Mexico: Nearly 500 Children Held as Sex Slaves

Rosa del Carmen Verduzco,”Mama Rosa,” is a noted children rights activist whose group home was often visited by politicians.

MEXICO CITY (AP) –  Federal and state police officers raided a group home Tuesday in the western state of Michoacan and rescued 458 children who were forced to beg for money and suffered sexual abuse while being against their will in filthy conditions, Mexico’s top prosecutor said.

Attorney General Jesus Murillo Karam said police also rescued 138 adults from “La Gran Familia” (The Great Family) group home in the city of Zamora.

The residents were kept in deplorable conditions, fed rotten food and made to sleep on the floor among rats, ticks and fleas and many of them were never allowed to leave the premises, Murillo Karam said at a news conference attended by top federal investigators and Michoacan Gov. Salvador Jara.

“I’m in utter dismay because we weren’t expecting the conditions we found at the group home,” Jara said.

Police detained the home’s owner, Rosa del Carmen Verduzco, and eight workers for questioning, Murillo Karam said.

Verduzco, known in Zamora as “Mama Rosa” or “La Jefa” is a noted local children rights activist whose group home was often visited by politicians. Local media on Wednesday published several photographs of her with former President Vicente Fox and his wife, former Michoacan Gov. Leonel Godoy and other officials.

The investigation began after five parents filed complaints last year with authorities because they weren’t allowed to see their children at the home, Jara said.

One of the parents was a woman who grew up and gave birth to two children at Great Family, which has been open for 40 years. She was allowed to leave when she was 31-years-old but Verduzco kept the two children, who had been registered under her name, said Tomas Ceron, head of the Criminal Research Agency at the Attorney General’s Office.

The mother of one of the boys held said Wednesday she was only allowed to see her child three times a year and that the home’s owner demanded $2,800 to release him.

Veronica Gamina told The Associated Press by telephone that four years ago she took her then 9-year-old boy to The Great Family group home in the city of Zamora because she had to work and couldn’t take care of him.

But when she returned to reclaim her now 13-year-old boy, “they told me to write letters explaining why I wanted him back, then they asked me for 37,000 pesos ($2,800 USD) but I make 800 pesos ($60) a week and couldn’t get the money together,” Gamina said. She spoke from outside the home, which was being guarded by police, and where she said about 70 parents had gathered.

Gamina, a 28-year-old sandwich shop worker, said she went to authorities after hearing about conditions at the home from someone who escaped.

Mexico’s federal Attorney General’s Office said the children remained in the home Wednesday while authorities made sure they were being fed and looked for places to transfer them. The youngsters were also being checked by doctors.

Kidnappings in Mexico Top 105,000 In 2012, 99% Go Unreported

Maria Teresa Ramos, grandmother of Jerzi Esli, kidnapped with other 11 people from a bar in May, reads a newspaper on August 23, 2013, in the popular neighborhood of Tepito, in Mexico City. The victims were kidnapped from a downtown bar in broad daylight on a Sunday morning three months ago in a case that raised concerns about security in Mexico City, which has been relatively immune from the country’s drug cartel violence. AFP PHOTO/RONALDO SCHEMIDT | Getty

By Roberto A. Ferdman @robferdman

Few crime statistics are as sobering as the ones coming out of Mexico these days.

The latest public security report, (pdf, Spanish link) released by Mexico’s statistics bureau (INEGI) earlier this week, reveals the extent of the country’s rampant and virtually unpunished kidnapping problem. According to the report (p.21), a mind-boggling 105,682 kidnappings were committed in Mexico last year, of which an incredibly small 1,317 were reported to local or federal authorities. In other words, 99% of kidnappings in Mexico flew under the radar last year.

Many kidnappings are drug-related, and therefore often kept from authorities because victims involved in the drug trade want to avoid backlash or crackdowns on other offenses. But a good deal of the 100,000+ abductions went unreported on suspicion that nothing would be done, or worse, that more harm would come to the involved parties, according to local digital news site Animal Politico (link in Spanish). A survey taken by INEGI and included in the statistics bureau’s report found that millions of crime victims simply considered reporting crimes “a waste of time.”

Mexico’s local police are famously negligent when it comes to identifying, pursuing and reporting crimes. A study in 2011 (link in Spanish) found that Mexican police investigated a mere 4.5% of crimes. Even when detained, criminals are rarely convicted because of the country’s broken justice system—one which the US has been trying (and failing) to help Mexico with for years. Only 31% of those arrested on drug charges between 2006 and 2011 were actually convicted, according to a report (link in Spanish) released by Mexico’s attorney general’s office last year.

Mexico’s government is equally ineffective with murders, disappearances and other serious crimes. Less than 20% of roughly 4,000 disappearances in 2012 were reported, and 98% of murders last year went unsolved. The federal government only investigated 6% of all crimes in Mexico last year.

Understandably, Mexicans tend to look behind their back in public places. Take a look at this chart:

Thanks to fallout from the government’s continued crackdown on the illegal drug trade, the country’s crime rate—the number of crimes committed per 100 heads—is above 34, a near historic high. According to local security and justice watchdog the National Citizen’s Observatory, Mexico’s crime problem is at its worst since at least 1997. No wonder Mexicans are more concerned with security (p. 12) than they are with unemployment, inflation, corruption or even health.

From L.A. Sweatshop to Anti-Slave Labor Activist

mmigration activist Flor Molina looks out from the offices of the nonprofit Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST). (Photo: Christopher Meeks/YES! Magazine)

by Christa Hillstrom

Flor Molina thought it was her lucky break. At 28, she had just lost her youngest child and was working two jobs in Puebla, Mexico, but not making enough money to feed and clothe her surviving children. At night, she took sewing classes, hoping to one day earn enough money to properly care for them . “I was so afraid that what happened to my baby would happen to my other three children,” she remembers.

So when her sewing teacher told her about a job in the United States that would pay enough money to support her family and maybe even start her own business, she accepted. She had never been out of the country and the job meant leaving her children with her mother indefinitely.

Molina and her sewing teacher were flown to Tijuana, where a powerful woman known in Puebla as “la Senora” met them at the border. She confiscated Molina’s documents and clothing for “safekeeping.” “I thought it was strange,” Molina says, “but she had been living in the U.S. for so long so I thought, she knows how things are run.” A coyote took the two women to Los Angeles, where they were immediately put to work in a sewing factory.

Molina’s workday started at 4 a.m., sewing by the dim light on the machine. During the regular workday, she ironed, unloaded and reloaded delivery trucks and stitched labels into dresses — some for major American stores. When the other workers went home, Molina cleaned the entire factory. She was subjected to physical abuse, and wasn’t allowed to leave the building unattended. She was, for all practical purposes, a slave.

“I thought slavery was only in the books,” she says. “I was surprised to find myself living in it.”

According to the International Labor Organization, nearly 21 million people are victims of forced labor — often called modern-day slavery — across the world. Many of them are exploited in agriculture, construction, domestic servitude and manufacturing. An estimated 15,000-17,500 people are trafficked into the United States alone every year.

Molina’s experience is typical. What’s remarkable is what she did with it.

Just 40 days into her internment, Molina broke free. She got permission to go to church alone and figured out how to contact a concerned fellow worker who had noticed Molina’s abuse in the shop. With her help Molina connected with the nonprofit Coalition to Abolish Slavery and Trafficking (CAST).

CAST has worked with victims of forced labor since 1998 helping them re-enter society and training them as advocates. Survivors are well-positioned to lobby for policies that help victims, curb abuse and prosecute offenders, says Kay Buck, executive director of the Coalition. “We’re learning directly from the survivors we’re serving, and that’s informing all of these policy measures to have an impact on future lives.”

One such law is California’s Transparency in Supply Chains Act, signed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2010. Molina testified before the California legislature to help urge the bill’s passage. The law requires companies doing business in California with more than $100 million in annual global profits to report their efforts to eliminate slavery from their supply chains. Buck says the law poses a question to both consumers and companies: What are we doing about slavery?

Portraits of survivors that CAST has helped, from a project by photographer Mette Lampcov. (Photo: Christopher Meeks/YES! Magazine)

Molina is now a pioneering member of CAST’s Survivors Caucus, a group of women from 13 countries who escaped forced labor in the United States. They are directly involved in crafting policies that meet the needs of trafficking victims — like what kinds of health care and visa protections they receive.

They also serve as a support group. Although she spent just 40 days in the sewing shop, it took years for Molina to recover emotionally — and eight years to reunite with the children left in Mexico. “I knew I could cry and share these feelings with the other survivors,” Molina says. “I don’t have sisters of my own, but if I had sisters, they would be like them.”

Molina looks ahead to lobbying for a federal counterpart to the California transparency act and a new California law addressing the growing problem of exploitative labor recruitment.

“Now that I’m a grandmother, I want a world free of slavery,” Molina says. “Now that I survived, I want to change something.”

‘Diana the Hunter’ Kills Bus Drivers in Juarez, Mexico

A mysterious vigilante calling herself “Diana the Hunter” is murdering Mexican bus drivers in the border city of Ciudad Juarez.

‘Diana the Hunter’ blamed for vigilante bus killings in Mexico

Authorities are seeking a woman accused of killing two bus drivers in northern Mexico amid claims that the murders were committed by a vigilante avenging rapes, officials said Tuesday.

Local media have received an anonymous message signed by “Diana, the hunter,” claiming to act as “an instrument of vengeance” for the sexual abuse committed by drivers in Ciudad Juarez, a border city with a dark record of violence against women.

Arturo Sandoval, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state prosecutor’s office, told AFP that the email, sent over the weekend, “has been included in the investigation.”

Witnesses said a woman wearing a blonde wig shot the drivers in the head after stopping the buses last week. Sandoval said prosecutors believe they were either crimes of passion or motivated by vengeance.

The drivers were working on a route used by women who work in assembly plants known as “maquiladoras,” and who regularly suffer sexual abuse as they head to their night shifts.

Authorities are investigating 12 cases of female passengers allegedly sexually assaulted by drivers. Investigators are looking into whether the killer is among the women.

Diana sent an email to local media outlets containing the following lines:
“My colleagues and I have suffered in silence, but they can no longer keep us quiet. I am an instrument of vengeance.”

Officials are also investigating any links with an arson attack against a bus at dawn on Tuesday. The vehicle was set ablaze after gasoline was poured on it, said Fire Chief Ramon Lucero.

The anonymous message from “Diana” stated: “My colleagues and I have suffered in silence, but they can no longer keep us quiet.”

“We were victims of sexual violence by drivers who worked during the night shift at the (plants) in Juarez. While many people know about our suffering, nobody defends us or does anything to protect us,” it said.

“They think that we are weak because we are women,” the message said, warning that there would be more deaths.

“I am an instrument of vengeance.”

Authorities have drawn up a profile of the suspected killer and launched an operation to find her with undercover agents in buses.

Witnesses describe her as a woman in her 50s, 1.65 meters tall (5-feet-four), with a dark complexion.

Ciudad Juarez, which lies at the border with Texas, gained notoriety in the 1990s when the bodies of hundreds of women began to appear in the desert bearing signs of extreme sexual violence.

Many of the victims were women who had come from other parts of the country to work in one of the city’s assembly plants following a manufacturing boom generated by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

In several cases, the victims disappeared after they left the plants at dawn.

Mexican Drug Cartels’ Other Business: Sex Trafficking

Narco gangs, including the Zetas, have diversified their portfolio to include buying and selling women as slave

ALFREDO ESTRELLA / AFP / GETTY IMAGES

By Ioan Grillo / Mexico City

Like many victims of human trafficking, Marcela was tricked into the sex trade by a man she thought she could trust. She met him in her small hometown in Veracruz state when she was 16. Posing as a wealthy businessman, he asked for her hand in marriage, promising a comfortable lifestyle. Instead he took her to the Merced neighborhood o fMexico City, a hotbed for prostitution. She was kept under duress in a hotel room and forced to have sex with up to 40 men a day, who paid $15 each to her so-called boyfriend and his accomplices. Girls suffering from human trafficking are often kept under such conditions for years. However, after a week, police raided the hotel, and Marcela defied the threats from the traffickers to testify in court, sending them to prison. “When it was happening, I just blocked it out, as it was so painful,” says Marcela, who asked that her name be changed. “It took me a long time to regain any confidence in myself, to rebuild my life.”

Now 21, Marcela works with activists in support of a new drive by prosecutors to make sure other girls don’t suffer what she did. Their efforts have been aided by Mexico’s first federal law on human trafficking passed in 2012. (Before this, the issue was governed by varying state laws.) The new act dictates custodial sentences for perpetrators at all links in the trafficking chain with sentences up to 40 years. Activists estimate that hundreds of thousands of women in Mexico, including many underage girls, are coerced into sex work or other forced labor, though the clandestine nature of the trade makes it impossible to know exact figures. Under the new law, any sex work involving girls under the age of 18 qualifies as human trafficking. Laws governing prostitution vary across Mexico’s states, and it is often tolerated in red-light zones, such as those on the U.S. border.

The fight against this trafficking is complicated by the deep involvement of the country’s notorious drug cartels in the business. Narco gangs like the Zetas — a criminal army founded by defectors from the Mexican military — have diversified their portfolio to include kidnapping, extortion, theft of crude oil, gun running and lucrative human-trafficking networks. It’s impossible to know the exact value of Mexico’s human-trafficking trade, though the U.N. estimates the global industry to be worth $32 billion a year. “As the drug war has become more intense, the networks that traffic women have made their pacts with cartels,” says Jaime Montejo, a spokesman for Brigada Callejera, a sex-worker support group in Mexico City. “Those that don’t cannot survive.”

In addition to selling women for sex, Mexican cartels also have been known to kidnap women and girls and use them as their personal sex slaves. “Human-trafficking crimes have a devastating effect on victims and their families,” says Rosi Orozco, who served as a Mexican federal deputy, drafting the new law, and now works closely with prosecutors. “There are parents who are searching and searching for their children and can’t sleep because of this nightmare.”

The antitrafficking drive has gained momentum in Mexico City, where a special prosecutor took power in May and has since overseen 86 raids on hotels, bars and massage parlors, rescuing 118 women and charging 62 alleged traffickers. Other significant arrests have been made across Mexico in states including Hidalgo and Puebla in recent months. Activists are also supporting cases as far away as the U.S., where Mexican women have been smuggled over the Rio Grande into forced sex work. This month, police in New Jersey arrested six Mexican nationals on sex-trafficking and organized-crime charges following a raid on a brothel in the town of Lakewood. “For too long, human-trafficking victims have suffered out of sight on the fringes of society,” acting state attorney general John Hoffman told reporters on July 18.

Gangs like the Zetas are involved in human trafficking at many links on the chain. Cartels control most of Mexico’s smuggling networks through which victims are moved, while they also take money from pimps and brothels operating in their territories. Prosecution documents show numerous cases in which cartel members have confessed to murdering pimps who crossed them or burning down establishments that refused to pay their “quota.” Mexican marines arrested the Zetas’ leader, Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, this month and prosecutors say that human trafficking will be among the long list of charges leveled against him. “The cartels know that drugs can only be sold once, but women can be sold again and again and again,” says Teresa Ulloa, director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean. Ulloa, who has helped hundreds of victims of sex trafficking in Mexico, says organized crime is involved in 70% of cases.

The new human-trafficking law takes into account cases of women forced to work directly for cartels, punishing anyone who helps bring women to them. Some recent testimonies made to journalists and activists cast light on the horrifying ordeals of women held in servitude for long periods by the gangsters. In one account taken by the former deputy Orozco, a woman from El Salvador described how she was kidnapped by the Zetas in Mexico, repeatedly raped and then also forced to cook and wash bloody clothes and machetes. While she was finally freed by one of her captors, other women are believed to experience similar brutal treatment before ultimately being murdered. This month, a mother located the body of her daughter in Oaxaca state after a two-year-long search; she discovered that her daughter had been held by a gang of Zetas and was repeatedly raped before being decapitated.

In western Michoacán state, the brutal Knights Templar cartel is alleged to have kidnapped large numbers of girls and held them for sex. Jose Manuel Mireles, a doctor who has become the leader of an armed vigilante group fighting the cartel in the village of Tepalcatepec, said the cartel’s systematic use of rape as a tool of terror was the final spark that made residents take up guns this year. “They arrived at people’s houses and said, ‘Bathe your daughter, she is going to stay with me for some time,’ and they wouldn’t return her until she was pregnant,” Mireles said in a video testimony posted on the Internet.

The vigilante militias, like the one headed by Mireles, have sprung up in a string of western Mexican towns in recent months, setting up checkpoints and rooting out alleged cartel members. The government has taken a rather ambiguous stance on these militias: President Enrique Peña Nieto condemned vigilantism, but local police have arrested only a few vigilantes. In recent weeks, the government has also sent in thousands of extra federal police, soldiers and marines into Michoacán to combat the cartels. In response, the Knights Templar gunmen carried out a series of attacks both on the vigilante militias and the federal forces. On Sunday, alleged gunmen from the Knights Templar killed a vice admiral in the Mexican navy and his bodyguard on a Michoacán road.

Back in the Merced neighborhood, many sex workers continue plying their trade independently in the shadow of Mexico’s bloody drug war and the predations of human traffickers. Patricia, who has been a sex worker in the Merced for 30 years, says she believes the majority of Mexican prostitutes are not coerced, though they face few options in life. “I have no problem with my clients. Many are good people,” Patricia says. “One even brought me medicine when I was sick.” However, Marcela, who was forced into sex work as a teenager, says there are often coercive pressures that cannot be seen, like threats against the sex worker or her family. “There might be some women who do it out of choice, but many are forced,” Marcela says. “Nobody, when they are a young girl, says, ‘I want to be a prostitute.’”

Mexico’s Feared Narcos: A Brief History of the Zetas Drug Cartel

Slave Labor for Thousands Feared Missing in Mexico’s Drug War

• by ThinkProgress
• July 18, 2013

A recent report indicates that civilians caught in the crossfire between drug cartels and the Mexican government may be also serving as human chattel, forced to perform labor in gang-run camps.

Over the last six years, a bloody stalemate has been in place between the Mexican federal government and the cartels, with an estimated 70,000 civilians killed in the process. At least 1,000 murders linked to organized crime have taken place each month since President Enrique Pena Nieto took over in December. Beyond the death, however, another facet to the conflict lurks just out of sight. In an article whose title translates to “Captives in Hell,” Spanish-language magazine Proceso features interviews with victims’ relatives and members of civil society, all of whom tell of a vast system of forced labor throughout Mexico.

These laborers are counted among the 26,000 “disappeared” in Mexico — civilians who have vanished without a trace — of whom many are assumed to be dead. In their interviews, civil society groups tell of some of these captives being alive but forced to perform “jobs” on behalf of the cartels. These can include “forced killings, preparing marijuana, constructing tunnels, cleaning safe houses, preparing food, installing communications equipment and acting as lookouts or sex slaves.”

The idea of cartels kidnapping individuals to perform specialized tasks is also well-documented, lending credibility to Procesco’s report. The Zetas — one of the deadliest gangs in Mexico — reportedly caused the forced disappearances of engineers in the recent past, forced to service the cartel’s sophisticated communications equipment. At one point, the Zetas’ infrastructure, supported through this forced labor, was enough to completely bypass the rest of the country’s communications’ systems entirely.

InSight Crime notes, however, that some of the claims Proceso make could still be inflated. “The idea that up to a third of Mexico’s disappeared victims may in fact be working in slave-like conditions is a horrifying proposition, although it seems unlikely given the huge profit margins of criminal organizations — why would they would need to resort to large-scale slave labor when they can pay willing recruits?” Miriam Wells asks in her analysis. “Isolated cases however, are certainly plausible,” she notes, given the rarity of being able to interview those who escape from captivity.

Disappearances go far beyond the issue of forced labor as well. According to a National Commission of Human Rights report, between 2009 and 2013, government officials freed 2,352 captives, 855 of whom were migrants. Both sides in the war have been blamed for these disappearances, with a report from Human Rights Watch earlier this year accusing the Mexican government of cooperating with many of the vanishing acts.

There are some glimmers of hope in the ongoing conflict, though. The Mexican Navy on Monday managed to capture Miguel Angel Trevino Morales, the head of the Zetas, taking him into custody without firing a shot. Morales’ capture means that three of the four top leaders in the Zetas have been killed or captured in the last year, likely weakening the group’s position. Despite that, other syndicates like the Sinaloa cartel, remain in place, ready to take over any ground the Zetas cede to the Mexican government.

http://youtu.be/kTfBQ5LN6PU