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Indigenous & Latina Women & Children's Human
Rights News from the Americas |
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Latin America |
| Women & Children
at Risk |
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Trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean Roundtable |
| [And a summary of
the detailed, ad-hoc presentation given by LibertadLatina.org
coordinator Chuck Goolsby before this assembly.] |
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| Event Location:
International Organization for Migration (IOM) offices, Washington, DC. |
| Event Date:
December 18, 2003 |
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| Publisher:
Chuck Goolsby -
LibertadLatina.org |
| Publish Date:
2003-12-20 |
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| (See the original
conference announcement at the bottom of this page.) |
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The December 18, 2003 event:
“Trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean” was an important
public and professional forum for the discussion of current trends in
human trafficking in Latin America.
As the crisis
in sexual exploitation affecting Latin American women and girls grows,
the development of professional and community- based leadership to
combat the problem becomes an urgent need.
This conference
furthered serious discussion of the nightmare of sexual exploitation now
facing indigenous and Latina women and girls in the Americas. Its
outcome will hopefully encourage a growth in interest and community
activism in defense of women and girls.
|
Thursday, December 18, 2003, 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Latin American/Caribbean Roundtable & Women in Development
Workgroup
“Trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean”
We are pleased to have a panel of experts
to present on Human Trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Results of recent studies conducted will be shared as well as case
studies to illustrate current trends. The recent reporting process
and the US evaluations carried out through the Office to Monitor and
Combat Trafficking will also be discussed.
- Laura Langberg, a Specialist on
Trafficking in Women and Children at OAS
- Berta Fernandez,
Project Development Officer for the Caribbean at the International
Organization for Migration
- Philip Linderman,
Senior Reporting Officer at the Office to Monitor and Combat
Trafficking will facilitate a discussion on human trafficking in
Latin America and the Caribbean.
- International Organization for Migration
|
Representatives of several important organizations providing leadership
in the Latin American anti-trafficking movement were present, including:
-
The U.S.
Department of Justice (DOJ)
-
The DOJ's
Civil Rights Division's Worker Exploitation Task Force
-
The U.S.
Department of Homeland Security
-
The U.S.
Department of State
-
The
Organization of American States
-
The
International Organization for Migration
-
The Mexican
American Legal Defense Fund (MALDEF)
-
AYUDA
(Washington, DC's principle legal assistance organization focused on
the Latino community, who have received funding for Washington area
anti-trafficking work.
The
presentation allowed local and national anti-trafficking and immigrant
rights activists from a number of advocacy organizations to hear
first-hand from experts. Material was presented on current
developments in sexual slavery in the Caribbean and across Latin
America.
Among remarks
at the event were those of Philip Linderman, Senior Reporting Officer at
the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking at the U.S. State
Department. Mr. Linderman noted that U.S. sources now estimate
that between 18,000 and 20,000 persons are trafficked into the U.S. each
year as slaves. Mr. Linderman also noted that in addition to the
sexual slavery that faces women and children in Latin America, Brazil's
government recognizes that it has a regional problem with "18th century
slavery" in its agricultural sector.
Berta
Fernandez, Project Development Officer for the Caribbean at the
International Organization for Migration, spoke in regard to current
efforts to rescue trafficking victims in the English, French and Spanish
speaking countries of the Caribbean region. Her remarks focused on
the sex trafficking crisis that severely affects women and girls in the
Dominican Republic.
Chuck Goolsby's remarks:
|
Chuck Goolsby
of LibertadLatina.org
thanks the organizers of this event and its presenters for holding this
timely discussion.
During this
event Chuck Goolsby spoke up during the question and answer period and
talked about many of the often-ignored aspects of the Latin American
sexual exploitation issue. Specifically, the work represented on
this web site, LibertadLatina.org,
was explained.
The continuum
of exploitation that affects Latin American women and girls was
discussed in both the context of Latin America and importantly, in
regard to Latin American forms of anti-female sexual exploitation that
have now become commonplace within Latin American immigrant communities
in the United States and specifically in the Washington, DC region.
Among the
points presented by Chuck Goolsby during this ad-hoc presentation were
the following facts:
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That Latin American women
and girls, and especially those from 'non-elite backgrounds' face
impunity in sexual
violence in Latin America and the United States.
-
That the efforts of the
assembled experts in human trafficking in Latin America should
provide basic education to the general public, the non-governmental
(NGO) community and government officials... on the degree to which
Latin American women and girls face sexual violence with impunity on
a scale not-often understood within the United States.
-
That Latin American
immigrant women and girls who work in the
low-wage workplaces
of the Washington, DC region and across the United States face rape
and sexual coercion with impunity on the job.
-
That Latin American
immigrant women and girls who are victims of sexual violence in the
Washington, DC region and across the United States often face
indifference and hostility from local law enforcement officials.
-
That
society, and the assembled organizations, need to address the fact
that so many thousands of girl children are forced into prostitution
to survive, including an estimated:
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500,000 to 2 Million children in
Brazil
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500,000 children in
Peru
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500,000 children in the northeast states of Argentina |
-
That 35,000 women and girls
per year are trafficked from
Colombia to Holland, Spain and especially Japan for purposes of
sexual exploitation.
-
That
in
San Diego, California, hundreds of girls between the ages of 7
and 18 have been kidnapped or subjected to false romantic entrapment
in Mexico, and were then taken to San Diego, California. Once
in San Diego, these underage girls were forced into prostitution and
were (and are today being) raped by dozens of men per day in over 25
suburban-house and agricultural-camp based brothels.
-
That
a Latina doctor, with
funding from the U.S. federal government, was tasked with supplying
condoms to the minor girl victims of these criminal 'child rape
camps' in San Diego, and was threatened by her U.S. federal
government contacts with legal repercussions against her if she
broke her contractual obligation of confidentiality and publicly
tried to organize assistance for the victims of the San Diego child
rape camps.
-
That
although federal and local
law enforcement officials knew about the San Diego child rape camps,
a raid was organized only 10 years after these horrors first came
into the view of law enforcement.
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That the combined FBI, INS
and San Diego sheriff's raid netted 50 male traffickers and
'customers' (johns), and that they were all eventually freed because
the child victims refused to testify against their tormentors.
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That
of the several minor Mexican
girls rescued, all but one of them was sent back to Mexico, and that
these deported girls never received any victim services after their
rescues, nor any follow-up.
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That the crisis in the San
Diego child rape camps continues to exist today.
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That a study by an NGO in
Guayaquil, Ecuador's largest city, found that 8% of secondary
school-girls had been raped by their teachers in school.
-
That
this continent-wide climate
of hostility against women creates the push-factors that force women
to migrate from Latin America, seeking a (hopefully) better life in
the United States and elsewhere. [As often as not, they end up
being trafficked into forced prostitution.]
-
That
Chuck Goolsby has encountered, through
first-hand intervention, and second and third-hand accounts, during
the last 15 years, a total of over 65 cases of sexual exploitation
faced by local Latin American immigrant women and girls in the
Washington, DC region [most especially in Montgomery County,
Maryland].
-
That
in a recent, August, 2003
victim intervention by Chuck Goolsby in the city of
Gaithersburg, Maryland, local police were insensitive to the
victim, and that three men had [literally] jumped out of the bushes
and attempted to kidnap and rape the Salvadoran Latina indigenous
woman who was their intended victim. [The police refused to arrest
any of the three assailants until Chuck Goolsby showed them his
LibertadLatina.org
business card.]
-
That the assault by these three men (who
were from Mexico, and perhaps were from the Mexican state of Oaxaca)
mirrored the attitudes of men in
Oaxaca, where a form of kidnap and rape of women and girls called
rapto is legal.
-
That a Oaxaca women's group,
with Mexican federal funding, had effectively lobbied the Oaxaca
legislature to ban rapto and apply a 10 year prison sentence to
convictions for rapto. A short time after the law was passed
the Oaxaca legislature reversed its decision, calling rapto
"harmless."
-
That
the Spanish language
Telemundo TV network (now a subsidiary of NBC) had, a number of
months ago, showed [on its nightly news program] the case of an 18
year old high school girl who was pursued on a daily basis by a man
in his forties who stalked her in his pickup truck after school
every day on an isolated stretch of road. This man wanted to
practice rapto on the unwilling victim by kidnapping and raping her.
The news report related that one day, this man jumped out of his
pickup truck on the isolated road and attempted, finally, to kidnap
the 18 year old girl. The girl shot the assailant to death,
and now faced 20 years in jail, according to the Telemundo news
report. [The local police chief stated openly for the
Telemundo reported, on tape, that rapto was simply a local tradition
that didn't have much importance.] [This 18 year old women is,
in very real terms, a political prisoner in a Mexican state where
rape is a legalized institution and a woman who defends herself is a
'criminal.']
Chuck Goolsby
concluded his impromptu remarks by posing a question to the three expert
presenters (see their names below), asking how (given the current severe
situation for women and girls in Latin America and in Latin American
immigrant communities in the United States) did they recommend that we
work to arrive at a situation where these realities are adequately
addressed. Chuck Goolsby noted that these broader issues go beyond
the narrow scope of sex-trafficking, and stated to the expert panel that
the current U.S. government 'T' visa program for victims of severe cases
of trafficking would only assist several dozen victims per year [out of
18,000 to 20,000 actual trafficking victims per year.]
In response, Laura Langberg, the anti-trafficking specialist for the
Organization of American States, noted that all we can do is to continue
to work with countries to improve the situation by building the legal
infrastructure to stop trafficking in the Americas.
(More can and must be done!) |
Chuck Goolsby wishes to thank the IOM hosts and all of those present at
this important gathering for allowing him to address these often-hidden
aspects of the criminal sexual exploitation that severely affects women
and children by the millions every day in the Americas.
|
|
Omitted from my remarks because of time constraints was any discussion
of the specific targeting of poor indigenous women and girls by
traffickers and other sexual exploiters/predators in the Americas.
A convergence of exploitation is coming about. Ninety percent of
child prostitutes in Canada are indigenous. Indigenous women and
girls in the U.S. face a rate of rape that is 3.5 times the U.S.
national average and in 82% of rape cases, the assailant was White
American. Mexico's population is 90% indigenous or heavily mixed
race Spanish/indigenous.
Centuries of rape with impunity focused against indigenous women and
girls in Latin America, culminating perhaps in the rape of almost all
Mayan girls and women over the age of ten during their 1980's civil war,
has created social conditions that allow indigenous women to become the
focus of traffickers, many of whom are well fueled financially by their
Colombian and Mexico drug cartel activity. They and lesser
trafficking organizations know that law enforcement and society will
typically not defend poor women, and much less the poor indigenous and
Latina women who are the female majority in Latin America.
African and Afro-indigenous descended women and girls face similar
circumstances, especially in the Dominican Republic and Colombia.
Members of these most vulnerable populations are rarely if ever
represented in government and NGO agencies that address the issue of
trafficking and exploitation, and their voice is rarely heard.
Recognition of the special dangers that this 'off-the-radar- screen'
population face is critical to allow the anti- trafficking movement to
focus its limited efforts accurately in support of exploited Latin
American women and girls. Providing the accurate and detailed
information about these complex interrelationships between social issues
and impunity is what LibertadLatina.org
exists to do.
Poor indigenous, African-descended and most other poor women in Latin
America have little-to-no voice, and, as in the case of the
above-described conference, no presence 'at the table' of decision
makers in government and in the non-profit world who are deciding their
fate in very real terms. LibertadLatina.org
presented their points-of-view at the December 18th
conference in Washington, DC. It was a much needed statement of
truth.
For all of the exploited women and children of the Americas... we will
not forget you, and we will work tirelessly to end the sexual
exploitation with impunity that prevails today across the American
continents.
Please join us in that effort.
- Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina.org
December 20, 2003
|
|
|
|
Thursday, December 18, 2003, 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Latin American/Caribbean Roundtable & Women in Development Workgroup
“Trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean”
We are pleased to have a panel of experts
to present on Human Trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Results of recent studies conducted will be shared as well as case
studies to illustrate current trends. The recent reporting process
and the US evaluations carried out through the Office to Monitor and
Combat Trafficking will also be discussed.
- Laura Langberg, a Specialist on
Trafficking in Women and Children at OAS
- Berta Fernandez,
Project Development Officer for the Caribbean at the International
Organization for Migration
- Philip Linderman,
Senior Reporting Officer at the Office to Monitor and Combat
Trafficking will facilitate a discussion on human trafficking in
Latin America and the Caribbean.
Location:
International Organization for Migration,
1st Floor Board Room, 1752 N Street, NW,
Washington, D.C.
Metro: Dupont Circle, South Exit (Red Line). IOM is located
between 17th and 18th on N Street.
Contact: Please RSVP to Marilyn
Conolly at
marilynconolly@hotmail.com
or Frances Molinaro at
FRANCESCAM@Contractual.IADB.ORG
or 202-623-2542.
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Últimas Noticias
Latest
News
Noticias de Dic.,
2008
Dec.
2008 News
(News Added During Dec., 2008)
Mexico
“No nos quedó de otra, más que salir de nuestro pueblo”, Floriana García
Premio Nacional de la Juventud 2005-2006
Winner of the 2005-2006 National
Youth Award:
"We have no other choice but leave our homes"
According to Beatriz Floriana Garcia Cortes, a migrant from Mexico's southern
state of Oaxaca, now living in Guadalajara,
the indigenous population in the region has two options: to move or to die.
Floriana won
Mexico's
National Youth Award for 2005-2006for her work in promoting the efforts of women artisans among the Mixtec
indigenous people.
Like many Oaxacans, Floriana had to leave her village to look for opportunities to study and work.
She, along with her eight brothers and her parents migrated, adding to the swelling
ranks of Oaxacans who represent one of the largest migrant communities
now living outside of Mexico.
Floriana moved to Guadalajara when she was six years old. In time, she achieved her
goal of getting an education. She completed a degree in computer management at the
Western Technological Institute of Higher Studies (ITESO).
After graduation she had the opportunity to work in a company, but chose instead to open a
store to promote employment for women artisans.
"Upon leaving the university you can work in any business, but I was concerned
about how mothers left their children alone to go out and work."
It was then that she decided, together with Catalina Acevedo Olea and Francisco Acevedo, who
had studied law, to start-up a micro enterprise - Bordados (flowers in Spanish) Mixtecos [Mixtec Flowers].
Their goal was to create jobs.
Floriana wins the National Youth Award
[As a result of her project] Floriana was honored with the National Youth Award for 2005-2006 in the category of productive activities. She had been nominated by the Jalisco Institute of Crafts...
Floriana notes that the Oaxacan people love their land, but the conditions of poverty
and misery
force them to choose between two options: move or die. They choose to move. By doing so, they face
barriers including an inability to speak Spanish well, and
the fact that they do not have basic identification documents such as a birth
certificate, a voter card or an immunization card.
The lack of these documents has been an obstacle for both women and men. Neither
public nor private employers will hire them. Their only choice has been self employment, from selling on street corners to begging, to working as domestics...
Floriana recounts that, upon completion of her primary education, her grandparents
asked her:
"Why do you study? Women don't need to study."
Looking back on the path she has traveled, Floriana knows that she has had success, but that she still has
a long way to go.
En Oaxaca, la población indígena tiene dos opciones: emigrar o morir, expresó Beatriz Floriana García Cortés, migrante oaxaqueña en Guadalajara y Premio Nacional de la Juventud 2005-2006 por su labor en el impulso de las mujeres artesanas mixtecas.
Al igual que muchos oaxaqueños, Floriana tuvo que salir de su pueblo para ir en búsqueda de oportunidades de estudio y trabajo. Junto con sus ocho hermanos y sus padres, engrosaron las cifras de personas que emigran del estado de Oaxaca, al sur de México, una de las entidades federativas con más comunidades de migrantes fuera del país.
Floriana llegó a Guadalajara cuando tenía seis años. Al paso del tiempo encontró lo que buscaba: estudiar. Logró concluir la licenciatura en Informática Administrativa en el Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO).
Olga Rosario Avendaño
CIMAC Noticias
Dec. 18, 2008
Mexico
Atentado del ejército colombiano iba dirigido a mí: Aída Quilcué
Consejera del CRIC había recibido amenazas de muerte
Aída Quilcué: "The Colombian army's attack was directed at me."
Indigenous leaders had received death threats
Mexico City - "I think the attack was meant for me," said Aida Quilcué, head
counsel for the Greater Regional Indigenous Council of [the province of] Cauca (CRIC).
Quilcué was referring to a Colombian Army attack last Tuesday that resulted in the death of her husband, Edwin Legarda, who had been riding in a van that Quilcué used for her travels.
Quilcué, after analyzing what had occured, stated that the murder was a premeditated crime, and that she was
the intended target.
Quilcué has received numerous death threats.
In a communiqué from the CRIC, Quilcué stated that the threats to her life
increased after she submitted reports nationally and internationally about the violence to which
indigenous peoples are being subjected in Colombia.
Aída Quilcué, along with other leaders of the CRIC, recently spearheaded a "Minga" (meet-up or mobilization) of the aboriginal peoples of the southwest of the country, from October to November, that included a march to [the nation's capitol,] Bogota, to demand the return of their [stolen] land and an end to the violence against their communities...
The CRIC's vehicle, which is widely known on the roads of the region, was attacked from three sides and had 17
bullet impacts. According to witnesses, there was no checkpoint on the road, nor was an order given by troops to stop...
Luis Andrade Evelis Casamada, Director of the the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC), pointed to these facts
and declared that an attack on the CRIC is an attack on ONIC, on the Colombian indigenous
movement and against any and all who dare to and engage the people by proposing
new ideas.
Evelis Casamada said that with this murder, we confirm once again that efforts by the Colombian
state to kill indigenous leaders are a component of its security policy, as was
also demonstrated during the recent Minga act of resistance.
The state calls these events acts that are carried out by isolated individuals, to distance themselves. In reality, these events for part of the massacre against the Colombian people...
The CRIC has reiterated the position of their past statements. They reject bullets, terror and war, wherever they come from. Impunity, they say, cannot be allowed to continue in this painful situation. "This is a war against
the people, and against the indigenous movement for dignity, including the right of peoples to build a country without bosses, that can live in peace."
The CRIC has demanded that soldiers leave their territories so that they can live in peace.
“Creo que el atentado era para mí”, expresó Aída Quilcué, Consejera Mayor del Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (CRIC), al referirse | |