The February 5, 2010 editorial by the Dallas Morning News, Mexico's Rock-bottom Moment, accurately describes the atmosphere of government corruption and indifference (at the federal, state and local level) that permeates Mexico and allows criminals to engage in horrendous behavior with reckless abandon.

That reality does not only apply to the war on drug cartels. These conditions of impunity also make it nearly impossible to effectively fight modern human slavery and other forms of sexual and labor exploitation.

We say 'modern' human slavery, but in Mexico, slavery, from the time of the Spanish colonization, had actually never stopped. Poor Indigenous and mixed-race (Mestizo) peoples, who are racially marginalized in Mexico, have always been easy marks for sexual and labor exploitation. This reality impacts children especially hard.

In 1994, for example, a U.S. National Public Radio news report noted that in Mexico's southern Chiapas state, the majority indigenous population was expected to serve their whole lives as unpaid peon farm workers on the plantations of wealthy Mexicans of European descent, in exchange for nothing more than being given rice and beans.

That is slavery!

The ability to rape and demand free labor of the Indigenous and Mestizo poor in Mexico with impunity has been a 'right' of the Spanish descended elites for 500 years.

As we have stated in previous comment-aries, our focus on the crisis of gender oppression in Mexico came about because:

How can a Mexican Government that acts to support those who oppress women be an honest partner in suppressing the power of sex and labor traffickers?

How can a Mexican society that is based upon very strongly embedded traditions of male supremacy (machismo) change to actually begin to defend the basic human rights of women and girls, when its own government fights reform to maintain the status quo?

How can a Mexico where influential business and political leaders have corrupt ties to the sex trafficking 'industry' defeat those forces?

How can activists make progress when international organizations such as Amnesty International have identified the fact that human rights activists face false imprisonment to halt their work, and, together with activist journalists, face a very real threat of being murdered?

These are the pressing questions that the women's rights movement face and seek answers to.

This movement deserves the full moral and financial and collaborative support of human rights, indigenous rights and women's rights activists, and all people of moral conscience, from across the world.

Most importantly, the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama must stand up and very publicly demand that the State of Mexico stop fighting against these human rights movements, and finally adhere to their international commitments to respect the rights of women and children.

The recent track record of the Calderón administration shows that it is indifferent to the issue of human slavery, and will only take minimal action to avoid getting a bad grade (and thus risk possible U.S. sanctions) from the annual U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons report. Therefore, the movement to end slavery continues its long struggle to force the Calderón government to change its misogynist ways.

Among the leaders of Mexico's pioneering women and children's rights movement are Teresa Ulloa, a pioneering women's rights lawyer and Executive Director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women for Latin America and the Caribbean (CATW-LAC). Ulloa has been a clear voice for identifying the need to enact and enforce anti-trafficking laws. She has identified the fact that 50 million women and children are at-risk of falling into the hands of human traffickers across all of Latin America. She has also declared that 5 million victims of human trafficking exist within Mexico. Ulloa has also stated that an estimated 1.5 million persons engage in prostitution in Central Mexico alone, and that 75% of those at any given time are girls between the ages of 12 and 13. Ulloa's serious research into these problems contradicts the research of others who conclude that only 20,000 children are engaged in prostitution in Mexico.

We also salute award winning journalist, author and women's center director Lydia Cacho, who responded to the impunity in child sex trafficking in the internationally popular tourist city of Cancun, Mexico by writing a well-researched book that exposed the complex links of collaboration between millionaire entrepreneur Jean Succar Kuri and child sex trafficker and a network of other businessmen and corrupt government officials. In response to the publication of Cacho's book, in December of 2005 the child sex trafficking network exposed by Cacho arranged with the governor of Puebla state, Mario Marin, to have Puebla state police officers arrest Cacho and drive her over 1,000 miles to Puebla state to face criminal charges of defamation for the accusations made in her book. During the trip and while in prison, state officers threatened Cacho with rape and with death.

Eventually cleared of the charges, Cacho has recently faced continuing threats to her life by armed suspects who shadow her daily movements. She lives 24 hours a day with armed guards. While Cacho's supporters in Congress demanded an investigation by the Supreme Court (a role that the Court may play in state corruption cases under Mexico's constitution), and despite the fact that one Supreme Court justice assigned to investigate the case found evidence to warrant investigation of Governor Marin by the full Court, the Court's justices decided that Cacho's treatment did not constitute a violation of her basic rights.

In utter disgust at the Supreme Court's behavior in this case, the Attorney General's special prosecutor for crimes against women, Alicia Elena Perez Duarte, resigned.

Child sex trafficker Jean Succar Kuri is in jail thanks to Cacho's efforts. However Puebla Governor Mario Marin and Succar Kuri's other accomplices continue living undisturbed in complete freedom.

We posthumously salute Esther Chavez, Lydia Cacho's mentor and the founder of the movement to publicize and demand action to end the mass murder (femicide) of women in northern Mexico's Ciudad Juarez. Chavez' tireless work to confront the apathy and impunity of government officials was the training ground that taught a generation of new leadership in the Mexican women's rights movement. By extension, Esther Chavez' legacy guides all of our efforts to dare to face into the wind and openly confront misogynist terrorism across Latin America.

Like Esther Chavez, Rigoberta Menchu is a long time leader working in defense of the basic human rights of indigenous peoples. A K'iche' Maya woman from Guatemala, Menchu's work impacts conditions for indigenous women and children in both Guatemala and Mexico. Winner of the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize, Menchu was a 1997 candidate in Guatemala's presidential elections.

Rigoberta Menchu and her family survived the 1970s-to-1990s anti-Mayan genocide in Guatemala in which 200,00 people died, including 50,000 women. Several members of Menchu's family were murdered, and she, like hundreds of thousands of Mayan Guatemalans, had to flee the attempts of the nation's government to mass murder its indigenous citizens.

Today Menchu continues to promote indigenous and women's human rights through the Rigoberta Menchu Tum Foundation (La Fundación Rigoberta Menchú Tum).

Menchu has been especially active in efforts to end the sex trafficking of young indigenous girls in Guatemala and Mexico, where they consitute one of the largest groups victimized by commercial sexploitation of children (CSEC).

We also give high praises to the CIMAC women's news agency. Their large network of women reporters has persistently documented the outrageous injustices confronting women and girls in Mexican society. CIMAC is not afraid to point the finger at government agencies and officials where that is warranted, in addition to identifying major criminal organizations and individuals who victimize women and girls with impunity.

CIMAC's highly professional news team has described in accurate detail the facts surrounding the issues of sex trafficking, rape and other crimes against women, and the lack of legislative and law enforcement action in Mexico to protect women and girls from these atrocities.

On the single issue of the rape with impunity of (mostly indigenous women and girls) by Mexican military personnel, CIMAC has published more than 340 comprehensive articles since 2007.

In July of 2008, CIMAC's offices were ransacked by 'unknown' vandals. CIMAC's computers were destroyed or stolen. This act of intimidation occurred days after CIMAC published an article that identified the fact that high ranking military officers working at Mexico City's equivalent of the Pentagon frequented the child prostitution brothels that exist just down the street from military headquarters.

Letters of solidarity poured in from across the globe in response to these criminal acts, which remain in impunity.

We especially applaud the fact that CIMAC for covering the mass gender atrocities facing poor indigenous women in a Mexico where such crimes are never, ever punished.

A Google search of the CIMAC News web site shows that:

* 170 CIMAC articles mention the late Esther Chavez

* 120 CIMAC articles mention Teresa Ulloa

* 550 CIMAC articles mention Lydia Cacho

We also give kudos to CIMAC for publishing information from the International Organization for Migration's office in Tapachula, noting that the southern Mexican border with Guatemala is a lawless zone where between 450 and 600 women and girl migrants from Central and South America are raped each day. The same CIMAC article notes that the global NGO Save the Children has identified southern Mexico as being the largest zone for the commercial sexual exploitation of children in the entire world.

Thanks to the trailblazing work of these brave journalists and activists, the criminals, the wealthy business owners and corrupt public servants who cooperate with them can no longer hide under a rock. The evidence is irrefutable that an ongoing mass gender atrocity is taking place in Mexico, and neither the Mexican federal government (lead by a National Action Party which has openly misogynist policies), nor the United States is taking any visible action of significance to stop that violence.

Thanks to the heroic work of Rigoberta Menchu, Esther Chavez, Teresa Ulloa, Lydia Cacho, the team at CIMAC and many other activists, the fact of the human slavery crisis in Mexico and the rest of Latin America cannot be denied by anyone.

These realities present a challenge to the global, and especially to the U.S. based anti-trafficking movements. Do they remain silent on this issue, or do they take appropriate action to give the crisis facing Latinas a proper seat at the table of deliberations in this movement?

The modern anti-trafficking movement was born in the 1990s in response to the enslavement of thousands of Eastern European and Russian women after the fall of the Soviet Union, and focused today principally on the issues of the enslavement of European, South Asian, East Asian and domestic minor U.S. youth. The focus areas reflect, interestingly enough, the ethnicities of the the majority of the activists in this movement.

All of those populations deserve attention. So do Latin American victims. Latin American and Asian victims were trafficked into the U.S. long before the anti-slavery sprung-up in Western nations (The risk of being sex trafficked was known in the U.S. even in the 1950s).

Yet more than ten years into the development of this movement, we have yet to hear public pronouncements about the Latin American / Latina immigrant human slavery crisis from the U.S. Federal Government, nor from the academics nor major U.S. NGO heads in the U.S. who have pioneered the effort to stop modern slavery.

During a number of major speeches on human trafficking that I have attended, virtually every region of the world will be  mentioned except Latin America. Latina immigrant victims in the U.S. are almost never mentioned. Academic papers, speeches and promotional materials from the major anti-trafficking organizations are equally lacking in coverage of the crisis facing Latin America.

In late 2009, for example, I called Public Radio's nationally broadcast Diane Rehm Show based at WAMU, from American University Radio, to talk with Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporters Nicholas D. Kristof and his wife Sheryl WuDunn (a former Times reporter), as they discussed their book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

In a reflection of the limited priorities of the majority of NGOs and U.S. federal government voices in the anti-slavery movement, Kristoff and WuDunn emphasized both in their book and during their radio interview, that their coverage of the crisis in women's rights as it exists in developing nations involved East Asia, South Asia and Africa. They did not even mention Latin America.

When I stated that Mexico is a major crisis area for human trafficking and that Save the Children had identified southern Mexico as the largest region for commercial sexual exploitation of children in the world, both authors responded by saying that, in their view, India was the largest zone for sex trafficking in the world and had to be tackled first. They admitted that they had not looked at Latin America in researching their otherwise important book on gender oppression. 

In point of fact, the sex trafficking networks began to focus on Latin America in their search for large numbers of women and children to enslave as law enforcement began to crack-down on Asian sex trafficking several year ago. Latin America's crisis is, arguably, just as large as that of India, where around 1 million children are sex trafficked at any given time.

One of my main motivations for expanding the LibertadLatina project (we are now in our ninth year), was to respond to the lack of publicly available factual information on the crisis in Latin America. That information gap leaves Latin American relatively isolated and without support from the global community (with the active role of the United Nations being a welcome exception to that fact).

I recall that about 7 years ago, a young Asian American man who had just graduated from college with a major in Women's Studies, and who was then a volunteer at Polaris Project, one of the leading anti-trafficking NGOs in the U.S., told me that "Latin America doesn't have a human trafficking problem. My professors said that Latin America didn't have a problem." This guy changed his attitude after I referred him to the LibertadLatina web site.

We would hope that such ignorance was a thing of the past. But today in 2010, the U.S. based anti-slavery movement continues to discuss anti-trafficking as a crime that impacts Europeans, Asians and U.S. domestic minor victims only.

We really have to wonder what the motivations are that drive that misguided thinking.

U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Luis CdeBaca, the Director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons at the U.S. State Department, is the U.S. Government's leading voice on human slavery issues. He is Mexican-American, and has prosecuted over 100 human trafficking cases, many involving Latin American victims and perpetrators.

In 2002 CdeBaca invited me to apply for a position as a victim advocate working with his team at the Justice Department's inter-agency Worker's Exploitation Task Force. So it is with great respect that we implore Ambassador CdeBaca to respond forcefully to the critical emergency facing women and girls in Latin America and its Diaspora in the U.S., a crisis that he is thoroughly familiar with.