This section of LibertadLatina.org lists many of the most heinous acts of criminal sexual assault, sexual coercion, child sex trafficking, and workplace and community-based acts of sexual exploitation facing women and girl children in the Latina and indigenous worlds today.

Please follow the links to learn more about these ongoing, critical human rights issues.

  During the 1970's, Colombian Born Jose Alonzo Lopez Raped and Murdered Over 300 Indigenous Girls Aged 8 to 12 in Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. Tried and Sentenced to Life in Prison (with the Possibility of Parole) in Ecuador in 1980, Jose Alonzo Lopez Remains Unrepentant About His Crimes.

  From: The Protection Project, Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC

Latin American Facts -- 2001

• "An estimated 500,000 girls younger than 16 are in Prostitution in the northeast states of Argentina."

• "According to a Brazilian Congressional Inquiry [1993], Brazil has 500,000 children in prostitution."

• "Experts also estimate that there are 5,000 Colombian women in the Netherlands alone who are forced into prostitution."

• "The U.S. Department of State conservatively estimates that 50,000 women and children are trafficked [illegally and against their will] into the United States annually."  "...1/3 [are] from Central and South America."

Rape Victims Face Widespread Cultural Bias in Pursuit of Justice

In the southern state of Oaxaca last summer, the one-year-old, government-funded Oaxacan Women's Institute persuaded the legislature to pass heavy criminal penalties against a practice known as "rapto." Laws in most Mexican states define rapto as a case where a man kidnaps a woman not for ransom, but with the intent of marrying her or to satisfy his "erotic sexual desire." The new law championed by the women's group established penalties of at least 10 years in prison.

But in March, the state legislature reversed itself and again made the practice a minor infraction. A key legislator—a man—argued for the reduction, calling the practice harmless and "romantic."

Human rights groups disagree. They say it is not charming for a man to spot a woman he fancies sitting in a park, pick her up and carry her away to have sex with her. Yet to this day, that is still how some women meet their husbands. The attorney general's office said there have been 137 criminal complaints of rapto in the state of Puebla since January 2000.

The San Diego Child Sex Trafficking Scandal

United States - California

The Ongoing San Diego Sex Trafficking Scandal

Child Rape Camps on the U.S. side of the U.S.-Mexico Border

These articles describe one of the largest known child and youth sex trafficking cases in the United States to date.  In one of several related cases, hundreds of Mexican girls between 10 and 18 were kidnapped or subjected to false romantic entrapment by organized criminal sex trafficking gangs.  Victims were then brought to San Diego County, California.  Over a 10 year period these girls were raped by hundreds of men per day in more than 2 dozen home based and agricultural camp based brothels.  

A Latina medical doctor employed by a U.S. federal agency provided condoms to the victims for years, and was told by her supervisors not to speak out and organize efforts to rescue the victims.  This doctor was ordered under threat of legal action to keep quiet about the mass victimization of children in "rape camps."  When a joint FBI, INS and San Diego Sheriff's raid was finally executed 10 years after coming to the attention of law enforcement authorities, most of the traffickers and johns either escaped or were let go when the intimidated victims refused to accuse their enslavers.  Most victims were deported to Mexico with no victim intervention services provided.

More about the San Diego, California Child Sex Slavery Scandal

"In the Amazon River basin, girls have been promised jobs as waitresses or cooks in gold mine camps and then beaten or killed if they try to escape from brothels.  In such remote regions, gold mine operators operate like local kings and have been known to authorize "virginity auctions," where new arrivals - some as young as nine years old - are sold to the highest bidder, according to Gilberto Dimenstein, author of Girls of the Night, the first book to document the child sex trade in Brazil." 

Jack Epstein, Christian Science Monitor - 1996

More about the crisis in Brazil

Brazil - The recently released Protection Project Report takes note of Brazil’s frontier mining town of Fortaleza  and  June Kane's book, Sold of Sex, which notes that an estimated 2,000 child prostitutes are exploited in Fortaleza.  Their ages are:   

More about the crisis in Brazil

Brazil - 

By Gilberto Dimenstein

Marcos is currently working with the tribes of the upper Purus region in Acre. There, he has also noted the sexual abuse of Indian women and children-- especially by the marreteiros, hawkers who travel by boat selling their wares. They carry rum with them to pay the women.

Not only the marreteiros are responsible for the attacks against women and children, but also the soldiers scattered among the different garrisons of the Amazon. The doctor and anthropologist Antônio Maria de Souza, a researcher at the Emílio-Goeldi museum in Belém, has gathered dozens of testimonies of the "general"--a sort of gang rape on Indian girls that the soldiers engage in.

"It was common practice until very recently for a group of men--in general off-duty recruits--to catch an Indian, often a young one," Antônio says. "They took her to a deserted place and forced her to do 'the general.' In other words, they gang-raped her. These rapes occurred innumerable times despite the punishment of some aggressors.

Colombia -- 1999 -- "Child prostitution rings working in sex shops throughout Colombia were raided in September 1998, freeing 370 minors aged 12-16. Twenty-nine adults were arrested. The children where being held in slavery-like conditions, were abused and forced into prostitution. At least 145 of the children where found in [the major city of] Cartegena, a busy sex-tourist destination."  

From: "Colombia launches crackdown on child prostitution," Reuters,  September 26, 1998

More about the Crisis in Colombia

What does she think happened to her daughter [kidnapped at age 11], who would have turned 15 this week? "Oh God," she sobbed. "They tell me she's been sold as a prostitute. No, no, no. My baby."  

From a 1999 Washington Post story on the open kidnapping of young girls in Colombia by sex traffickers.

More about the Crisis in Colombia

Harris said it took a multi-disciplinary team of 56 experts 10 months to prepare the organization's first ''region-wide investigation of child trafficking, prostitution, pornography and sex tourism in Mexico and Central America.'' The probe was carried out in high-risk conditions in which the experts infiltrated rings of traffickers in minors, pedophiles and producers of child pornography, he underlined.

Psychologist Viviana Retana, [a] member of the team of investigators, told IPS that the trafficking of children as sexual merchandise was a constant phenomenon in Central America and Mexico, as well as other countries in Latin America. ''The rings of pedophiles and procurers are very well organized, operate with advanced technology and handle large amounts of money,'' she explained. The authors reported that procurers in Mexico buy 12 to 15-year- old girls from Central America - mainly Salvadorans and Hondurans - for 100 to 200 dollars.

From: CENTRAL AMERICA: Activists Infiltrate Child Sex Rings - April 5, 2002, Inter Press Service

More about the Crisis in Central America

More about the important work of Casa Alianza in Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras.

Fifteen years ago, 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.

"The soldiers and the (paramilitary civil defense) patrollers started grabbing the girls and raping us," recalls Ana, one of a handful of survivors of the massacre. "Only two soldiers raped me because my grandmother was there to defend me. All the girls were raped."

In total, 177 women and children [107 children and 70 women] died that day. The village, one of the most far flung of Rabinal municipality in Baja Verapaz province [Guatemala], disappeared.

From: CERIGUA Weekly Briefs,, No. 48, DEC. 11, 1997 By: Jennifer Harbury

More about the anti-indigenous Guatemalan genocide

President Bill Clinton

CNN report - Clinton says U.S. did wrong in Central American Wars - March 10, 1999

CNN - ...President Clinton admitted Wednesday to Guatemalans that U.S. support for "widespread repression" in their bloody 36-year civil war was a mistake.

- Dr. Mabel Bianco, MD, 1998 -www.BodyPositive.com

...The sexual harassment was widespread with managers routinely subjecting women to groping and crude and explicit requests for sexual favors over a period of years. The harassers were managers and male co-workers. One woman was locked in a freezer by her supervisor after she turned down his sexual request. Two other women who were pregnant at the time were pressured for sex and subsequently demoted and fired following their refusal to comply with the advances. Other women at the plant were given menial or difficult work assignments for rejecting requests for sexual favors by plant managers. - EEOC 

More on the Crisis of Rape Facing Latinas in the U.S. Low-Wage Workplace

"Over the past two years, I have been observing a systemic pattern of violence committed against girls and young women in our community. This violence involves the sexual abuse/assault against girls as young as 10 years old... There have been incidents of date rape, gang rape, abductions, drugging, threats with firearms, etc.  The incidents are just as you described in your [Mr. Goolsby's] letter and have been met with the same level of indifference and dismissal of legal (never mind moral) responsibility on the part of civil institutions -- the police department, public schools, etc." 

- From a letter by a Latina Social Worker working with young Latina girls in Washington, DC's largest Latino neighborhood.

Report on the newly formed Child Sexual Abuse Task Force in Washington, DC.  The report addresses the rampant sexual abuse of children by adults in Washington, DC, the sexual exploitation of 12 year old Latina girls by adult men, cultural issues and parental fear of the law. (This Task Force responds in part to the important efforts of the social worker who authored the above letter.)

From:  WAMU-FM, 88.5 FM - Show: Metro Connection

Latina Female Workers, including several pregnant, and elderly women, face repeated violent acts of physical intimidation and illegal firings at the Derwood Wendy's Restaurant in Rockville, Maryland.

Rockville, Maryland -- 1999

From Charles Goolsby's E-mail Advocacy Newsletter

09/29/1999 - Discrimination against Latin Women in Health Care  

An Ecuadorian, who was a indigenous woman of about  40 years old, was told by two Latino doctors in Montgomery County that the lumps in her breasts were not cancer, she should not worry about it, and that the lumps were just concentrations of calcium.

Our friend was told the same thing in Ecuador by another doctor.  Our friend, after being, finally, correctly diagnosed as indeed having Breast Cancer, died about a year and a half ago.  Nobody ever had to answer for the injustice that our friend faced.

Another friend, from Guatemala, told me of how a sister-in-law went to our local hospital, Shady Grove Adventist Hospital...  She was also an Indigenous woman. She was having sever abdominal pains.  She was examined and was told to go home and take aspirin.

After being taken by ambulance to another local hospital,  Holy Cross Hospital, this woman was told that she had a tubal pregnancy, and was properly treated.  

Peru

Book: Silence and Complicity

Indigenous and other poor women and girls in Peru face rape and other abuses from Peru's public health service doctors.

This investigative book reveals sexual and psychological violence against women who use public reproductive health and family planning services. The book was researched and written by the Center for Reproductive Law & Policy (CRLP) and the Lima branch of the and the Latin America and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women's Rights (CLADEM).

Victory For Women In Peru

In a meeting with the Prime Minister, the Minister for the Promotion of Women, and the Minister of Health of Peru, lawyers from the Center for Reproductive Law & Policy (CRLP) and the Latin America and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women's Rights (CLADEM) obtained assurances from the government that the state would enact the changes as a result of a settlement in the case of Marina Machaca before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights.

Marina Machaca, a 19-year old [indigenous] girl, was raped by Doctor Gerardo Salmón Horna, a doctor with the public hospital Carlos Monge Medrano in Juliaca, Peru...

July 26, 2002 - Peru's Government Apologizes for the Forced Sterilization of 200,000 Indigenous Women in the late 1990's