After the West Chicago woman returned home from her daughters' school event, the two girls told her a secret they shared about her live-in boyfriend.

"I had no idea what I was about to hear," the mother wrote in a victim-impact statement. "Both my daughters then said that he had sexually molested them. I am so angry because this man has taken something so sacred. They are going to have to live with the pain and memories of his actions for the rest of their lives."

Francisco Moyotl was sentenced Thursday to 30 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to committing predatory criminal sexual assault of a child and aggravated criminal sexual abuse.

The 42-year-old West Chicago man must serve 85 percent of the prison term before being eligible for parole. He also likely will face deportation because he is not a U.S. citizen...

A hulking sex offender raped a 75-year-old Bronx woman who employed his mother as a caretaker, police said Monday.

Marcos Cuevas sneaked into a private senior citizens residence on Sunday and had wormed his way into the apartment of another woman - a neighbor of the victim - when she happened to come by for a visit, police said.

"I'm looking for my mother," the brawny pervert told her.

"She's not here," the elderly victim replied. "She's off on weekends."

So Cuevas, 32, tied the wrists of the victim and her 76-year-old pal behind their backs - and then raped the younger woman, police said.

The tattooed terror, who stands 6-foot-2 and weighs 295 pounds, also robbed the 76-year-old of $10 before fleeing the Bronx building, cops said.

When detectives arrived, the rape victim had no problem identifying her attacker because his mom, Iris, works as a home care attendant for her 95-year-old mother, police said.

A Level 3, or high risk, sex offender, Cuevas was caught later on E. 141st St. in Manhattan.

Cuevas was charged with rape, robbery, sex abuse and unlawful imprisonment. His alleged victim was in stable condition at Lincoln Hospital.

Ivonne Suarez, who said she is Cuevas' wife, defended her "Gentle Giant" and insisted the rape accusation was dreamed up by a "crazy woman."

"He would never do this after spending that time in jail," said Suarez, 40. "The woman is senile. She made up this story. My husband wouldn't lay a hand on her."

...Cuevas spent nearly a decade behind bars for raping two Manhattan women - one of them at knifepoint in Harlem - in 1996.

Sentenced to seven to 14 years in prison, Cuevas was twice denied parole by boards that deemed him a danger to society. He won a conditional release in November 2005, but a year later he was back in jail after violating his parole in August 2006.

He wasn't released again until November 2009, according to records.

Ontario - A Catholic priest in San Bernardino County is accused of sexually abusing two boys within the last two years.

Rev. Alex Castillo was removed from duty as an active priest in June.

He served at four churches within the Diocese of San Bernardino, including Our Lady of Guadelupe in Ontario.

The parents of two adolescent boys, who are brothers, claim Castillo sexually abused their sons. Castillo maintains his innocence.

The accusations were revealed in a letter read in church over the weekend.

Parishioners say the man they call "Reverend Alex" is strict and spiritual.

"It's a good person. It's a good father. He's been here for quite a few years," parishioner Benjamin Rosas told KTLA.

Church members say they were told Castillo was sick when he left back in June.

The diocese will only say he's in a place where he no longer has any contact with parishioners. They won't say where.

Police will not comment on the allegations.

The San Bernardino Diocese is asking any potential victims to come forward.

Dayton - Police are looking for a man, possibly Hispanic in connection with the sexual assault of a 15-year-old girl.

Officers say the girl was walking home from school near Bolton Avenue when a man started following her. He then jumped out , grabbed the girl, threw her over his shoulders, and took her into a vacant house where she was assaulted.

Police say the man is between the ages of 18 and 20 and weighs about 140 pounds. He has a teardrop tattoo under one of his eyes, and he is dressed in black.

If you have any information about this crime, please call 333-COPS.

...For those of us who remember the tragedy of Latin America's recent past, seeing the images of last month's massacre of 72 immigrants in northern Mexico is like reentering an old and very familiar nightmare.

Not long ago, dictators ruled most of Latin America. They had large groups of people kidnapped, tortured and executed in secret. Their crimes against humanity hit nearly every corner of the region, from cosmopolitan Buenos Aires to provincial Guatemala City.

But this new act of mass murder was not the work of a military junta run by generals. It didn't take place in a tiny banana republic without a judicial system worthy of the name.

It happened in the proud, multiparty democracy called Mexico, a country with ample social freedoms, including a vibrant free press. And it wasn't an isolated occurrence. A report last year by Mexico's human rights ombudsman said at least 400 mass kidnappings are reported in Mexico every year, many involving the rape and murder of hostages.

Modern death squads are operating freely in northern Mexico, extorting those who wish to come here, where relatives and jobs await. The kidnappings and murders of immigrants carried out by these groups are a stain on Mexican democracy, and many commentators there recognize this.

"The abuse against migrants is an everyday embarrassment we don't want to talk about because it would rob us of all our moral authority before our neighbors to the north," columnist Alfonso Zarate wrote in response to the massacre in the newspaper El Universal.

"Mexico demands respect for the human rights of 'illegal' workers in the U.S.," Zarate continued, " … but is now itself under the microscope of the international community, which is rightly scandalized and indignant."

...As with the many killings of police officers and officials in Mexico, the San Fernando massacre was an act of psychological warfare. Such extreme violence is meant to spread fear and thus make it easier for the killers to impose their will on the living.

If we stay silent about their crime, if we treat it as just another episode in Mexico's unwinnable drug wars, then we'll allows the killers to win.

And yet, here in the United States, the expressions of outrage from the immigrant rights movement have been muted. You could say they are a mere whisper compared with the very loud campaign against Arizona's SB 1070, a law whose most controversial provisions will probably never go into effect.

We should see the killings as a blunt reminder of the reasons why people so desperately want to come here. And we should speak of San Fernando with the same horror as we do El Mozote and the Naval Mechanics School of Buenos Aires — sites of the most heinous crimes committed by the militaries of El Salvador and Argentina in the 1970s and '80s.

It's not just the killers who deserve our moral outrage, it's the failed judicial systems that allow them to thrive without fear of punishment.

In Latin America, the massacre has already provoked much reflection and protest. The government of Honduras, home to the largest number of its victims, announced it would take new steps to try to discourage illegal immigration to the U.S.

In Mexico, the northern city of Saltillo witnessed a rare event just days after the Aug. 23 massacre: a march by 200 undocumented immigrants, carrying the flags of El Salvador, Guatemala and other Central American countries.

"Our countries deny us the opportunity for economic development," the demonstrators said in a written statement, after marching through the city with covered faces. "But Mexico denies us the opportunity to live."

To stop SB 1070, we've seen Angelenos drive across the desert to Phoenix to march, to denounce both the governor of Arizona and the mad sheriff of Maricopa County, Joe Arpaio.

But I've yet to hear of any rallies at the Mexican consulate or anywhere else here in Los Angeles, demanding that the Mexican government prosecute those guilty of so many migrant killings and disappearances.

Most of the country's leading immigrant rights groups haven't even bothered to issue a news release.

That doesn't surprise me. Generally speaking, the U.S. immigrant rights movement doesn't have much to say about the social and political conditions that lead so many to leave their native countries and place themselves at the mercy of an increasingly violent smuggling industry.

This is wrong. We can't turn a blind eye to the deeper, seemingly intractable injustices that are the obvious root cause of the problem.

Simply put: It's wrong that people have to undertake the journey to the U.S. in the first place. People shouldn't have to leave the land of their ancestors, their extended families, their barrios and their farms.

They leave because the promise of democracy in Mexico and Central America remains unfulfilled.

The Tamaulipas murders are really just the most sickening expression of a vast system of inequality and corruption that still defines life for millions of people.

U.S. immigration reform, unfortunately, won't do anything to strengthen the rule of law in those countries that supply the greatest number of migrants. It won't stop the power of the criminal groups that infiltrate government and intimidate officials, not just in certain regions of Mexico but in much of Central America.

There's a movement for democracy and government accountability in those places. But it's often under threat...

...Many more of us need to stand with those who work to keep the promise of democracy and justice alive in northern Mexico, Guatemala and other places.

It matters not just to them but to us.

And now, as in the age of the dictators, it's a matter of life and death.

Cada minuto y medio se comete un delito de trata de personas en el mundo, y en México, aún sabiendo los lugares y rutas donde operan las redes, las acciones que se realizan para evitarlo son insuficientes, señalaron especialistas.

Oscar Castro Soto, director del Instituto de Derechos Humanos “Ignacio Ellacurría” de la Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA), indicó que cada año 400,000 personas son víctimas de dicho delito en el mundo.

En la presentación de la agenda del “II Congreso latinoamericano de trata y tráfico de personas”, el director explicó que 80% de las victimas son niños y mujeres utilizados para explotación sexual y trabajos domésticos, ya sea de forma conciente o en contra de su voluntad.

Las rutas identificadas son: Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile y Argentina; Brasil y España; Panamá, Nicaragua y Costa Rica; y El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, México y Estados Unidos, expresaron académicos de la UIA.

Las redes de trata y de pornografía infantil en México que están vinculadas al narcotráfico, se encuentran en regiones de Tapachula, Cancún, Acapulco, Veracruz, Tijuana, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Ciudad Juárez y La Merced, en el Distrito Federal, indicaron expertos.

Las instituciones federales y estatales de México, con excepción del Instituto de Mujeres del Distrito Federal, no se sumaron a la convocatoria del evento internacional a realizarse del 20 al 24 de septiembre en la UIA de Puebla en la que participaran funcionarios de varios países, lo que ocasionó la sorpresa de varios especialistas.

Raquel Pastor, integrante del Comité Académico del Congreso, señaló en un comunicado, el apoyo del foro para ayudar a quienes trabajan en la persecución del delito de trata, ya que en México no existen instituciones especializadas que atiendan a las víctimas de dicho delito.

Mexico's actions against human trafficking are insufficient: Ibero-American University

According to Oscar Castro Soto, director of the Ignacio Ellacurría Institute for Human Rights at Mexico's Ibero-American University (UIA) in Puebla state, every minute and a half a human trafficking crime is committed somewhere in the world. In Mexico, despite the fact that trafficking locations and routes are known, [state] actions to prevent such crimes are inadequate. According to Castro Soto, 400,000 persons become victims of trafficking each year globally.

Castro Soto presented his observations in the just-released agenda for the upcoming Second Latin American Congress on Human Trafficking, which will be held at the UIA campus in Puebla between September 20th and 24th, 2010. He explained that 80% of the victims of human trafficking are children and women, who either consciously or against their will are utilized for sexual exploitation or domestic servitude.

Known [Latin American] trafficking routes exist in Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico, the United States and Spain, stated Castro Soto.

Castro Soto's statement noted that within Mexico, human trafficking and child pornography networks are tied to narco-trafficking organizations. These criminal groups may be found in Tapachula, Cancún, Acapulco, Veracruz, Tijuana, Tlaxcala, Puebla, Ciudad Juárez and the La Merced sector of Mexico City.

With the exception of the National Women's Institute, Mexican federal agencies chose not to participate in the conference, which brought expressions of surprise from some of the specialists involved with the event. Government officials of several other nations plan to attend.

Raquel Pastor, who is a member of the academic committee of the Congress, stated in a press release that the goal of the Congress was to assist those in government who seek to prosecute human trafficking crimes, given the fact the Mexico currently does not have institutions set-up to assist victims.

Comparisons have been made before between Colombia of the 1980s and Mexico today with regards to drug-trafficking. But never before has a senior member of the US administration made such an explicit comparison.

"It's looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago," said US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Wednesday, pointing out that narco-traffickers control certain, although not significant parts, of Mexico.

In Colombia, she said, "it got to the point where more than a third of the country, nearly 40% of the country at one time or another was controlled by the insurgents."

Mexico was quick to react, with officials stressing that they "did not share" Mrs Clinton's vision.

President Felipe Calderon's government has always rejected such comparisons.

National Security spokesman Alejandro Poire recognised "some similarities" in the way criminal gangs operated in both Latin American nations, but he said violence in both nations "was fuelled by the enormous demand for drugs in US".

Both Mexico and Colombia have indeed had to tackle the threat posed by drug-trafficking to the institutions of state, analysts say.

The number of people killed in Colombia when Pablo Escobar was the leader of the Medellin drug cartel "was thousands, killed by indiscriminate violence and bombings, a total challenge to the State," said Samuel Gonzalez Ruiz, former head of the Mexican government's organised crime unit and UN adviser.

"In this sense, it is similar to Mexico now."

Mexico City - Most drug trafficking news in Mexico, horrific as it might be, slips out of the public consciousness the following day.

But the massacre of 72 migrants in northern Mexico last week, the worst known mass killing since Felipe Calderón took office in December of 2006 declaring war against organized crime, has sparked debate about the vulnerabilities of migrants traveling through Mexico to the United States.

It also confirmed what the government and analysts have claimed for some time: that criminal gangs are increasingly diversifying their illicit activities and targeting more than just rival drug traffickers.

The government says that sending some 50,000 federal forces to weaken the power of criminal gangs has made them desperate and forced them increasingly into other businesses, such as extortion, kidnapping, and human trafficking.

“When it comes to justice and the social dynamic, we are losing against criminal organizations,” says Javier Oliva Posada, a drug expert at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. “It is seen not just in the number of murders but the cruelty in each one of them.”

Tamaulipas violence continues

The violence is constant in Tamaulipas, the troubled state where the 72 migrants were massacred. On Friday, a car bomb exploded outside the broadcasting group Televisa in the state's capital of Ciudad Victoria. On Sunday, a Mexico mayor was assassinated – the second in less than two weeks.

“This cowardly crime and the condemnable violent events that have recently occurred in this part of the country reinforce the commitment to continue fighting criminal groups with all the resources of the state,” President Calderón's office said in a statement Sunday night. On Monday, the local press reported that about 3,200 federal officers, or 10 percent of the entire force, were fired for corruption charges or for failing to carry out their duties.

The government also announced over the weekend that because of the presumption that drug traffickers are the perpetrators of the massacre of the 72 migrants, the investigation is now in federal hands. The state prosecutor who was leading the investigation has been missing for several days. Authorities suspect the massacre was carried out by the Zetas, a group of Mexican Army deserters who worked for drug cartels before forming their own drug trafficking organization...

The Zetas reportedly transported the captured migrants to a ranch about 100 miles south of the Texas border. When the migrants refused to become recruits, they were killed.

'Brutality escalating steadily'

Some 28,000 people have been killed in drug-related violence since Calderón became president of Mexico. But the nation is grappling with why these men and women became part of the casualties list and whether the inability to pay a ransom or the refusal to partake in organized crime is now reason enough to be killed.

“There is a kind of heartless rationality to this,” says Bruce Bagley, a drug expert at the University of Miami. “They become a liability.”

He says the Zetas are probably also sending a message to future migrants: pay up or work for us, or you die.

“The brutality has been escalating steadily,” he says, not just on the part of the Zetas but drug trafficking organizations in Mexico overall...

When Mexican officials come to the United States pretending to have the moral authority to preach about compassion and human rights for undocumented immigrants in this country, they personify hypocrisy.

Everyone knows that what they preach here they don’t practice at home.

They often claim to be coming here to support U.S. undocumented immigrants, mostly Mexicans, in their efforts to gain respect for their human rights and some sort of legalization plan.

With hypocritical indignation, they react to Draconian U.S. measures against undocumented immigrants and encourage this country to have the compassion they don’t have themselves. Their double standards are gigantic...

To get here, these immigrants have to go through the Mexican gantlet of abuse, in a country where some law enforcement authorities compete with criminal gangs to see who gets to kidnap, extort, rob and even rape the immigrants first. Thousands of hapless people become their victims every year.

In the U.S., we tend to know a little about Mexico’s bloody war on drug-trafficking cartels and a lot about the Mexicans and other Latinos coming illegally through our southern border. But we are extremely uninformed about the treatment of migrants entering Mexico through its southern borders, especially the one with Guatemala, where there have been numerous reports of human rights violations committed by Mexicans for many years.

And we are even less informed about the plight of traveling through Mexico as undocumented immigrants. There are many people who simply have vanished while traveling from town to town, many who have been pulled off trains at gunpoint, many who have been forced to become slaves, many who have been kidnapped en masse and held hostage until they can call their U.S. relatives and pay ransoms, many whose bodies are yet to be identified.

In the United States, undocumented immigrants can end up getting exploited, racially profiled and deported. But in Mexico, they can get massacred.

When Americans who support strict enforcement of U.S. immigration laws respond to my columns that call for compassion and legalization for undocumented immigrants, they often encourage me to “look at Mexico,” as if I can’t see what goes on there.

Mexico’s laws are not only much harsher against undocumented immigrants but also superseded by bribes, intimidation, extortion and mass graves!

You need to stand on high moral ground when you preach to a neighboring country about how it should conduct its immigration policies. Yet Mexican officials try to preach from the basement.

When immigrant rights advocates seek compassion for undocumented immigrants here, Mexico doesn’t help...

Earlier this year, Amnesty International reported that Mexican authorities had failed to prevent the kidnapping and abuse of migrants by criminal organizations that “often … operate in complicity or with the consent of public officials.” Last week, the organization noted that the 72-person massacre “once again demonstrates the extreme danger and violence that Central Americans face on their treacherous journey north, as well as Mexican authorities’ abject failure to protect them.”

Mexicans have gangs of drug-trafficking hoodlums trying to diversify their crime portfolios by including human trafficking and kidnapping for ransom, and they have corrupt cops, judges and politicians allowing these gangsters to get away with murder, literally. Yet some Mexicans still are going on TV and blaming the United States. They are so used to blaming U.S. immigration policies for all their problems that they don’t know when to stop or when they begin to sound ridiculous...

When Mexican government officials protest against Arizona for criminalizing undocumented immigrants, for using local cops to enforce immigration laws and for promoting fear and hatred of foreigners, they are absolutely right.

But do they have the moral right to do it after having been doing it all themselves?

To be fair, the Mexican government has taken some steps to combat abuses and soften its most Draconian immigration laws. But they are baby steps, certainly not enough to lead government officials to the high moral ground where they can lecture anyone about immigration reform or human rights.

The U.S. government is considering substantially increasing funding for Mexico's drug war beyond the $1.4-billion Merida Initiative, Paul Richter reports from our Washington bureau. Citing an unnamed source in the White House, Richter reports that the Obama administration sees its joint anti-drug effort with Mexico as a top priority.

At the same time, the administration separately announced that Mexico would receive $36 million in already-scheduled funds from the Merida Initiative but that another $26 million was being withheld until "additional progress can be made" on human rights issues in Mexico.

The State Department's report on Mexico was sent to Congress last week but has not been publicly released.

The administration wants Mexico to increase the authority of its National Human Rights Commission and for Mexican soldiers to be prosecuted on human rights charges in civilian courts rather than military tribunals. Soldiers and officers are rarely if ever convicted on such accusations in military courts, even as rights complaints have skyrocketed since President Felipe Calderon launched the army-led campaign against drug-trafficking groups in late 2006.

On Sunday, Mexican soldiers opened fire on a family's car at a highway checkpoint in the northern state of Nuevo Leon, killing a man and his teenage son and injuring five others. The Mexican army is implicated in the shooting deaths of two children in April. In March, a suspected drug gang member was photographed being hauled into the custody of marines one day, then showed up dead on a roadside the next.

Mexico's Interior Ministry said it would be paying the funeral expenses (link in Spanish) of Sunday's shooting victims, citing the military's "error" in the incident.

After last week's announcement about the withheld money, Mexico's Foreign Ministry responded with a measured critique. "Cooperation with the United States against transnational organized crime through the framework of the Merida Initiative is based on shared responsibility, mutual trust and respect for the jurisdiction of each country, not on unilateral plans for evaluating and conditions unacceptable to the government of Mexico," the statement said...

Mexican authorities have rescued six undocumented Cuban migrants who had been held for ransom for a month in Cancun, a vacation hotspot on the nation's Yucatan Peninsula, the state-run Notimex news agency reported Wednesday.

The abductors, who were not apprehended in Tuesday night's rescue, were seeking between $8,000 and $10,000 from relatives in Florida for each of the five men and one woman they had been holding in a series of safe houses, Notimex said.

The Cubans said they arrived in Cancun on a raft and were picked up from the streets of Cancun by men in a pickup truck, the news service said.

The Yucatan Peninsula, particularly the municipalities of Cancun, Isla Mujeres and Cozumel, is a major landing point for smugglers who bring Cubans into Mexico and take them to the U.S. border.

"It's a major receiving dock for things coming from the Caribbean," said Samuel Logan, founding director of Southern Pulse, an online information network focused on Latin America. "It's a pretty important reception point."

Human smugglers charge up to $10,000 per person to transport them by boat from Cuba, usually from the westernmost province of Pinar del Rios, and then overland in Mexico to the U.S. border.

Mexican and Cuban officials estimate that up to 10,000 Cubans are smuggled into Mexico each year, the online Diario de Cuba publication said Wednesday...

Cuban smugglers have been working with drug-trafficking organizations in the Yucatan area, particularly the Beltran-Leyva and Zetas cartels, authorities say. Lately, officials say, the Cuban smugglers have been branching out into trafficking cocaine from Colombia.

The Noticaribe online publication said in November that a group of Cuban migrants had reported being tortured in Cancun by abductors who demanded $10,000 from family in Miami, Florida.

Of the 34 killings in the Cancun area in 2007, Noticaribe said, many of them were Cubans involved in human trafficking.

Tuesday's rescue of the six Cubans came one week after Mexican authorities discovered the bodies of 72 migrants from Central and South America on a ranch in Tamaulipas state. Officials are investigating whether the Zetas cartel killed the migrants and for what reason. It's possible the migrants refused to work for the cartel or were unable to obtain ransom money.

"Sometimes the Mexican organized crime group says, 'The hell with it. We're not going to deal with these people,' and they kill them all," Logan said...

In Mexico, human smuggling is a $15 billion- to $20 billion-a-year endeavor, second only to drug trafficking, Logan said. That money, which used to go mostly to smugglers, now also flows into the hands of drug cartel members. The drug-trafficking organizations charge the smugglers a price per person for the right to cross over their territory, a practice called "derecho de piso," or right of passage. Or they often abduct the migrants and hold them for ransom.

Al inaugurarse el Foro Nacional contra la Trata de Personas, la diputada Federal Rosi Orozco, se pronunció que así “como se alzan las voces porque se castigue a los secuestradores, también debería exigirse castigo para los tratantes de blancas, porque también aquí se les tortura”.

Este Foro se inauguró este viernes y la representante de la Comisión Especial de la Lucha contra la Trata de Personas del Congreso Federal, ante autoridades del gobierno estatal y federal, exigió que “se escuchen las voces de esos niños y niñas pobres, porque es la misma demanda que tienen los niños ricos que sufren secuestro. La trata de blancas es el secuestro de lo más pobres, de los más vulnerables, que no tienen para pagar un rescate”.

Human Trafficking and the Kidnapping of Mexico's Poorest

During the commencement of a recent forum on human trafficking held by the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of Congress), National Action Party (PAN) deputy Rosi Orozco, who is the president of the Special Committee to Fight Human Trafficking in the Chamber, declared that "just as we must raise our voices to demand punishment for kidnappers, we should also insist on the same treatment for human traffickers, because torture is involved in both [crimes]."

Deputy Orozco went on to demand that "we listen to the voices of these poor boys and girls, because it is the same demand [for freedom] that wealthy child victims of kidnapping cry out for. Human trafficking is the act of kidnapping those who are the poorest and most vulnerable. They are the ones who don't have the money to pay for rescue."

Estela Frajinal, director of the Institute for Women in Oaxaca state, added that the objective of the national forum was to design a strategy to "attack this phenomenon, which touches many families. We need to promote a culture of prevention and demand the all persons who engage in human trafficking be punished."

Deputy Orozco went on to warn that those of us who are involved in this initiative are not going to let the officials of this nation rest until [public] enemy number 1 - impunity, is confronted.

Deputy Orozco noted that human trafficking must be punished "with life sentences, just as such punishments are demanded for kidnapping cases. We insist that criminal penalties must increase. The consumer and every person in the chain of human trafficking activity must be punished."

During previous congressional conferences on human trafficking, victims have testified and demanded punishment for those who had raped and exploited them, as well as for the owners of the newspapers where [prostitution] services are advertised.

Among the federal, state and local officials who attended the forum were Pablo Navarrete of the National Women's Institute, Oaxaca state Attorney General Evencio Nicolás Martínez Ramírez, Oaxaca Women's Institute director María de la Luz Candelaria Chiñas, and federal special prosecutor Zara Irene Guerra…

Currently, human trafficking is not a punishable crime in the state of Oaxaca. This sends a message [of tolerance for impunity] to criminal groups, who know that selling a young girl 30 times a day is more profitable than selling a kilo of marijuana…