico's
National Human Rights Commission recently announced that some
1,600
mostly Central American migrants traveling through Mexico to reach
the U.S., mostly women and girls, are kidnapped each month into
slavery. It is known that sexual slavery predominates in
Mexico much more so than labor slavery. In the case of domestic
servitude, involving tens of thousands of underage Indigenous girls
in Mexico, sex and labor slavery, co-exist).
This is
happening to the benefit of the elites and paid-off corrupt
officials in Mexico, while at the same time the publication of
serious federal regulations that are urgently required to enact the nation's first
anti-trafficking law was intentionally delayed by President Felipe
Calderón for 11 months. When the rules were finally published, after
four stern warnings from Congress, they were
watered down to make the law ineffective.
Many members of Mexico's
Congress of the Republic have admonished President
Calderón for not caring
about the plight of trafficking victims. Together with
non-governmental organizations, these legislators have organized an effort to insist
that President Calderón withdraw his current anti-trafficking regulations
and allow them to be re-written to put the teeth back in them to
reflect the original intent of Congress in passing the law. It is
obvious that President Calderón finally published the regulations so
that Mexico would receive a positive rating (Tier 2) in the 2009
U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Report.
Meanwhile,
20,000 migrants, mostly women and children, are kidnapped into
slavery in Mexico each year while corrupt and apathetic law enforce-ment
and government officials not only don't lift a finger to help these
victims, but, as the 2009 TIP report acknowledges, they are
sometimes direct participants in these kidnappings.
In
addition, 4,000 Indigenous Mexican children remain enslaved in
prostitution in Japan, while neither Mexico nor Japan do anything to
find and rescue them.
Eight year
old Mexican girls have been reported as being trafficking "into the
brothels of the basements of New York" both currently and since at
least the mid 1990s, if not earlier.
Yet these
realities are not reflected in the 2009 U.S. State Department
Trafficking in Persons Report, which was also true under the
administration of former President George W. Bush.
The
overall TIP report assessment of Mexico is accurate, but the nuances,
detailing the intentional resistance by the Calderón administration
against actually caring
about and acting to defend trafficking victims and those at risk, is
not reflected in the report.
The misogynist policies of the far
right members of Calderón's National Action Party (PAN) are also not
reflected in the 2009 TIP report. It is not in their best interest to clamp-down on modern human
slavery, a position reflected in their efforts to foot-drag on
building effective anti-trafficking efforts at the federal level.
Truth be
told, Mexico's economy would be seriously 'harmed' if all forms of
labor and sexual slavery ended. That does not justify extending the
life of such
exploitation for
even one second.
We applaud
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Trafficking in Persons Office
Director Louis C. De Baca, the first Latino head of the
office, for the release of an expanded and well thought out Trafficking
in Persons report, the first delivered by a Democratic
administration.
But the case of Mexico, as well as
the case of the major
criminal enterprise that is the trafficking of mostly Afro-Latina
women from the Dominican Republic to Argentina (while
anti-trafficking analysis largely ignores this issue) are two areas
that greatly concern us.
We look
forward to seeing serious emphasis placed on addressing sex and
labor trafficking in Latina America, especially where indigenous and
African descendent populations are targeted, because in both types
of slavery, these peoples comprise a very large segment of those who
are at
risk.
If this
basic task of putting greater focus on the Latin American issue is accepted by the U.S. State Department, we should
expect to see new initiatives in the Trafficking in Persons Office
that go beyond the limited work that is being done today to address
this emergency.
Latin
America's exploding human trafficking crisis was virtually ignored
during the past decade by the U.S. Government, except where foes of
the U.S., including Cuba and Venezuela were concerned.
The real
bad guys make their money in Mexico, Brazil, the Dominican Republic,
Colombia and Argentina. The Mexican trafficking mafias enslave
500,000 sex trafficking victims, according to Teresa Ulloa, director
of the Latina American and Caribbean office of the Coalition Against
Trafficking in Women and Children. Yet the U.S. State Department
declares, following the estimates developed by the United Nations
funded International Labor Organization (ILO), that only 1.5 million
sex slaves exist in the entire world.
So if both
Teresa Ulloa and the ILO are to be believed, then Mexico has 1/3 of
the world's sex slaves? Something is wrong with these numbers.
In
addition, Save the Children has recognized that the southern Mexican
border region is the largest area for the commercial sexual
exploitation of children in the entire world. That fact is also
missing from the 2009 TIP report.
We do not
need another 8 years of obfuscation about the true and horrific
magnitude of modern human slavery in Latin America.
We also do
not need a diminished focus on this emergency because the forces
that favor the legalization of prostitution are strongly represented
in liberal Democratic circles. Their work is largely academic, and
it does not account for the mass victimization of children and
underage youth, especially in Latin America, who cannot possibly be
seen as consenting, willing participants in the sex trade.
As well,
we do not need to limit action against human trafficking to only a
focus on further adoption of the Palermo Protocol, an approach which
was defined during a gathering of diplomats at the United Nations on
May 13, 2009 as being ineffective.
As we have stated before... We are encouraged by the brave
efforts of United Nations diplomats and
Ecuadorian Minister
of Justice and Human Rights (Attorney
General)
Néstor Arbito
Chica to
promote a Global Plan of Action
to get around the very clear fact that
the Palermo Protocol, and regional efforts
by the Organization of American States (OAS)
are insufficient to successfully fight this
aggressive criminal war against a whole generation of
Latin American and especially Indigenous
women and girls.
We look forward to seeing the United States
take a leading role to step-up
efforts to bring this crisis under control.
We also look forward to seeing the U.S.
State Department demonstrate leadership in
addressing the hard issues in Latin America
without seeing the rules changed behind
closed doors in favor of
quieting criticism of U.S. allies in the
region, something that was quite blatant
during the last
U.S.
Administration.
Those at
risk, and those who are today enslaved in the region deserve our
undivided attention and an honest approach to ending the condoned
and officially sanctioned mass gender atrocity that is modern human
slavery in Latin America.
The
time of the Roman Empire is over!
Free
my people now!
End impunity
now!
Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
June 21/22, 2009
See also:
En Japón, de 3 a 4 mil niñas mexicanas víctimas de ESCI
Afirma la experta Teresa Ulloa
Three to four thousand underage indigenous girls from the poor states of Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero and Mexico [state] have become victims of commercial sexual exploitation of children
(CSEC) in Japan.
Puebla city, in Puebla state - Teresa Ulloa, Latin America and Caribbean Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking of Women (CATW)
announced her estimates of the numbers of indigenous children sex trafficked to
Japan, and explained that traffickers trick the victims using offers of
thousands of dollars for their parents in exchange for [obtaining
permission] to take their daughters. The parents are told that their girls are going to the United States to work in fast food restaurant jobs.
Taking advantage of the condition of submission that Mexico's indigenous communities are forced to live in, the traffickers take their victims to Japan where they are prostituted and work as geishas, a role that Asian women no-longer want to play because today they have more decision-making power than in the past.
Ulloa said that before these victims from Japan are repatriated, the home
conditions of these girls must be investigated to assure that they can be
reintegrated without facing the risk of being sold or sexually exploited again.
Ulloa noted that in the year 2002 the CATW helped to repatriate two sisters,
ages 8 and 10, who had been prostituted in a brothel in New York. They were
subjected to exploitation again, 15 days later, because their family "had sold
their daughters in exchange for two goats and two cases of beer."
During her interview with CIMAC Noticias, Ulloa declared:
"the subject [of child protection] is not on the national agenda. Much attention is paid to drug trafficking, but the government hasn't even realized that the same drug trafficking networks are used for the [sex] trafficking of children, and that organized crime regards this activity to be one of their most important businesses."
...
Nadia Altamirano Díaz
CIMAC Noticias
Dec. 12, 2008
See also:
Mexico: Más de un millón de menores se
prostituyen en el centro del país: especialista
Expert: More than one million minors are sexually
exploited in Central Mexico
Tlaxcala city, in Tlaxcala state - Around 1.5 million
people in the central region of Mexico are engaged in prostitution, and
some 75% of them are between 12 and 13 years of age, reported Teresa
Ulloa, director of the Regional Coalition Against Trafficking in Women
and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean...
During an international seminar in the city of Tlaxcala, Ulloa noted
that, due to the conditions of marginalization in which they live, at
least 50 million women and children in Latin America are at risk of
being recruited for sexual exploitation.
La Jornada de Oriente
Sep. 26, 2007
The United States - Latin America
The US Human Trafficking Report 2009: Whatever
makes you think it's political?
The USA sometimes
tries to make out the "equal partners" thing with the rest of the
Americas and sometimes it doesn't. You get The Hawaiian making some
lip service to the greater cause at the moment, but when push comes
to shove and the bureaucrats are let loose, those old habits of
arrogance, selective memory based on friendships and high-handedness
towards "the brown people down there" shine on through.
Today the US State
Department's ninth annual "Trafficking in Persons Report" was
published, and here's how the region stacks up in the eyes of
TheWorldPoliceman.™
Level One (complies with all, we luvs ya): Colombia
Level Two (not up to scratch but we see you're making an effort, try
a bit harder, boyz): Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El
Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Peru, Uruguay.
Level Three (hmmm..not so good, kiddies. We're watching you so don't
do anything stupid): Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Rep Dom,
Venezuela
Level Four (bad bad bad naughty naughty sanctions sanctions): Cuba
But the biggest
guilty party on human trafficking is left off the list completely.
The country where many labor and sex slaves are sent by their
paymasters and blind eyes are turned. Go on....take a wild guess as
to which one.
The Democratic Underground
June 16, 2009
The Americas
| 2009 TIP
Ratings |
 |
Tier 1 |
 |
Tier 2 |
 |
Tier 2 Watch List |
 |
Tier 3 |
2009 U.S. Department of State Trafficking in
Persons Report - Nations of the Americas
A-C:
Antigua and Barbuda (Tier 2), Argentina (Tier
2 Watch List), Bahamas (Tier 2), Barbados (Tier 2), Belize (Tier 2
Watch List), Bolivia (Tier 2), Brazil (Tier 2), Canada (Tier 1),
Chile (Tier 2), Colombia (Tier 1), Costa Rica (Tier 2), Cuba (Tier
3)
D-K:
Dominican Republic (Tier 2 Watch List),
Ecuador (Tier 2), El Salvador (Tier 2), Guatemala (Tier 2 Watch
List), Guyana (Tier 2 Watch List), Haiti (missing), Honduras (Tier
2), Jamaica (Tier 2)
L-P:
Mexico (Tier 2), Nicaragua (Tier 2 Watch
List), Panama (Tier 2), Paraguay (Tier 2), Peru (Tier 2)
Q-Z:
ST. Vincent and the Grenadines (Tier 2 Watch
List), Trinidad and Tobago (Tier 2), Uruguay (Tier 2), Venezuela
(Tier 2 Watch List)
See also:
Letter from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Letter from Ambassador Luis C. de Baca
Introduction
Major Forms of Trafficking in Persons
The Three P's: Punishment, Protection,
Prevention
Financial Crisis and Human Trafficking
Topics of Special Interest
Victims' Stories
Global Law Enforcement Data
Commendable Intiatives Around the World
2009 TIP Report Heroes
Tier Placements
Maps
U.S. Government Domestic Anti-Trafficking
Efforts
U.S. Department of State Office of Trafficking in Persons
June 16, 2009
Guatemala
Justicia parece no llegar en casos de niñas
víctimas de violencia
El sistema de
justicia parece no ser efectivo en los casos de tres niñas
asesinadas recientemente en San Lucas Sacatepéquez y de una menor
violada en Sololá, ya que se han registrado señales de negligencia
en las investigaciones y parcialidad en el estudio de las pruebas,
denunció la Fundación Sobrevivientes...
Justice Appears Distant
in Cases of Girl Victims of Violence
The
non-governmental organization La
Fundación Sobrevivientes (the Survivor’s Foundation) has
denounced the fact that Guatemala’s
justice system does not appear to be working effectively in two
criminal cases: 1) that of three girls killed recently in San Lucas
Sacatepequez; and 2) the case of a minor girl raped in the city of
Sololá. The Foundation states that
there have been indications of negligence and bias in the evaluation
of the evidence in these cases.
In the first case, a 13-year-old
girl was raped on July 8, 2008 in Sololá. Judge Frank Armando
Martínez allowed the accused assailant, Martín Tambríz, to be
freed despite conclusive evidence of his guilt.
Forensic evidence had showed a positive
DNA match tying Tambríz to the
rape. The Foundation plans to appeal the acquittal.
Lawyers for the Survivor’s Foundation also expressed concern about
the case of three girls, ages 7, 8 and 12, who were “butchered” on
May 29, 2009 in the hamlet Chicamán in San Lucas Sacatepequez. It
was ascertained that one of the victim’s was raped. Three men
suspected in the crime have been detained. The Foundation emphasizes
that there are signs of negligence in the investigation conducted by
the District Attorney of Sacatepéquez, a fact that will not
contribute to solving these crimes.
The Survivor’s Foundation has asked that the case be moved to the
capital, Guatemala City to insure that the investigation and preparations for
prosecution are able to be observed, ensuring that due process is
respected in the case.
CERIGUA
June 19, 2009
Guatemala
 |
|
Juana Méndez, right, and her
translator explain in Court how one
of the two police-men who raped her
told her after the attack: "Why are
you complaining? I will put two
bullets into you and throw you over
an embankment."
From the
documentary
film on the
Juana Méndez
case (in Spanish on
YouTube) |
Guatemala.- Una indígena
guatemalteca es la primera mujer maya que logra
que encarcelen a un policía por haberla violado
Nebaj - La indígena guatemalteca Juana Méndez ha
sido la primera mujer maya que abre un proceso
judicial contra un policial por haberla violado
y logra que sea condenado, según contó ella
misma en una entrevista con Europa Press.
El gran índice de impunidad en delitos contra
las mujeres, según han denunciado reiteradamente
asociaciones feministas, se rompe así con este
caso. A Méndez "le hicieron daño" y ella "no lo
quiso dejarlo así, quiso decir la verdad".
Pese a las amenazas de muerte y a los consejos
que personas de su entorno le reiteraban para
que retirase del proceso contra el policía, ella
decidió seguir adelante. "Qué pienso, que tiene
que haber ley; si un hombre me hizo eso, tiene
que pagarlo"...
An
Indigenous Mayan Woman has Become the First
Female in Guatemala's History to Achieve the
Conviction and Imprisonment of a Police Officer
for Having Raped Her in Custody
Nebaj - Juana Méndez has become the first Mayan
woman [in this Mayan majority nation] to pursue
legal proceedings against a policeman for the
crime of rape resulting in a conviction and a
prison sentence.
This case succeeded despite the high rate of
impunity for crimes against women, an issue that
has repeatedly been raised by feminists. Méndez
stated: "they did me harm" and she "did not want
to leave it at that, I wanted to tell the
truth."
Despite death threats and the repeated advice
from people around her to withdraw the case
against the policemen, she decided to go ahead.
"What do I believe? I believe that the rule of
law has to exist. If a man does that to you, he
has to pay.” Juana Mendez said that with the
full support of her husband, who had told his
wife that he would not respond to this problem
with domestic violence [a common reaction of the
husbands of rape victims]…
Méndez’ struggle for justice caused her insomnia
from fear, and she couldn’t eat. But she never
retreated, saying, “I had to tell the truth.” "I
told the judge that these policemen had raped
me.” Her female friends told her that she should
not pursue the case, because her husband would
beat her. She replied to them: “I don’t care if
my husband beats me. I am going to tell the
truth.”
The one policeman who was tried has been
sentenced to 20 years in prison. Asked whether
she fears retaliation when the convicted rapist
gets out of prison, Méndez said that "I am
afraid that he will do something. But I don’t
think that he will get out of prison."
Echoing the sentiment of many indigenous defense
association leaders, Méndez denounced the
situation of impunity that we live through in
Guatemala, and above all, she protests the
crimes that were committed during the 36-year
armed conflict [that ended in 1996].
I regret that the victims
and the murderers have to live together.
Francisco Otero
Europa Press
May 10, 2009
See also:
New film about Juana
Mendez
Juana Mendez will be
remembered in Guatemala as the first woman
who succeeded in achieving a
conviction against a serving police
officer for mistreating her in custody.
During her detention at
the police station in Nebaj she was raped
and sexually assaulted by several officers,
one of whom was finally brought to justice.
The Institute of Comparative Studies in
Penal Sciences,
ICCPG from
its initials in Spanish, and
Project Counseling
Services, have made a film about
the case which you can
see here,
in three parts (in Spanish).
El Instituto de
Estudios Comparados en Ciencias Penales de
Guatemala (ICCPG) fue el productor de una
pelicula documental sobre el caso de
Juana Méndez
From the film:
A study conducted in 2005 by the The
Institute of Comparative Studies in Penal
Sciences found that
75% of
women arrested in Guatemala suffer sexual
abuse at the hands of policemen while in
custody.
Some 43% of these victims file complaints in
regard to their abuse.
The answer of the Government, says the film,
is: impunity.
Gabriela Barrios
April 6th, 2009
Also about Juana Mendez:
Supervivientes del genocidio Maya se sienten "olvidados"
y acusan al Gobierno de incumplir los acuerdos
Supervivientes del genocidio Maya, acaecido durante la guerra civil
de Guatemala (1960-1996), acusaron al Gobierno de la nación de
incumplir los acuerdos de paz de 1996 y denunciaron que "se sienten
olvidados" por las autoridades del país centroamericano.
Survivors of the Mayan
Genocide Feel "Forgotten" and Accuse Guatemala's Government of
Having Ignored their Obligations Under the 1996 Peace Accords
Nebaj -
Mayan survivors of the genocide, which took place during Guatemala's
civil war (1960-1996), have accused the national government of
violating the 1996 national peace agreements and they feel neglected
by the authorities of the Central American country.
This is
what Juana Méndez believes. She asserts that "we continue living in
poverty because our people have not yet recovered from the crimes
committed against us." “They have not acknowledged the fact that the
victims need material, as well as psychological support, such as in
the form of opening a museum so that the families [of the victims]
can understand what happened.”
Méndez
explained that in her case, she had to flee to the mountains to
avoid being attacked by soldiers. She doesn’t remember any longer
how how long she was in hiding, but she feels that she is “one more
victim of the military violence,” which had a major impact on
women. However, Méndez says that she appreciates the efforts made by
non-governmental organizations to bring light upon the violence that
Guatemalan women suffered in the flesh during the war.
Francisco Otero
Europa Press
May 09, 2009
Colombia
Statement of Ms. Navanethem Pillay, United
Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to the 11th Human Rights
Council
"In Latin America, I wish to reiterate
that Colombia remains a situation of utmost concern. That country's
40-year-long armed conflict has resulted in enormous human, social,
economic and political costs. Civilian lives, security and property
continue to be targeted by all armed groups. Indigenous and
Afro-Colombian are disproportionately affected. Sexual violence as a
war tactic is directed against women and girls. Most victims are
women heads of larger households, in their 40s, with limited
education and few opportunities to work. The conflict continues to
displace people. Antipersonnel mines, which the Government banned,
but which are planted by guerrilla groups, keep exacting their toll
on civilians.
I welcome the Government's invitation to a number of
Special Procedures mandate holders, but also call upon it to act on
their recommendations in an effective manner. The Government should
take all the necessary steps to protect civilians, mitigate their
suffering and address their need for justice."
United Nations Human Rights Council;
United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
(OHCHR)
Geneva, Switzerland
June 03, 2009
Mexico
2009 TIP Report: Summary of Evaluation of
Mexico's Anti-trafficking Efforts
Mexico is a large
source, transit, and destination country for persons trafficked for
the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation and forced labor.
Groups considered most vulnerable to human trafficking in Mexico
include women and children, indigenous persons, and undocumented
migrants. A significant number of Mexican women, girls, and boys are
trafficked within the country for commercial sexual exploitation,
lured by false job offers from poor rural regions to urban, border,
and tourist areas…
Child sex tourism
continues to grow in Mexico, especially in tourist areas such as
Acapulco and Cancun, and northern border cities like Tijuana and
Ciudad Juarez. Foreign child sex tourists arrive most often from the
United States, Canada, and Western Europe. Organized criminal
networks traffic Mexican women and girls into the United States for
commercial sexual exploitation. Mexican men, women, and children are
trafficked into the United States for forced labor, particularly in
agriculture and industrial sweatshops.
The Government of
Mexico does not fully comply with the minimum standards for the
elimination of trafficking; however, it is making significant
efforts to do so…
Prosecution
The Government of
Mexico failed to improve on its limited anti-trafficking law
enforcement efforts against offenders last year. No convictions or
sentences of trafficking offenders were reported by federal, state,
or local authorities… There are concerns over the new law’s
effective implementation, particularly that victims must press
charges against traffickers, otherwise they will not be considered
trafficking victims and will not be provided with victim assistance.
NGOs and other
observers continued to report that corruption among public
officials, especially local law enforcement and immigration
personnel, was a significant concern; some officials reportedly
accepted or extorted bribes or sexual services, falsified identity
documents, discouraged trafficking victims from reporting their
crimes, or ignored child prostitution and other human trafficking
activity in commercial sex sites. No convictions or sentences
against corrupt officials were achieved last year…
…Last year Mexican
authorities identified
55
trafficking victims within the country: 28 females and 27 males;
trafficking allegations related both to commercial sexual
exploitation and forced labor…
U.S. Department of State: 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report
June 16, 2009
The Americas
 |
|
Mailiana Morales Berrios - Costa Rican
anti-trafficking activist |
Fighting Human Trafficking a Critical Part of U.S. Foreign Policy
U.S. hopes to cultivate more public-private
partnerships to fight slavery
Washington - The Obama administration views the fight against human
trafficking, both at home and abroad, as a critical part of the U.S.
foreign policy agenda, says Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton.
At a June 16 event at the State Department marking the release of
the ninth annual Trafficking in Persons Report, Clinton emphasized
the need for more public-private partnerships to fight the scourge
of modern-day slavery.
“The criminal network that enslaves millions of people crosses
borders and spans continents,” Clinton said, “so our response must
do the same.”
“We are committed to working with all nations collaboratively,” the
secretary said...
The secretary also made the announcement that the State Department
will rank the United States in its report to be released next year,
even though the U.S. Department of Justice releases an annual report
focused exclusively on the trafficking problem as it exists inside
the United States…
Ambassador Luis C. de Baca, director of the State Department’s
Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons... himself a
federal prosecutor who has worked many trafficking cases, noted that
the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime recently released its
own report on global human trafficking and found that two out of
every five countries have yet to achieve a single conviction of a
human trafficker. “Prosecutions can be a blunt tool, but they do
matter” in deterring traffickers, he said.
Heroes Honored
In addition to a number of U.S. senators and House members, two
anti-trafficking activists were present at the June 16 State
Department event: Mariliana Morales Berrios of Costa Rica and Vera
Lesko of Albania.
Yasmine Alotaibi
America.gov
June 16, 2009
Public Awareness a Major Weapon in Fighting
Human Trafficking
Washington — Around the world, people
desperate for employment often find themselves tricked by human
traffickers. An estimated 800,000 men, women and children are
trafficked across international borders each year. Millions more are
trafficked within their own countries.
This problem does not go overlooked by
everyone, as some everyday heroes from a variety of nations take
steps to end modern-day slavery...
For example, Canadian Benjamin Perrin founded The Future Group, a
nongovernmental organization (NGO) committed to fighting human
trafficking and the child-sex trade. By bringing together a team
from across Canada, The Future Group works with foreign governments,
other NGOs and businesses to address human trafficking and other
global issues such as HIV/AIDS…
Costa Rican Woman a
Pioneer in Anti-Trafficking Programs
…Over the last year, the Costa Rican
government has made progress in addressing human trafficking crimes
and helping victims. The government recently launched prevention
campaigns as well as training efforts for government and law
enforcement officials. Also, the government has begun to provide
more victim assistance, although prosecution of human traffickers
remains lacking.
Before the government began such
efforts, Mariliana Morales Berrios was already fighting to protect
trafficking victims. In 1997, she created the Rahab Foundation to
help victims and their families find a new life, keeping the program
running despite limited resources. Although she and her staff
frequently face threats and attacks, they continue to help
trafficking victims escape from their captors. In fact, since its
founding, the Rahab Foundation has helped more than 3,000 victims
and also trained more than 5,000 government leaders, law enforcement
officials and tourism workers on human trafficking issues...
For these efforts, Perrin and Morales
are being recognized by the U.S. Department of State in its annual
report on human trafficking…
Yasmine Alotaibi
America.gov
June 16, 2009
Mexico
Child Sex Tourism Growing in Border Cities
Like Juárez, Report Says
Child sex tourism
continues to grow in Mexican northern border cities like Tijuana and
Juárez, according to a U.S. State Department report.
"Foreign child sex
tourists arrive most often from the United States, Canada, and
Western Europe," the report said.
People from Mexico
also are trafficked into the United States for commercial sexual
exploitation. Besides the northern border cities, the report said
Cancun and Acapulco were popular child sex tourism destinations.
Each year, as many
as 20,000 children are sexually exploited in these urban centers,
officials said.
"Mexican men,
women, and children (also) are trafficked into the United States for
forced labor, particularly in agriculture and industrial
sweatshops," the report said.
The U.S. federal
government said corruption and lax enforcement were to blame for few
human-trafficking prosecutions in Mexico.
The U.S. State
Department released "The 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report" on
Tuesday, and on Wednesday Mexican authorities announced the arrest
of a Mexican federal immigration official assigned to Mexico City's
airport on suspicion of human-trafficking.
Last week
authorities in Costa Rica said they were investigating the
trafficking of its citizens in Mexico.
Diana Washington Valdez
El
Paso Times
June 18, 2009
Mexico
 |
| "IMPUNITY" - Women victims of Police
Assault at Atenco Protest at FEVIMTRA offices |
 |
|
"Women are not the Spoils
of War!" |
Exigen atenquenses a fiscalía agilizar juicios
contra policías
Habitantes de San
Salvador Atenco, particularmente 11 de las 26 mujeres que
denunciaron haber sido víctimas de violencia sexual, física y
sicológica por policías los días 3 y 4 de mayo de 2006 en ese
municipio mexiquense, exigieron a la Fiscalía Especializada en
Delitos Violentos cometidos contra Mujeres y Trata de Personas
(Fevimtra) que ya consigne la averiguación previa que abrió y
ejercite acción penal contra todos los uniformados que participaron
en los acontecimientos, con el propósito de que sean sancionados por
acción u omisión…
Women Victims of Sexual Violence at 2006
Atenco Protest March Demand That Special Prosecutor's Office for
Crimes Against Women Expedite Proceedings Against Accused Policemen
Inhabitants of [the Mexico City suburb of] San Salvador Atenco,
including 11 of the 26 women who reported being physically,
psychologically and sexually abused by [male] police officers on May
3rd and 4th of 2006, have demanded that the
[federal] Special Prosecutor's Office for Violent Crimes Committed
Against Women, and Trafficking in Persons (FEVIMTRA) act upon the
results of their preliminary investigation in the case, and bring
the actors to justice for their actions and acts of omission.
During
a demonstration in front of the offices of FEVIMTRA in Mexico City,
the activists indicated that, "the Mexican authorities have once
again demonstrated their inefficiency in prosecuting and punishing
those responsible for the serious violations human rights that were
committed in San Salvador Atenco. They were referring specifically
to the fact that just recently, the only police officer to have been
tried, convicted and sentenced for the assaults against women at
Atenco was pardoned...
Full English Translation
Gustavo Castillo
La Jornada
June 17, 2009
See also:
LibertadLatina
Mexican
Federal, State and Local Police Rape and Assault 26 Women
Protesters in Atenco, Mexico - May 3/4, 2006
Mexico
20000 Migrants a Year Kidnapped in Mexico En Route to US
Some 20,000 of the
140,000 illegal migrants en route to the United States via the
Mexico border to find work and a better life are kidnapped each year
and subjected to rape, torture and murder, crimes that usually go
unpunished due to the corruption of the authorities, fear of
reprisals and distrust of authorities, according to Mexico’s
independent National Human Rights Commission.
Mexico City – More than 1,600
migrants, above all Central Americans en route to the United
States to find work, are kidnapped monthly and subjected to
humiliations that usually go unpunished due to the corruption of
the authorities, Mexico’s independent National Human Rights
Commission reported.
“The kidnapping of migrants has
become a continuous practice of worrying dimensions, generally
unpunished and with characteristics of extreme cruelty,”
commission chairman Jose Luis Soberanes said Monday at the
presentation of the report.
Between September
2008 and February 2009, the commission registered a total of 198
cases of mass kidnappings of migrants involving 9,758 people.
Motivated by the yearning to begin a
new life in the United States, each year some 140,000 people
cross Mexico’s southern border intending to traverse the country
and then cross the U.S. border, according to official figures.
To achieve their dream, the migrants
have to travel thousands of kilometers with hardly any money and
trusting unknown people who promise to help them, but there
exists a risk that they will be betrayed and wind up in the
hands of people-trafficking networks.
Upon presenting its report on the
kidnappings of migrants, the rights commission called attention
to their “high vulnerability” and denounced the fact that the
practice “is on the increase.”
The document prepared by the panel
includes many shocking testimonials, like that of a Salvadoran
woman who was locked up and raped numerous times during the 48
hours she was held.
Finally, the young woman was freed because her family, who lives
in the United States, gave in to the threats of her abductors
and paid part of the $4,500 they demanded as ransom.
“But my companion didn’t have anyone to help her and so they
shot her and let her bleed to death in front of me to intimidate
me,” the woman said...
The kidnappings are committed mainly by organized bands whose
members remain unpunished for the crimes because their victims
do not report them since they don’t know their rights, they are
afraid of reprisals and don’t trust the Mexican authorities,
which, according to the commission report, are complicit with
the criminals in at least 1 percent of the cases.
Victims are usually kidnapped in groups along certain stretches
of the railroad lines in southern Mexico, where migrants
commonly hop on northbound freight trains.
The commission had to move Monday’s presentation of the report
to a different office after receiving a bomb threat – which
turned out to be false – at the original venue.
The threat, according to Soberanes, was a “message” from the
“bands interested in having impunity continue” for their crimes.
EFE
June 17, 2009
Guyana
Guyana will not prosecute people for
trafficking in personss just to satisfy the US, says minister
Georgetown, Guyana - Minister of Human Services and Social Security,
Priya Manickchand, has lashed out at the United States of America’s
rating of Guyana for its Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report by the
US State Department which places Guyana on Tier 2 watch list.
“Guyana objects completely to being placed on the Tier 2 watch
list...we do not believe that we have trafficking on the scale that
should attract the attention of the US, the report is inaccurate in
some of its assertions: it did not given us (government) credit for
all that has been done,” she stated...
“We prosecute every person who can be prosecuted under the Act who
would have committed acts of trafficking, what we do not have is a
large number of convictions. We cannot dictate what the courts do,
we do recognize that there are some weaknesses in the entire
judicial system in terms of how long matters take to pass through
the system and in that regard, the government is at present engaged
in improving the entire justice system through the Justice Sector
Reform Strategy,” she explained.
GINA / Caribbean Net News
June 18, 2009
United States
Human Trafficking Rises in Recession
This particularly gory testimony,
used by the US State Department to highlight the severity and
widespread nature of human trafficking, is one of many alarming
personal accounts included in their 2009 Trafficking in Persons
(TIP) report.
Time Magazine
June 18, 2009
Jamaica
Jamaica
cited for inadequate anti-human trafficking measures
Jamaica has again been ranked as a
tier two country for human trafficking by the US State
Department which has cited inadequate efforts to prosecute
trafficking offenses and protect victims. In its ninth annual
Trafficking in Persons Report released ...
RadioJamaica.com
June 18, 2009
Costa Rica
Mejora en la lucha contra trata de
personas
Costa Rica se supera en la lucha contra la trata de
personas, según un informe del Departamento de Estado de los Estados
Unidos.
Costa Rica
has improved its standing in the 2009 U.S. State Department
Trafficking in Persons Report. (Translation to follow)
Telatica.com
June 17, 2009
The United States
Alerta de que la -esclavitud moderna-
está aumentando por la crisis
El Gobierno de EEUU amplió la lista de países con
crecientes problemas de tráfico humano de 40 en 2008 a 52 este año,
en que ha incluido a Nicaragua, Irak, Filipinas, Antillas Holandesas
y los Emiratos Arabes Unidos.
U.S.
Government: Modern slavery is increasing during the current economic
crisis .
www.ABC.es
June 16, 2009
Colombia
Autoridades desmantelan banda de
trata de personas y detienen a 69 personas
En más de 60
allanamientos fueron detenidos 52 hombres y 17 mujeres de la red que
solicitaba damas de entre 18 y 25 años de edad en avisos
clasificados en los diarios y les ofrecía trabajo en bares y
restaurantes y altos ingresos, para luego obligarlas a prostituirse.
Authorities
in Colombia dismantle sex trafficking ring and free 69 women between
the ages of 18 and 25. (Translation to follow)
http://web.presidencia.gov.co
June 16, 2009
Canada
Penalties for sex
trafficking in Canada lax - US report
Vancouver, British Columbia - A US report on human
trafficking says Canada has the laws needed to prosecute human
traffickers and sex tourists, but the penalties dished out by
the courts are lax...
KBS Radio
June 16, 2009
The Dominican Republic
Washington: people trafficking still occurs Dominican Republic
The State Department's annual
report, first under president Barack Obama's Administration,
extends the list of countries with increasing human trafficking
problems, from 40 in 2008 to 52 this year, among them Nicaragua,
Iraq, the Philippine ...
Dominican Today
June 16, 2009
The Vatican
Pope Praises "Courageous Commitment" of
Religious Against Human Trafficking
Pope Benedict has lauded the “courageous
commitment in defense of human life” of religious sisters involved
in helping victims of human trafficking. The Pope's praise was
contained in a telegram sent Sister Louise Madore, President ...
Vatican Radio
June 15, 2009
Latin America
Sub-Regional Operations Profile - Latin America
In Central America and Mexico,
efforts to improve border security, guard against terrorism and
counter human and drug trafficking have led to stricter controls
on the movements of undocumented migrants. ...
UNHCR (press release)
June 15, 2009
Utah, USA
Human trafficking
underground in Utah communities
But even in Utah, human trafficking,
one of the world's top three most profitable hidden industries,
has reared its ugly head. Dewayne Hopkins, a 27-year-old Salt
Lake City resident pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy to commit
sex trafficking ...
BYU Newsnet
June 15, 2009
Georgia, USA
Sex-trafficking fight goes beyond streets
Teenage prostitutes, according to a
mayor's report on child sex trafficking, had begun working
within a few steps of the familiar inscription from Matthew on
the church's wall: “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are
heavy laden, and I will give you ...
Atlanta Journal Constitution
June 14, 2009
Nevada, USA
March
Calls For End To Child Sex Slavery
The group Shared Hope International
partnered with Canyon Christian Church for the event, drawing
attention to the disturbing crime of human trafficking. A
candlelight vigil was also held after the march. ...
Fox5 KVVU
June 13, 2009
Latin America
OAS
Assistant Secretary General: “the Future of Inter-Americ ...
In terms of the challenges, Ramdin
offered that “there are still pending bilateral tensions and
outstanding disputes among member countries” and that many of
the traditional issues such as drugs and arms trafficking,
discrimination, food security ...
ISRIA
June 12, 2009
The Vatican
Women
religious organize conference to combat 'new form of slavery'
This morning at the Vatican's press
office, organizers announced a forthcoming congress on the
theme: “Female Religious in Network against Trafficking of
Persons.” The congress will focus on fighting and preventing
human trafficking...
Catholic News Agency
June 12, 2009
The Vatican
Women's religious orders vow to extend anti-human trafficking
programs
Vatican City – With
the global financial crisis and the increased desperation of the
poor, human trafficking appears to be on the increase and the
International Union of Superiors General is committed to
extending its networks to fight ...
Cindy Wooden
The Catholic Review
June 12, 2009
The Vatican
Religious Sisters Speak Out Against Human Trafficking
Religious sisters
say they will not remain silent about the horrors of human
trafficking. Here in Rome this week, the International Union of
Superior Generals of women religious and the International
organization for migration ...
Vatican Radio
June 12, 2009
Mexico
Tlaxcala Diary
Fair Haven’s
Father Jim Manship blogged his recent trip to Mexico. His second
entry follows.
…Part of the
presentation at the Center of Human Rights in Tlaxcala included a
discussion of increased exploitation of women and girls — a very
dangerous topic, as there is a large quantity of money associated
with the sex trade. Exposing the sex trade has led to death threats
against members of the Center of Human Rights. Influences of
“machismo” in the culture, that is to say the domination of women by
men, feed the tacit approval of this exploitation. Corruption has
caused authorities to look the other way. Because the traffickers
are not preying supposedly on local women and girls, there exists
the attitude “It’s OK” because the victims are not from the area…
Traveling through a
small town in Tlaxcala that is the notorious center for those
involved in the trafficking of women and girls for the sex trade,
one can see huge houses being erected in the middle of very humble
neighborhoods. Such ostentatious expenditures signal those who are
benefiting from the misery and enslavement of young women and girls.
The traffickers and their families enjoy luxury cars and one
purportedly has even begun purchasing buses to start a “legitimate”
transportation company.
Those directly and
indirectly involved in the trafficking of these women and girls have
found it quite lucrative. The “dirty money” is plentiful. And I dare
say, with the major disruption of the other source of “dirty money,”
the Mexican drug trade, the exploitation of the immigrant women and
girls, will sadly continue to increase.
New Haven Independent
June 12, 2009
Mexico
Trafficking law aims to protect Mexican minors
...More than 8,000 children... come to
the United States alone each year; many are seeking safe haven from
human rights abuses, domestic violence and trafficking. When they
are caught, they are put in immigration proceedings to decide
whether they can stay or must return home. More than half of these
children, some of whom are remarkably young, must face these
proceedings without the help of a lawyer or guardian. The U.S.
government does not provide people in immigration proceedings — even
children — with a lawyer, even though the government is represented
by a lawyer. Children who have viable claims are often not able to
present them and are sent home, where their well-being, even their
lives, may be in danger...
The good news is that more
vulnerable children will have access to free lawyers and other
basic protections thanks to the passage of a law that for the
first time requires that children’s well-being be considered
foremost by officials who pick them up entering the United
States. The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act
of 2008 says that when children come here without documents and
without a parent or legal guardian, officials are to act
according to the best interests of the child — and not according
to an archaic and outdated system that was never designed to
handle children.
The law requires the government to
facilitate the representation of children by pro bono attorneys
in the private sector. This opens the door to innovative
public/private partnerships at no cost to the government that
will make a real difference in these children’s lives.
Now the law needs to be fully
implemented and the government needs to do its part. It must
institute procedures that give children a fair opportunity to
share their experiences of abuse and trauma. Judges and lawyers
must be trained so that they don’t inadvertently cause children
more trauma. Imagine being a young teenager and having to tell
lawyers and a judge who you have never met your story of being
sold to traffickers...
Nogales International
June 12, 2009
Canada
World Vision targets
child trafficking
The World Vision report urges
greater recognition and criminalization of all human trafficking
activities, many of which it says are tolerated by communities,
overlooked by authorities and even sanctioned by families...
Mississauga
June 12, 2009
Costa Rica - Mexico
 |
|
Rosa María Casanova Maya, using the Alias
"Rosi", was detained by Mexican officials for heading
the human trafficking ring and pimping. |
Ticas Say They Were Duped Into Traveling To Mexico Then Forced ...
Following up on the actions of
Mexican authorities, Costa Rican authorities quickly moved to
open an investigation into an alleged human trafficking ring
that young Costa Rican women duped into traveling to Mexico, in
the hopes of earning big money ...
Inside Costa Rica
June 12, 2009
United States
 |
|
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's
press conference presenting the 2009 Trafficking in
Persons report |
 |
|
U.S. State Department Trafficking in
Persons Office director ambassador Luis C. de Baca
delivers press briefing on the 2009 Trafficking in
Persons Report |
[This
year's TIP finds a 30% increase in countries listed in the 'Tier
2 Watch List']
"...The
International Labor Organization issued a report, The Cost of
Coercion, about six weeks or – excuse me, about a month ago,
and in that report the ILO estimated about
12.3 million people being held in bondage worldwide, of whom
they estimated about 1.5 million are for sexual slavery, sexual
servitude, which is perhaps a little bit counterintuitive to
what people have seen the modern slavery or the human
trafficking problem as, historically. Certainly, press
accounts, what you see in movies, what you see in mass culture,
tends to define this as a problem of people being moved to
prostitution, people perhaps being kidnapped into prostitution.
Rather, what we see, what the UNODC has reported on in their
trafficking report earlier this year, and what the ILO is
reporting on, is the notion that people are being enslaved,
whether it is for prostitution, whether it is in labor,
agriculture, factories, fields, domestic service, that they are
often entering into the relationship voluntarily and then
becoming enslaved within that..."
"...At the end of the day, though, it’s not about administrative
responses, it’s not about structural responses; it’s about the fact
that this is a crime. It is one of the most serious crimes that is
out there. The slavery and involuntary servitude that the
traffickers hold their victims in is something that cannot simply be
remedied by having different immigration structures, by having labor
inspectors, by having different policies about various things.
Rather, it can only be dealt with by
investigating and prosecuting the people who dare to do this.
And so we certainly stand ready, not just abroad but also at home,
for those countries who would like to engage, for those countries
who are willing to do the same type of self-assessment that we did
in the Attorney General’s report which was also released today,
where we look at what are the strengths, what are the weaknesses of
the United States Government’s response. For those countries who are
willing to engage in that type of partnership, the trafficking
office here at the State Department, the Justice Department and the
rest of the U.S. Government stands ready to partner...
Video of TIP Office Director Luis C. de Baca's
press briefing
U.S. Department of State
June 16, 2009
Mexico
 |
|
"My body is mine, and I decide."
Photo: CIMAC |
Cifras evidencian atropello a derechos SyR de
las mexicanas
Aunque discurso oficial asegura respetarlos
México DF - Sin
rumbo ni congruencia, la administración de Felipe Calderón propone
en el discurso respetar la libre decisión de las personas sobre el
número y espaciamiento de sus hijas e hijos y dotarlas de los medios
para que así sea, pero en la práctica criminaliza a las mujeres que
se atreven a ejercer sus derechos sexuales y reproductivos, como
interrumpir legalmente un embarazo (ILE) o usar métodos
anticonceptivos que eviten la implantación del óvulo, como el
dispositivo intrauterino (DIU)...
Although official discourse ensures
respect, statistics show that
individual reproductive rights are abused
Mexico City -
Lacking a clear and consistent policy, Mexican president Felipe
Calderón states in his public discourse that he respects the
right of individuals to freely choose number and spacing of
their children, and is willing to provide them with adequate
means to do so. In practice, the Calderón administration
criminalizes women who dare to exercise their sexual and
reproductive rights by either choosing to have an abortion or by
using the intrauterine device (IUD) as a form of birth control.
...[Thirteen]... states have criminalized the use of
intrauterine device (IUD) and emergency anti-contraception as
"for being considered to be methods of abortion, contrary to
scientific evidence.
International
agencies like the the United Nations Fund for Population (UNFPA)
and the Committee of Experts of the Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW),
among others, have insisted that a larger access to
contraception will reduce the [high] levels of death during
childbirth [especially in rural and indigenous areas]…
Despite the
goal established in the PNP that the workers in health
institutions be trained in the application of the NOM on family
planning, and apply it in a strict sense, the reality is that
these health workers put their moral beliefs, religious and
ethical decisions first in their interactions with individual
women.
This is
according to
Carlos Echarri, a researcher at El Colegio de Mexico. His
research paper entitled Key Issues, Needs and Obstacles to
Reproductive Health Care, addresses this issue.
The report
states: "Through the institutionalization of the
control of
fertility by involving health institutions, staff have
[actively] intervened to interfere with reproductive health
decision that are completely private. Health center staff
[impose their personal] values, norms and practices on the
private topic of sexuality."
Extended translation
Lourdes Godinez Leal
June 16 09 (CIMAC)
United States -
The World
 |
|
Melanne
Verveer - US Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s
Issues |
Remarks at Swearing-in Ceremony of the
Honorable Melanne Verveer as Ambassador-at-Large for Global
Women's Issues
Secretary
Clinton: …Melanne is most famous for the unwavering passion she
brings to her causes. And for the last 15 years, that cause has
been women and girls; their rights, their opportunities, their
central importance to the future of our world’s progress and
prosperity.
The absolute
commitment she has always shown to giving voice to the
voiceless, and making sure that the stories of everyday heroes
and heroines would be known to a broader audience. She helped to
launch the Vital Voices Democracy Initiative more than a decade
ago, and she nurtured it and helped it to grow into what it is
today. In the past eight years, she turned a government program
into a global NGO, and the results of that work are ones that I
encounter everywhere I travel on behalf of the United States.
And she particularly helped to lead our commitment to end the
intolerable scourge, the global crime of human trafficking.
So I was pretty
lucky that Melanne was willing to accept this nomination to be
our first ever ambassador on behalf on the issues and the causes
and the women and girls that she has worked for so many years.
She’s exactly the kind of diplomat that we need in the 21st
century to exercise what we call smart power. And I am so
pleased that the President agreed with me that there wasn’t any
other choice for this job…
Video of Melanne Verveer's swearing in
ceremony
Hillary Rodham Clinton
US Secretary of State
June 12, 2009
See also:
Melanne Verveer on
Human Trafficking
Verveer has called human trafficking,
which disproportionately affects women, one of the most important
women’s issues she will address.
"We need to elevate the race against human trafficking to the Grand
Prix level, with Formula One-quality vehicles, sponsors and fuel. We
simply can't stay in the slow lane for another ten years,"
she said in a 2007 interview.
She has long been an advocate of
protecting women from trafficking. While working in the Clinton
White House, she heard stories of networks that took women from
their homes and “sunk them into a nightmare.” These stories inspired
her to push for the 2000 Trafficking in Persons Act, which demanded
an annual report on the state of human trafficking around the world.
As ambassador, Verveer will work with
the Department's Trafficking in Persons Office to address
trafficking in three ways: prevention, protection, and prosecution,
all of which must be worked on together to be successful.. She has
also called on the U.S. to work more closely with NGOs,
international-law organizations and the business community to
address the underlying problems that give rise to trafficking,
including lack of opportunity and worker exploitation.
WhoRunsGov.com
May, 2009
See also:
Guatemala
 |
|
Rosa
Lacan Petzey |
Vital Voices: Rising Voices of Guatemala
At age eight Rosa
Lacan Petzey left home to seek work to support her family. For
eleven years she worked away from home for meager pay, living with
surrogate mothers. Her 14 hour workday left no time to study or to
play. She lost her chance to enjoy childhood.
Rosa’s story is
common in Guatemala, a country recovering from a 36-year civil war
that claimed more than 100,000 lives and displaced over 1 million
refugees. The devastation wrought by the conflict permeates
Guatemalan society, especially for young indigenous rural women.
At age 22 Rosa
defies all expectations - she is an educated, single woman in
unwavering pursuit of a focused professional goal - advocacy for
reproductive health. As part of a Population Council program, she
works with girls under pressure to drop out of school. Recounting
her job, Rosa tells stories of smart, ambitious girls unable to pay
school tuition, who reluctantly decide to enter the sex trade to pay
for their fees.
Rosa sees herself as a mentor for vulnerable young women, someone
who can inform, counsel and empathize with them. “Parents say the
girls need to marry, because they don’t have the means to keep them
at home.” As someone who went to work and back to school, Rosa
challenges parents to see the potential in their daughters that she
saw in herself.
Vital Voices
selected Rosa to attend Rising Voices: Unleashing Young Women’s
Economic Potential, a collaboration between Vital Voices and the
World Bank Group supported by the Nike Foundation...
Student Fellow
Megan Abbot
Vital Voices
LibertadLatina
Commentary:
We congratulate
Melanne Verveer upon
her swearing-in as US
Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s
Issues. We look forward to seeing serious
efforts to defeat human trafficking and
slavery during the Obama Administration. As
Ambassador Verveer stated in 2007:
"We need to elevate the race against human
trafficking to the Grand Prix level, with
Formula One-quality vehicles, sponsors and
fuel. We simply can't stay in the slow lane
for another ten years,"
Agreed!
Full speed ahead!!
End impunity
now!
Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
June 16, 2009
Mexico
 |
|
trabajo infantil
Child Labor |
México: nueve años de incumplimiento con niñez trabajadora
Ni Plan Nacional ni
definición de trabajos peligrosos
México DF - Hoy,
Día Mundial contra el trabajo infantil, México cumple nueve años de
haber adoptado el Convenio 182 de la Organización Internacional del
Trabajo (OIT), que responde a la necesidad de erradicar las peores
formas de trabajo infantil, sin que haya adoptado, como se
comprometió, un Plan Nacional de Acción y la determinación de los
trabajos peligrosos para la infancia y su identificación geográfica.
Por ello, Jorge
Hidalgo, de la organización Caminos Posibles, señala que en estos
últimos nueve años de gobierno del Partido Acción Nacional (PAN),
sólo se ha visto un retroceso de 15 ó 20 años en la problemática de
trabajo infantil, porque no hay una política por favorecer los
derechos de la infancia.
Mexico: Nine Years of Non-compliance with its
Commitment to End Child Labor
Neither the Creation of a National Plan of Action nor the identification of
dangerous jobs, both required by ILO Convention 182, have been carried out
by Mexico
Mexico
City- Today, on the World Day Against Child Labor, Mexico has passed
its ninth anniversary since having adopted Convention 182 of the
International Labor Organization (ILO), which addresses the need to
eradicate the worst forms of child labor. However, Mexico has failed
to fulfill its commitment to draft a National Action Plan and to
define categories of hazardous work for children, and to map the
locations there these types of work are carried out.
Therefore, Jorge Hidalgo, of the organization
Caminos Posibles [Possible
Paths], said that during the past nine years of government of the
National Action Party [Partido Acción Nacional - PAN], has set back
progress on eliminating child labor by 15 or 20 years, because they
have no policy to promote children's rights.
Mexican children form part of the global statistics issued by the
ILO showing that 100 million [underage] girls are working, or 46% of
the total children working. Twenty percent of those girls are under
12 years old. It is estimated that 53% of them engage in dangerous
forms of work...
The Mexican Context
Jorge Garcia Hidalgo noted that, according to official figures
reported in 2007, 3,647,000 Mexican children engage in some
occupation other than going to school. Of these, 67 percent are boys
and 33 percent are girls. Some 67% are youth between the ages of 14
and 17.
The study indicates that the majority of children work in a family
business with or without pay. Thirty eight percent of working
children work in agriculture. Fifty two percent of them began
working between the ages of 7 and 10.
According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI),
in 2005 there were 1,630,185 domestic workers. Ten percent were
under age 18, although only youth between 14 and 17 were counted in
the survey.
According to [the social services consulting firm]
Thais Social Development, it is estimated that 68 percent of girls who work in Mexico
are engaged in domestic service...
The
ILO, in this Day, calls for policy responses to tackle the causes of
child labor, paying attention to the situation of girls, as well as
urgent measures to eradicate the worst forms of child labor and
attention to the need for education and professional formation for
adolescents.
Full English Translation
Narce
Santibañez Alejandre
CIMAC
Noticias
June 12, 2009
Wisconsin, USA
 |
|
International Labor Organization's
Campaign "Give
Girls a Chance" |
World Day Against Child Labor: Mexican Foreign
Ministry releases report detailing Mexican children traveling to US
alone are looking for work
…The global
community observes World Day Against Child Labor
Begun in 2002 by
the International Labor Organization, this year's theme is "Give
Girls a Chance -- End Child Labor."
According to ILO estimates, of the 218
million child laborers worldwide, 100
million are girls. More than half of those
girls are exposed to hazardous work in a
variety of sectors, including agriculture,
manufacturing, mining, domestic services and
commercial sexual exploitation. In many
cases, work performed by girls is hidden
from the public eye, leaving the girls
vulnerable to physical danger and abuse.
Girls are often
forced to carry a double burden by contributing significantly to
their own households' chores, including child care, as well as
undertaking other employment outside of their homes.
…Recently, the
Mexican Foreign Ministry compiled a report entitled 2008 Report of
the Repatriation of Unaccompanied Minors. (In Spanish)
The report found
that over 17,000 children from 0-17 were captured along the
US-Mexico border by US authorities. The overwhelming reason that
these children gave for coming to the United States was to work.
Some of the other major findings:
* 83 percent of the
youth captured were boys, while 17 percent were girls.
* The main
destination state for the children was California followed by Texas,
Arizona, New York, Illinois and Florida.
* The majority of
children were found to be between 12 and 17-years old…
* Of the children
captured, 26 percent were indigenous mixteco.
This study by the
Mexican government illustrates that there does exist a need by these
children to work to help their families. Seeing that these are the
ones who were caught, it stands to reason that many more escaped
capture.
The more troubling
thought is where are these other children and what are they doing?
One answer is
certain -- they are in the United States.
Are they at the
mercy of human traffickers and being prostituted out to satisfy the
demented needs of a sick demographic? Probably.
Are they being
forced to work in slave-like conditions with no or very little pay
and no freedom? Most likely?
Have they
sacrificed their childhoods to help their families? Yes.
Are they lost
forever between two countries? Hopefully, not.
Though most of
these children do disappear into the underworld of this nation, they
do come up for air sometimes. It's up to all of us to be cognizant
and question why a young person would be working in a particular
situation or under certain conditions or be with a questionable
group of people…
Marisa Treviño - Blogger
LatinaLista.com
June
12, 2009
The World /
El Mundo
Día mundial 2009: Demos una oportunidad a las
niñas: Erradique-mos el trabajo infantil
AEl Día mundial contra el trabajo infantil se
conmemorará el 12 de junio de 2009. Este año, el Día mundial marcará
el décimo aniversario de la adopción del simbólico Convenio núm. 182
de la OIT que responde a la necesidad de erradicar las peores formas
de trabajo infantil. A la vez que celebrará los progresos logrados
en los últimos diez años, el Día mundial pondrá de relieve los retos
que aún subsisten, haciendo hincapié en la explotación de las niñas
en el trabajo infantil.
Se estima que hay en el mundo unos 100 millones de niñas víctimas
del trabajo infantil. Muchas de ellas realizan trabajos similares a
los que desempeñan los niños, pero también suelen sobrellevar
dificultades adicionales y enfrentarse a diferentes peligros. Además,
las niñas están también expuestas a algunas de las peores formas de
trabajo infantil, habitualmente en situaciones de trabajo encubierto...
Organización Internacional del Trabajo (OIT)
The World Day Against
Child Labor will be celebrated on 12
June 2009. The World Day this year marks
the tenth anniversary of the adoption of
the landmark ILO Convention No. 182,
which addresses the need for action to
tackle the worst forms of child labor.
Whilst celebrating progress made during
the past ten years, the World Day will
highlight the continuing challenges,
with a focus on exploitation of girls in
child labor.
Around the world, an
estimated 100 million girls are involved
in child labor. Many of these girls
undertake similar types of work as boys,
but often also endure additional
hardships and face extra risks.
Moreover, girls are all too often
exposed to some of the worst forms of
child labor, often in hidden work
situations.
International Labor Organization (ILO)
June
12, 2009
Wisconsin, USA
|
|
|
Dr. Jefferson Calimlim Sr. and his wife,
Dr. Elnora Calimlim |
Milwaukee couple each sentenced to six years
in prison for forcing a woman to work as their domestic servant for
19 years
Milwaukee - A Brookfield, Wis., couple who kept a domestic servant in
their home under conditions of servitude for nearly two decades was
re-sentenced in federal court Tuesday to six years in prison. This
sentence resulted from a joint investigation by U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the FBI.
Jefferson Calimlim
Sr. and his wife, Elnora, both medical doctors in Milwaukee, were
each sentenced by U.S. District Judge Rudolph T. Randa, Eastern
District of Wisconsin, to six years in prison for forcing a woman to
work as their domestic servant and illegally harboring her for 19
years in their Brookfield home…
According to
evidence presented at trial, Jefferson Calimlim Sr. and his wife
recruited and brought the victim from the Philippines to the U.S. in
1985 when she was 19 years old. In September 2004, ICE and FBI
agents removed the victim, then age 38, from the Calimlim's
Brookfield residence through the execution of a federal search
warrant. The victim testified that for 19 years she was hidden in
the Calimlim's home, forbidden from going outside, and told that she
would be arrested, imprisoned and deported if she were discovered.
She was not allowed to socialize, communicate freely with the
outside world, or leave the house unsupervised, and she was required
to hide in her basement bedroom whenever non-family members were
present in the house.
"Today's sentence
is a testament to our solemn commitment to protect those who cannot
protect themselves," said James Gibbons, acting special
agent-in-charge of the ICE Office of Investigations in Chicago.
"Many people are unaware that this form of modern day slavery still
occurs in the United States. The victims can be domestic servants,
sweat shop employees, sex workers or fruit pickers who are lured
here by the promise of prosperity and forced to work as indentured
servants. ICE is committed to giving them the help they need to come
forward as we work to end human trafficking with vigorous
enforcement and tough penalties..."
U.S. ICE
June 9, 2009
United States
Officials Want a Change in Law to Shut Down
Safe Houses Used in Human-Trafficking Schemes
Washington, DC -
The Obama administration and Senator Chuck Schumer want to step up
pressure on human-trafficking operations by taking away their safe
houses.
Schumer
announced plans Wednesday to propose legislation to allow federal
agents to seize houses if they can prove the buildings were used by
smugglers to shelter illegal immigrants temporarily.
Under current
law, the home owner must be convicted of a smuggling-related offense
before prosecutors can seize the safe house.
Officials say
taking safe houses out of play could disrupt many smuggling
operations. Federal law allows prosecutors to seize houses in drug
cases, money laundering and child pornography, but not for human
smuggling.
"This policy
needs to be fixed right away," Schumer, D-N.Y., said after a meeting
with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. "It can put a
serious dent in the operations of the Mexican cartels that deal in
human trafficking..."
Eileen Sullivan
The Associated Proess
June 10, 2009
Guatemala
 |
|
Rigoberta Menchú Mum, 1992
Nobel Peace Prize winner and an indigenous political
leader |
Guatemala’s Neglected Story: Continued Disregard for Indigenous
Autonomy
Indigenous
peoples are still violently suppressed when they voice any
opposition to foreign multi-national investment operations
Gaining
strength, the country’s Indigenous movement is a much needed tool
for securing equal rights
…Continued
Repression and Impunity
In 1996, the
Guatemalan government and the combined guerrilla forces functioning
under the moniker, Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca (UNRG),
signed the Peace Accords that brought an end to more than 30 years
of a bloody civil war. Guatemala’s internal conflict resulted in the
death of close to 200,000 people, many of whom were indigenous
campesinos caught in the crossfire of the warring factions’ violent
ideologies. Many more were kidnapped, tortured and never heard from
again. Claims that indigenous communities were easily manipulated
and recruited by leftist guerrillas were used as excuses for the
systematic ethnic cleansing by rightist death squads in what the
Guatemalan Commission of Historical Clarification (set up by the UN
as part of the Accord of Oslo ) deemed to be genocide. Those who
participated in creating the infrastructure which indirectly led to
the indiscriminate killings in indigenous communities did not only
include Guatemalan authorities, but also foreign entities with roles
to play in the country, such as the World Bank and the
Inter–American Development Bank.
In the 1980s,
civilian paramilitaries, sanctioned by the government, cleared the
way for the construction of the World Bank-financed Chixoy Dam by
eradicating the indigenous opposition it had attracted. This has
become known as the Rio Negro massacre, a tragedy that left hundreds
[of women and children raped and] dead…
The indigenous movement lay semi-dormant for a
number of years, until the recent election of Bolivia’s Evo Morales,
the first indigenous leader in Latin America, raised expectations
among Guatemala’s underrepresented community. This prompted a 2006
statement by Rigoberta Menchú Mum, 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner and
an indigenous leader, to announce that she would pursue the
presidency in the 2007 election.
Menchú’s presidential bid that year proved to be a fiasco, as she
gained only about 3 percent of the vote. The meager figure can be
attributed to the fact she was an ineffective campaigner, but also
that indigenous people are still “largely outside the country’s
political, economic, social, and cultural mainstream due to limited
educational opportunities, widespread poverty, lack of awareness of
their rights, and pervasive discrimination.” Another impediment was
her inability to connect with indigenous communities. However,
Menchú later returned to the political scene by announcing that she
was collaborating in the creation of a new political party in
Guatemala, WINAQ (meaning “people,” or “humanity” in Quichua), in an
effort to gain the executive seat in 2012. After gathering the
17,000 affiliates needed to register as a legitimate political
party, WINAQ was established in 2008, and its representatives stated
that it had close to 40,000 members. According to Barbara Schieber,
contributor to Guatemala Times, this was “one of the most important
steps ever achieved by a Mayan political leader in Guatemala.”
WINAQ has made it a point not to claim that it is an exclusively
indigenous party, which, if it had done so, would perhaps alienate
much of the rest of the population. Gregorio Canil, spokesman for
WINAQ, states that the party is constructed as a “political tool for
the expression of the needs of the four villages in Guatemala: Maya,
Ladino, Garifuna and Xinca...”
Today, indigenous
leaders and local activists are routinely faced with threats of
assassination and cases of intimidation that are met with inadequate
investigations or total indifference by the authorities. Death
squads have re-emerged, which are hired to survey indigenous lands
scheduled for exploiting by foreign enterprises. The 1996 Peace
Accords set the international community at ease by declaring an end
to the civil war that had decimated the Central American country for
over three decades, but it became obvious that such optimism was
unwarranted and that the treaty did not bring an end to the
violence…
…In Guatemala,
hostility and racism towards indigenous groups is manifested by
political exclusion. The unvoiced consensus among the powerful
Europeanized minority remains that although the indigenous
population is substantial, its political representation should
remain marginalized…
Research
Associate Billy Lemus
Council on
Hemispheric Affairs (COHA)
June 9th, 2009
See also:
LibertadLatina
About the Sexual Exploitation with Impunity of
Especially Indigenous Women and Children in Guatemala
...The Río Negro
massacre occurred after an indigenous community at
Río Negro refused to relocate and make way for the
Chixoy Hydroelectric Dam, a massive government
energy project supported by The World Bank. After 74
villagers were killed in February 1982, most of the
men fled to the hills. Early on March 13, 1982, army
soldiers and a civil patrol from the nearby village
of Xococ arrived at Río Negro, and murdered 177
women and children. Many of the victims were raped
and tortured...
See also:
The women of
Rio Negro
[the town of
Black
River], some
of them
pregnant,
were dragged
from their
homes,
forced to
march to the
top of a
mountain,
and there,
along with
their
children,
were raped,
tortured and
killed.
Ana, a
survivor...
|
"The soldiers and (paramilitary civil
defense) patrollers started grabbing the
girls and raping us."
"Only two soldiers raped me because my
grandmother was there to defend me. All the
girls were raped." |
In total,
177 women
and children
died that
day [in 1982].
CERIGUA
Weekly
Jennifer
Harbury
DEC. 11,
1997
Guatemala
Dos décadas de violación a las normas laborales y Derechos Humanos
Guatemala -
En las maquilas está prohibido embarazarse, orinar más de dos veces
al día e incluso tomar agua durante la jornada de trabajo. También
esta vedado quejarse o faltar un solo día por enfermedad.
Estas razones
son justificantes de despido para las guatemaltecas que laboran en
la industria textilera de este país centroamericano, en
establecimientos dirigidos, en su mayoría, por coreanos...
Maquila factories in Guatemala engage in labor slavery and sexist discrimination against women
Foreign-owned textile industry has two decades
of violating labor and human rights standards
Guatemala - In the maquilas [low wage foreign-owned
factories], women [who are the great majority of workers] are
prohibited by their employers from getting pregnant, urinating more
than twice a day, and to drink water during the workday. It is also
forbidden to complain or miss even a single day because of illness. | |
/ Welcome
