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Indigenous & Latina Women & Children's Human
Rights News from the Americas |
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Latin American
Women, Children at Risk |
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Sexual Exploitation in the Workplace
Across the Americas
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Last Updated April 9,
2009 |
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"Traditions" of Workplace Rape Across the United
States and Latin America |
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A crisis of rape with impunity in the workplace
severely impacts the lives of Latin American
immigrant women and girls across the United States |
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Plaintiffs & EEOC staff attorneys involved in a
$1,855,000 voluntary settlement resulting from a
class action suit brought on behalf of lettuce
giant Tanimura & Antle
female employees subjected to sexual harassment and
retaliation in California & Arizona.
Full story. |
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EEOC Reveals Rise in Cases Involving Blue-Collar
Women
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Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court clarified
employer liability in sexual harassment cases,
experts say the problem remains persistent even
while the nature of complaints shifts.
An examination of the caseload at the U.S. Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission reveals that
companies are facing a changing and growing roster
of complaints. The EEOC, under its first Latina
chair, Ida Castro, cites an " alarming" rise in
cases involving the most vulnerable women in the
workplace: those filling blue-collar and factory
jobs, especially immigrants. |
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NEWS
The United States
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Farm worker women wear bandanas in the fields
for protection and to help ward off sexual attention
Southern Poverty Law Center |
Campaña nacional contra el
acoso sexual a mujeres, en EU
Promovida por OSC 40
ciudades de EU
Nueva York, EU,- Organizaciones de derechos civiles
iniciaron la “Campaña Nacional en contra del Acoso
Sexual que sufren las Mujeres” en 40 ciudades de
este país. Las más afectadas, aseguran, son las
trabajadoras del campo.
Tocante al acoso sexual que sufren las mujeres, el
mes pasado, el programa ‘Now’ que proyecta la
televisora pública del canal 13, informó que por lo
menos 200 mil jóvenes anualmente son molestadas
sexualmente en sus centros de trabajo.
En tanto, la televisora en español Univisión informa
que el alto porcentaje se registra en las mujeres
del campo.
La iniciativa, denominada "Bandana Project", que
hace alusión a los pañuelos (bandana en inglés) con
los que las campesinas cubren su rostro mientras
trabajan en el campo y es impulsada por el "Southern
Poverty Law Center" (SPLC, por sus siglas en inglés)
en Atlanta, Los Ángeles, Nueva York, Boston y
Chicago, entre otras ciudades, informa la agencia de
noticias EFE...
Leticia Puente Beresford
CIMAC Noticias
April 07, 2009
Bandana Project to Spotlight
Sexual Exploitation of Farmworker Women
Residents of 25 states and three other countries
will take a stand against the sexual exploitation of
farmworker women and other low-wage female immigrant
workers in April as part of the "Bandana Project," a
partnership between the Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC) and community groups, universities and other
advocacy organizations to raise awareness and
educate these women about their rights.
The Bandana Project is a national campaign, launched
in 2007, that adopted the bandana as a symbol of
solidarity to end sexual violence against farmworker
women because many use bandanas on the job to cover
their faces and bodies in an attempt to ward off
unwanted sexual attention that often leads to
rape...
Sexual exploitation has received little public
attention but is well-known to farmworker women,
many of whom remain silent about sexual harassment
on the job. William R. Tamayo, regional attorney for
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in San
Francisco, wrote in a 2000 report that "the sexual
harassment of farmworker women is a widespread
problem..."
Southern Poverty Law Center
April 02, 2009
LibertadLatina
Commentary
We applaud the Southern Poverty Law Center's decision to promote a
campaign bringing attention to the problem of sexual harassment and
rape in farmworker communities, which is an epidemic problem.
As someone who started his activism advocating for the basic human
and legal rights of low wage working Latina women and teens in the
greater Washington, DC region over 20 years ago, I have seen
close-up the impunity with which men in supervisory positions within
Latin immigrant workplaces demand sexual favors from all women and
underage teen girls, even those who are pregnant, as a basic condition of being hired, and
then of
being able to continue employment.
If you as a working Latina female do not comply with these illegal demands,
you will be demoted and ultimately fired, and government
institutions will typically not respond or assist you unless you
know the U.S. legal system well, and are persistent over a period of
years in demanding justice. Few immigrant women face those unique
circumstances.
Here on
LibertadLatina
we have documented farmworker sexual exploitation cases for several
years. We are glad to see the Southern Poverty Law Center take up
the banner of this cause and carry it forward with a level of public
awareness that will be felt nationwide.
Within the farmworker community, the tens of thousands of immigrant
indigenous women workers from Mexico and elsewhere are especially
vulnerable to sexual exploitation, given their limited know-ledge of
Spanish, and the carry-over of patterns of race-based sexual abuse
from their home countries.
Not to be forgotten in relation to this issue is the undisputable
fact that sex trafficking networks in Mexico systematically kidnap,
rape, and sell into forced, unpaid sexual slavery thousands of
Mexican and Central American girls whose sole purpose as slaves is
to provide sex to immigrant farmworker men. The victims include
many, many girls in the 12 to 14-years-of-age range, and some as
young as age 7.
In the past an analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center wrote an
article critical of the idea that migrant men living in Pensaquitos
Canyon (located in San Diego County, California) a men's farm labor camp built
on wild lands adjoining suburban housing tracts, were using
enslaved underage girls brought to them on a regular basis by child
sex traffickers. Such child sex trafficking in that region is an
undeniable fact that has been well documented.
We encourage the Southern Poverty Law Center, and all other
defenders of human rights to take up the banner of these enslaved
girls, who are forced to live out their now-shortened lives
providing sex against their will to up-to 30 men per hour, 7 days a
week, until they die or are killed for rebelling against a life of
torture.
Focusing attention on the crisis of sexual exploitation facing farm
worker women is very important.
An equally important goal is to keep up the
pressure to end the enslavement and sale into prostitution of little girls and teens
who were kidnapped and forced to sell their bodies under the threat
that the pimps would kill them, and/or kidnap and kill their family members back in
Mexico and Central America.
One issue does not exist without the other!
End impunity now!
Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
April 09, 2009
See also:
LibertadLatina
Latina Child Sex Slavery in
San Diego, California
Hundreds of
children and youth are forced into 'child rape camps' by
traffickers.
Florida, USA
Tampa -
More than anything, the young mother wanted
her children in a permanent home so they
could succeed in elementary school. They
must not end up like her and their father,
hunched over rows of crops all day...
When the owner
of the farm began sexually assaulting her,
she kept it a secret. If her hot-headed
husband learned of it, he might take matters
into his own hands. If he went to prison,
she and her children would be destitute...
...Lourdes
Villanueva... with the Redlands Christian
Migrant Association in Plant City tried to
help. But the woman was ashamed and
terrified - of immigration officials, of
deportation, of her husband's wrath, of the
boss, of getting her family blackballed from
working again. No, she would handle it. No
policia, no. When Villanueva visited her
trailer this month, the family was gone...
Mary Bauer,
director of the Immigrant Justice Project at
the SPLC, testified April 15 about
farmworker exploitation before the Senate
Committee on Health, Education, Labor and
Pensions... Bauer told the senators that of
the estimated 70,000 female farmworkers in
Florida, hundreds if not thousands face
chronic sexual harassment on the job. They
often are forced to have sex with
supervisors to get or keep jobs, she said,
and they put up with a "constant barrage of
grabbing, touching and propositions for sex
by their supervisors."
...Ramirez says
the few studies that have been done on
sexual exploitation reveal a pattern.
"It's like a
Catch-22," she says. "The women know the
abusers won't get in trouble, and the
abusers know it, too. They'll use threats
against the woman's family or say, 'I'll
have your husband and children deported.'
"If they're
undocumented, they are certain no one will
believe them..."
- Donna Koehn
The Tampa
Tribune
April 27,
2008
LibertadLatina
note:
The above tragic story of severe sexual
harassment and 'legalized' (because nobody
gets prosecuted) serial rape is repeated in
thousands of farmworker communities, and in
tens of thousands of low-wage jobs in
restaurants, office cleaning jobs and
hotels, for example, across the United
States. In my 25+ years of advocacy
work for this population in the Washington,
DC region, I have seen little improvement in
conditions for women and underage girl
immigrants who came to the U.S. largely to
escape the impunity of 'legalized' sexual
assault across all of Latin America.
Latin American community leaders within the
U.S. have a responsibility to change course
from the past pattern of ignoring this
issue, and stand-up to fight for the dignity
and basic human rights of women and
children.
Silence is also
violence!
End impunity now!
-
Chuck Goolsby
LibertadLatina
April 19,
2008
See also:
LibertadLatina
The sexual Exploitation of Women and Children in
the Washington, DC Region
LibertadLatina
The Workplace Rape
of Latina and Indigneous Women in the U.S. and
Latin America
Added
Jan.
24,
2006
Mexico
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Deputy
Angélica
de
la
Peña
Photo:
La Cronica
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99% Of
Domestic
Workers In
Mexico Are
Adolescents
And Girls -
40,000 Are
Under Age
14.
El 99 por
ciento de
las
trabajadoras
domésticas
del país son
adolescentes
y niñas; 40
mil tienen
menos de 14
años.
Mexico City
- Deputy
Angélica de
la Peña of
the
Democratic
Revolutionary
Party (PRD),
president of
the Special
Commission
on
Childhood,
Adolescents
and Families
in the
Chamber of
Deputies
(Lower
House),
indicated in
a press
conference
that
99% Of all
domestic
workers In
Mexico are
adolescents
and girls
who do not
study in
school, and
who are
vulnerable
to sexual
abuse in
their
work-places.
Deputy de la
Peña stated
that 40,000
of these
workers are
under
14-years-of-age,
children who
depend upon
their
employers
for shelter
and food.
They have no
set list of
work tasks,
and no work
schedule.
Domestic
work is
considered
to be the
least
respected,
the most
poorly paid
and the
least
regulated
form of
work.
Although the
Mexican
Constitution
states that
children
must be
provided
with food,
healthcare,
education
and
recreation
for their
integral
development,
and
prohibits
youth under
age 14 from
working, the
reality is
that Mexican
society is
violating
that sacred
concept.
Mexico is
also a
signatory to
the
International
Labor
Organization's
Convention
182,
prohibiting
the worst
forms of
child labor.
Faced with
these
realities,
Deputy de la
Peña is
proposing
that the
Mexican
Congress
modify
Article 175
of Mexico's
employment
Law, to
completely
eliminate
child
domestic
work.
In addition,
the Deputy
would like
to add an
Article 21
to the Law
for Child
and
Adolescent
Protection,
to
specifically
defend
children
from forms
of work that
subject them
to sexual,
physical or
psycho-logical
harm.
- La Cronica
de Hoy
Jan. 22,
2006
See Also:
Web
Site / Sitio
Web -
Diputado
Angélica
de la Peña
Added
Dec. 10,
2005
México
Minimizan
violencia hacia mujeres en el ámbito
laboral.
Women labor leaders in Mexico held a press
conference to announce that, despite the
fact that violence against women in the
workplace is a constant reality, official
action against these aggressions are few,
and that employers and government
institutions still see workplace sexual
violence as ‘natural.’
Organizers of
the event are promoting their Women’s
Political Agenda in Relation to Political
Power, which emphasizes the importance
of creating environments free of workplace
violence, particularly sexual harassment and
assault.
Daisy Hernandez, member of National Union of
Education Workers (SNTE)…
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“Violence against women in the
workplace has not been seriously
investigated, and when there are
investigations, it is apparent that
money corrupts the companies and
government agencies involved, since
there are never any results.”
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Marcelina Bautista, founder of the Center of
Support and Training for Domestic Employees…
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Without legislation to protect them,
domestics, who are typically
children, are subject to violence by
homeowners who force them to work up
to 16 hours a day and who subject
them to sexual harass-ment.
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Maria Salazar, also of the SNTE…
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This is violence that really is a
form of terrorism, although it is
not viewed as such [by society].
"We have all lived through workplace
violence in flesh and blood, or
through assisting our sisters who
have been." |
- CIMAC Noticias
Dec. 09, 2005
Added
Oct.
29,
2005
Nicaragua
Domésticas en mira de patrones abusivos.
According to a legal
investigation done by the International
Labor Organization (ILO) domestic work done
by adolescent girls between the ages of 12
and 16 is an open door to the sexual
exploitation.
The majority of male
homeowners sexually abuse these workers.
In addition to being subjected to workplace
rape, these girl workers are often denied
pay for their work.
-
ElNuevoDiario.com.ni
Oct. 28,
2005
LibertadLatina
Note:
The sexual and economic
exploitation of girls, youth and women in
the workplace is common across Latina
America and also affects many thousands of
low- wage workers in the U.S. Our work
started out in advocacy for this abused
population.
Added July 03 2005
Selected U.S.
Equal Employment Opportunities Commission
(EEOC) actions in the first half of 2005:
United States
EEOC
Launches Spanish-language Youth@work Web
Site.
06/29/2005
Rivera
Vineyards in California to Pay 1.05 Million
to Latina Women Subjected to Severe Sexual
Harassment, Rape, Retaliatory Firings & Job
Segregation.
06/15/2005
Aerospace
Leader
Hamilton
Sundstrand to Pay 1.25 Million to Latino
Workers in olorado Subjected to Hostile Work
Environment.
05/20/2005
Las Vegas Hotel/Casino
Caesars Palace is Sued Alleging that for
Years, Five Managers in Kitchen Forced Oral
Sex Acts, Bodily Touching, Unfavorable
Treatment for Resisting and
Retaliation on Women Workers, Including a
Pregnant Employee.
04/04/2005
McDonalds
in New Mexico & Arizona Sued for Managerial
Sex Harassment of Young Workers.
02/24/2005
California's
Agriculture Giant Harris Farms Ordered
by Jury to Pay $994,000 to a Married Mother
of 5, Repeatedly Raped at Work by Her Boss,
Who Threatened Her and Other Women, Bragged
of His Impunity, and Carried a Gun and
Knife.
01/21/2005
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1 - Sexual Exploitation of Latin American Women
& Girls in the Workplace - Montgomery
County, MD |
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Working To Make
a Difference
The work of
LibertadLatina.org
grew out of 2 decades of effort focused on
providing Latina and Latina Indigenous women and girls in
Montgomery County, Maryland (a suburb just north of
Washington, DC)... with advocacy against rape and
retaliatory firings (for not giving in to rape) that were
and are the daily reality in the low-wage workplace.
The abuses commonly encountered include those described
outrages in the Laurel, MD EEOC case (see below), and
included actual cases of rape and coerced sexual
exploitation. Latina and Indigenous women and girls in
the U.S. face an epidemic of rape in their workplaces and
communities. The legal system does not now
effectively protect these women and children from criminal
sexual assault.
LibertadLatina.org's
work within the Washington, DC region has
documented the fact that the dynamics of historic patterns of
anti-female exploitation with impunity that target Latina and
Indigenous women and girls are merging with other, existing
forms of local criminal sexual predation in the U.S.,
subjecting immigrant women and children to open sexual assault
with impunity in low-wage workplaces and on the streets of their
communities.
The below employment abuse
cases document the sexual assault, coercion and severe
sexual harassment events that the author has witnessed
firsthand, second-hand and through third-hand stories from
dozens of immigrant women and girls since the 1980's.
Convincing abused
victims to come forward and pursue long-term
legal actions (cases typically take two years to
resolve) is difficult. Case duration
combines with justified immigrant women's
fear of the judicial system's possible
prejudices and fear of the known terror tactics
of their supervisors to often convince victims
to either keep quiet and submit to rape in the
workplace, or to face retaliatory reprimands,
demotions, shift changes and firings for not
submitting to the sexual demands of their
supervisors and managers. These events
occur every day in the U.S.
Latina immigrant women and
girl workers are typically unaware of the laws against
sexual harassment and sexual coercion on the books.
When the author distributed the translated version of the
Montgomery County Women's Commission's Sexual Harassment
brochure to Latina women workers in the mid 1990's, for
example, it was read with astonished surprise that such laws
existed in the United States. When the author noted to
the Montgomery County Women's Commission during a May, 1994
presentation to them on these issues that... more brochures
needed to be printed, and that I could effectively
distribute them (I did Latin event promotions at the time),
several commission members shook their heads in disbelief
and my request was denied. That simple action still,
nine years later in 2003, needs to be taken in Montgomery
County, MD and across the U.S.
The effective communication
by advocates to Latina victims of their rights and abilities
to pursue criminal, civil and EEOC legal cases will be a
critical part of the education process needed to break the
code of silence surrounding these acts of blatant impunity
in the U.S. workplace.
Presentation to
the Commission for Women
A Letter from the Montgomery County, MD Women's
Commission
responds positively to Charles Goolsby, Jr.'s May
27, 1994 presentation before the Commission that
detailed many of of the abuse cases listed on
the
LibertadLatina.org
web
site and specifically on this page).
Despite over a decade of effort, both the abuse
with impunity faced by working Latina women and
girls and the apathy and inaction of police and
judicial authorities continue to be an ongoing
horror in this county.
True Cases from
the Frontlines of Impunity
The below three
workplace sexual and physical abuse cases are
all 100% factual. The case narratives
speak for the victims, and they document the
voiceless cries of tens if not hundreds of
thousands of working women and girls across the
United States who face rape and coercion with
impunity largely because anti-immigrant
hostility and apathy from government
agencies allows it to happen,
That must change!
Only public awareness and public expressions of
outrage to elected officials, police
administrators and local prosecutors will lead
to improvement. Nothing else seems to
motivate change.
Deliberate
Inaction was the official government and
corporate response in all of
these cases. |
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Using the Pen to Fight Back Against
Impunity
In response to repeated failures to get
the legal and press establishment of
Montgomery County and the greater
Washington, DC area to respond
positively to the urgent needs of Latina
victims of workplace and community
sexual assault, the author wrote the
below report and has distributed it to
many local police, press and advocacy
organizations during the past 9 years.
The organizations that have received
this report in-person from the author
have included the Montgomery County
Police Department, the U.S. Department
of Labor, Women's Bureau staff and
attendees at their 1995 Low Wage Workers
Conference, and the Montgomery County
Commission for Women (1994). The
report was sent by mail to the U.S.
Department of Justice, Worker
Exploitation Task Force in 1999.
LibertadLatina.org
is the evolution of that 1994 report
over time. The issues remain the
same, and the severity of this crisis is
now worse than it was in 1994.
Public pressure is still needed to
change the environment of sexual
exploitation with impunity facing U.S.
immigrant women and girls every day.
-
Chuck Goolsby - September, 2003
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Montgomery County, MD
-- 1994
Charles M. Goolsby, Jr.'s
1994 Report on the Sexual Exploitation
of Latina immigrant Women and Girls in
Montgomery County, Maryland
EXCERPT
...All of
my work in Latin-American immigrant
victim-advocacy has resulted from
victims having approached me seeking
help. Repeatedly, the official reaction
of cleaning contract companies working
within Montgomery County to my polite
raising of these issues has been to do
the following: 1) silence any discussion
of these issues by the use of gross
intimidation against the victims and
myself, 2) fire or force the victims
out, and 3) back-up the actions of the
perpetrators, protecting them from legal
trouble.
Latin-American immigrant women have thus
gotten the message loud and clear on
many occasions that they have become a
cheap, disposable resource in the
American work-place, underpaid,
overworked, and often forced into sexual
submission while government and commerce
knowingly turn their backs.
At this
time I have found it necessary to write
this report. Since 1988 I have formally
presented this information to many
persons-in-authority. Time after time,
these well-educated, well-paid officials
of public and commercial organizations
have said "SO WHAT!" This report is a
substitute for the muffled CRY OF
RAPE from victims who are tired of
having become the sexual 'cannon-fodder'
of America...
- Charles M. Goolsby, Jr. - February,
1994
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Additional Cases
Laurel, Maryland
-- June, 2002
The below case from
Laurel, Maryland, a city on the Route !-95
corridor in Prince Georges County, just East of
Montgomery County, has defined in a formal legal
setting exactly the types of sexual coercion and
severe sexual harassment that the author has
fought against in neighboring Montgomery County,
Maryland since the 1980s. Even pregnant
Latina women and girls are routinely pressured
for sexual favors by their managers and
supervisors in the low-wage workplace.
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"One of the complainants, having been fired
after putting up with daily unwanted
fondling, was, at the time, pregnant. She
was told to come back after the pregnancy
(when she could be exploited sexually)."
Workplace Rape:
Rockville, Maryland - Case 3
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The U.S. Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC) today
announced a $1 million settlement of a class
action lawsuit against Grace Culinary Systems,
Inc. and Townsend Culinary, Inc. alleging
egregious sexual harassment of 22 Hispanic women
at a food processing plant in Laurel, Maryland.
The suit charged the companies with routinely
subjecting the female workers, all recent
immigrants from Central America who spoke
limited English, to unwanted groping and
explicit requests for sexual favors by male
managers and co-workers over several years.
...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...
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...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.
- U.S.
EEOC, Laurel Maryland Case |
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2 - Sexual Exploitation of Latin American Women
& Girls in the Workplace - Across the
United States |
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The advocacy work done in Montgomery County,
Maryland defines a problem of sexual assault, sexual
coercion and severe sexual harassment that exists
across the United States within Latino immigrant
communities and within the low-wage workplaces where
Latin women and girl workers predominate.
Conditions in Montgomery County, Maryland are equal
to conditions for Latinas in New York, Boston,
Detroit, Atlanta, Miami, San Antonio, Los Angeles,
San Diego, San Francisco or Seattle.
Thanks
to the efforts of the United States Equal
Employment Opportunities Commission, which
processes workplace discrimination complaints,
some Latina victims of workplace sexual
exploitation are finally beginning to receive
recognition and some for of compensation for
having been subjected to rape as a condition of
work.
The
U.S. EEOC is playing a critical role in
documenting the reality of this crisis, forcing
the corporate employers involved to stand up to
their responsibilities to provide safe
workplaces for women and girls, and the results
of these cases educate Latina women about their
rights and validate the efforts of grassroots
advocates who can only do so much to affect
change locally.
Still,
the U.S. EEOC case victories for Latinas listed
below represent a tiny fraction of the actual
sexual exploitation cases going on in the U.S.
workplace. Thus much more work remains to
be done.
- Chuck Goolsby
The Voices of
Other Advocates
"Many
women and youth from both sides of the
[Mexican-U.S.] border suffer sexual harassment on a
daily basis (from vulgar sexual propositions to
frottage) and find that oftentimes their work
schedule and salary are dependent on sexual
availability."
"YET WE DON’T HEAR THE CRIES OF INDIGNATION!!"
From
Toxic Silence, by Laura Zárate, Executive Director of
Arte Sana (Art Heals) -
www.Arte-Sana.com
- Texas
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he below
articles were added on 12/11/2004
From
Human Rights Watch:
Migrant Domestic Workers Face Abuse in
the U.S. -
Press Release
Reform of Visa System, Monitoring Are
Needed
The special visas granted to foreigners who
work as household domestics in the U.S.
leave them vulnerable to serious abuse,
Human Rights Watch charged in Hidden in the
Home: Abuse of Domestic Workers with Special
Visas in the United States.
June 14, 2001.
Hidden In The Home: Abuse of Domestic
Workers with Special Visas in the United
States
The special visas granted to
foreigners who work as household domestics
in the U.S. leave them vulnerable to serious
abuse, Human Rights Watch charged in a
report released today. Thousands of these
workers, typically women, enter the United
States every year to work for diplomats,
officials of international organizations,
foreign businesspeople, and U.S. citizens
temporarily back in the U.S. from their
homes abroad. In the fifty-six-page report,
Human Rights Watch documents the cases of
dozens of workers but believes that many
more are exposed to some form of abuse.
The
most effective recourse for workers in
abusive employment relationships is to
change jobs. But under U.S. law, these
workers' visas are tied to their employers
and in most cases they cannot legally change
employers. If they leave, they lose
immigration status and can be deported. In
about ten percent of the cases that Human
Rights Watch reviewed, workers were
trafficking victims. Employers lured the
workers to the United States with false
promises about their employment conditions
and then held them in servitude. These women
worked long hours, up to nineteen per day,
and were often paid less than 0 per month.
They were rarely allowed outside and were
prohibited from speaking to strangers. Some
were physically or sexually abused.
HRW Index No.: G1302
June 1, 2001 Report
Download PDF |
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Sexual Exploitation Cases:
United States
Iowa
- November 20, 2002
Egg firm settles rape suit for $1.5 M
Associated Press
DES MOINES, Iowa - DeCoster Farms, a major U.S. producer of
eggs, agreed yesterday to pay nearly $1.5 million to 11
Mexican women who claimed they were raped by supervisors at
company plants in northern Iowa.
The deal announced by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission settles a discrimination lawsuit filed in August
2001.
The suit claimed the women, who worked as egg packers at four
plants in Wright County, were raped and abused by
supervisors, who threatened to have them fired or
killed if they did not submit.
"We regret that any worker ever felt abused or harassed in the
workplace and would never have tolerated such a
situation had it been known," said Peter DeCoster, who
oversees the company's operations in Iowa.
DeCoster Farms is owned by A.J. "Jack" DeCoster, who reached a
$6 million settlement in May 2001 with hundreds of Mexican
laborers at his operations in Maine who accused him of
discrimination.
Copyright, Associated Press, 2002
Camarillo, California
U.S. EEOC Latina Harassment
Case
Augt 14, 2002 -- LOS ANGELES - The U.S. Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission (EEOC) today announced an $875,000 settlement
of an employment discrimination lawsuit against Technicolor
Videocassette, Inc. at its Camarillo, Calif., video/DVD processing
plant, on behalf of a class of women who alleged they were subjected
to serious, mostly verbal, sexual harassment and to retaliation. TVI
is the leading global supplier and distributor of DVDs, CDs, and
video cassettes.
[The settlement provides
monetary relief for] 18 current and former female employees - half
of whom are Hispanic with limited English proficiency...
California, Arizona
--
U.S. EEOC Case -
California & Arizona
February 23, 1999
Plaintiffs & EEOC staff
attorneys involved in a $1,855,000 voluntary settlement
resulting from a class action suit brought on behalf of
lettuce giant Tanimura & Antle female employees subjected to
sexual harassment and retaliation in California & Arizona.
Arizona
U.S. EEOC Case -
Arizona
June
21, 2000
The U.S. Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) announced today that it
filed a class lawsuit against Gilbert, Arizona-based Quality Art LLC
and Palestra Capital alleging widespread sexual harassment and
national origin discrimination against 27 female and Hispanic
employees. The suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District
of Arizona, also claims that Quality Art retaliated against
employees who complained about the discriminatory treatment by
firing them or forcing them to resign, as well as by reporting
several undocumented workers to the Immigration and Naturalization
Service (INS) in an effort to have them arrested and deported.
"This case exemplifies
the type of egregious discrimination and exploitation of low-wage
workers that is still perpetrated against the most vulnerable in our
workforce," said EEOC Chairwoman Ida L. Castro. "Workers cannot be
singled out for discrimination and harassment based on their
national origin and gender, regardless of their immigration status,
much less be retaliated against for trying to protect their civil
rights. The Commission's anti-discrimination mandate is clear and it
applies to everyone in the American workplace."
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3 - Sexual Exploitation of Latin American Women
& Girls in the Workplace - Latin America |
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Human Rights Watch Index on
Women Workers in Mexico
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Added
Oct. 29,
2005
Nicaragua
Domésticas en mira de patrones abusivos.
According to a legal investigation
done by the International Labor Organization (ILO)
domestic work done by adolescent girls between the
ages of 12 and 16 is an open door to the sexual
exploitation.
The majority of male homeowners
sexually abuse these workers. In addition to
being subjected to workplace rape, these girl
workers are often denied pay for their work.
-
ElNuevoDiario.com.ni
Oct. 28, 2005
LibertadLatina
Note:
The
sexual and economic exploitation of girls, youth and
women in the workplace is common across Latina
America and also affects many thousands of low- wage
workers in the U.S. Our work started out in
advocacy for this abused population. |
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From
Human
Rights Watch:
The
below paragraph as added on 01/18/2006
Voices of El Salvador Girl Domestic Workers
Former
official, Attorney General’s Office, San
Salvador
“I have known
various cases of patrones (male homeowners)
and sons who sexually abuse domestic
workers, including cases in which the
domestics became pregnant, and then [the
families] throw the girls out. We followed
at least three cases of this, and at least
one was underage [under eighteen]. . . . The
rate is huge. It’s the norm, whether it’s
the patrón or his sons. It’s normal for
her—she accepts it. She goes to work in a
house, and she has no friends or relatives
there, and she is afraid that she will be
fired. If she says what is happening, they
will fire her and say that she has provoked
it. There is no fear of the complaint
[process].”
The
below articles were added on 12/11/2004
Women and Children's Rights Articles
from Human Rights Watch's
Central America Page.
"Over 60
percent of girls reported physical or
psychological mistreatment—including sexual
harassment—from their employers, according
to a 2002 study of El Salvador by the
International Labor Organization’s
International Program on the Elimination of
Child Labor." - Human Rights Watch
El Salvador: Girls Working as Domestics Face
Abuses
Tens of thousands of girls in El
Salvador work as domestics, a form of labor
that makes them particularly vulnerable to
physical abuse and sexual harassment, Human
Rights Watch charged in a report released
today.
January 15,
2004 Press Release
Also available in
Printer friendly version
Voices of El Salvador Girl Domestic Workers
Testimonies from "No Rest: Abuses
Against Child Domestics in El Salvador"
“When I was ten, I went to work in the first
house. I would wash the dishes, make the
beds . . . . I slept there. This was in San
Salvador. They didn’t pay me because they
left and went to their mother’s house and
didn’t give me the address. I worked there
for four months without being paid. I worked
from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. In the morning I would
do the cleaning and then make lunch. I took
care of the three-year-old child. I would
cook [and] wash clothes.”
January 15,
2004 Testimony
No Rest
Abuses Against Child Domestics in
El Salvador
Tens of thousands of girls in El Salvador work
as domestics, a form of labor that makes
them particularly vulnerable to physical
abuse and sexual harassment. This 35-page
report calls on the Salvadoran government to
include domestic workers, who are almost
exclusively girls and young women, in its
program to address hazardous child labor.
Girls as young as nine work as domestics in
El Salvador and may labor 12 hours or more,
up to six days a week, for wages of $40 to
$100 a month. They are particularly
vulnerable to physical abuse and sexual
harassment from members of the household in
which they work.
HRW Index No.: B1601
January 15, 2004 Report
Also available in
Download PDF, 558 KB, 38 pgs
Purchase online
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Mexico
Maids, Mostly
Indigenous, Target of Racism, Abuse
At age 12, Raquel
Guadarrama left the home of her poor, widowed mother
to clean the houses of middle- and upper-class
Mexican families. For 34 years, she scrubbed floors,
washed dishes, hung laundry, and baby-sat toddlers -
all the while cowering as employers called her
stupid and sexually harassed her. When she was just
14, Guadarrama was forced to fend off the advances
of her 70-year-old employer, who exposed his
genitals from behind a newspaper when his wife
wasn't looking and offered her expensive jewelry for
sex. "Many times I had to leave my jobs because of
the sexual harassment," Guadarrama said. "I always
had to eat after my employers did, on separate
plates, as if I were their pet. In fact, I think
pets have more privileges." Guadarrama, now 55, has
little more than a bruised ego and tired bones to
show for her more than three decades of backbreaking
labor. She has no pension plan, no social security,
no health insurance.
Added 10/24/2004
See also
Maltreated Mexican Indigenous Women and Girl
Domestics Organizing in Mexico. |
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Peru
...On Tuesday, May 22, 2001, Laura en
America show [from Peru] covered the issue of
the sexual exploitation of young, poor women who
work in office jobs in Peru. In two separate
cases, multiple victims of bosses who demanded sex,
and then raped the women workers, were confronted by
the victims in the presence of the accused men's
surprised spouses. One victim appeared on the
show at 4 months into her pregnancy. She
became pregnant after her boss gave her a date rape
drug, and she woke up in a hotel room with him,
having been raped against her will. The other
man featured had also raped his female workers with
the use of force.
From
LibertadLatina.org's
page on
Dr. Laura Bozzo of Peru
Peru, Ecuador
...Two
personal friends from South America have related to
me stories of their being subjected to attempted
rape by potential employers during their first job
interviews as 16 year old teenagers. A friend from
Peru stated that she had to break a lot of furniture
to get out of that situation. She also stated that
denouncing the assailant to the police would have
been impossible, as he was a wealthy member of the
community, capable of buying-off the judicial
entities involved. A friend from Ecuador also made a
super-human effort to escape her first job
interview/attempted rape. She did not report this
violent assault to anyone.
I have had casual
conversations with several Latin-American men
regarding this topic. Conversing with an Ecuadorian
accountant and businessman during a visit to Quito,
Ecuador, he stated to me that "well, of course, any
woman who applies for an office job must also 'like'
the boss." Literally translated, a female applicant
for office employment is expected to sleep with the
boss.
From Charles M. Goolsby, Jr.'s 1994 report:The
Sexual and Economic Exploitation of Latina immigrant
Women and Girls in Montgomery County, MD
Indigenous Guatemala
2002 --
Tens of thousands of women and girls, many of them
indigenous Mayans, face persistent discrimination
and other abuses working in Guatemala's export
sector and as maids and servants in private homes,
according to a report released... by Human Rights
Watch (HRW).
[They] often suffer sexual harassment and even
assaults, said the report, which cites the cases of
29 domestic workers, of whom one third said they had
been harassed sexually during their work.
Mayan girls and women are particularly susceptible
to verbal and emotional abuse, even from children,
as a result of the racism that pervades much of
Guatemala's non-Indian, or ladino, population,
according to the report.
Guatemalan Women Face
Discrimination and Abuse in Job Market
Feb 12,
2002 - Jim Lobe,OneWorld US
Added
December 26, 2003
Indigenous Guatemala
Sexual harassment of domestic workers,
especially indigenous workers, has been identified as a
"widespread phenomenon" throughout Latin America.
..."The men of the
house appropriated the bodies of these women, and this continues
in the present day," according to Amanda Pop Bol, a psychologist
and researcher.
[Note: This
exploitation also targets Latina and especially indigenous
Latina domestics across the United States.]
...None of the women
Human Rights Watch spoke with had ever tried to
lodge a legal complaint against their aggressors.
Sabas summed up the feeling of most domestic
workers, saying "I never reported anything, because
I knew no one would believe me." Had she done so,
her claim would have had scant chance of proceeding
successfully. Olimpia Romero Pérez, an organizer
with CENTRACAP, explained, "It's unlikely that women
want to file for sexual harassment, because they
don't want to expose themselves, because they lack
the resources, because there's no law." Indeed,
Guatemala does not yet have a law against sexual
harassment.
Guatemala
In December, 1993 I
asked a Guatemalan friend of mine to describe any
incidents known to him of the sexual-economic
coercion of working women within his home country.
My friend proceeded to explain to me how a major
retailer, which he described as being like a Sears
and a supermarket combined, traditionally advertised
during the winter holidays for temporary help (as is
done here, of course). According to my friend, this
large retailer systematically accepted job
applications only from women, and then only from the
young women whom they regarded as being the
prettiest. The male managers would make it known to
these high school girls that permanent employment
was available to them in the company after their
graduation. The only requirement was accepting a
sexual relationship with those managers now! My
friend noted that these managers could buy
everyone's silence if needed.
From Charles M. Goolsby, Jr.'s 1994 report:The
Sexual and Economic Exploitation of Latina immigrant
Women and Girls in Montgomery County, MD |
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LibertadLatina
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
 |
|
"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
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|
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
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