Human Trafficking in the Western Hemisphere
Doctors Arrested for Faking Infants' Deaths to Sell Them
Published November 06, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
Three doctors and one nurse were arrested just outside of Mexico City yesterday for a child trafficking operation that involved fabricating the deaths of newborns and then selling the babies on the black market for profit. Whether the children were sold to parents desperate for a child or for more nefarious purposes is not yet clear. Nor is whether any of the infants were trafficked into the U.S.
What kind of sick and heartless beasts came up with this strategy? Did it start around the water cooler like this:
Evil Doctor 1: Hey, I'd love to make some money to supplement my doctor's salary, which is not quite enough to buy those jet skis. Anyone got any ideas?
Evil Doctor 2: Well, we've got all these babies just lying around the hospital, why don't we try selling some of them?
Evil Nurse: Who wants to buy a baby? Babies are expensive to take care of.
Evil Doctor 2: Oh, lots of people want to buy babies for all sorts of reasons.
Sweet Sugar for Us, Bitter Life for Bolivian Children
Published October 12, 2009 @ 01:00PM PT
Luis is thirteen now, but he first left school to work full-time harvesting sugarcane when he was ten. He spends all day, sometimes up to 14 hours, every day cutting, hauling, and chopping the plants to be eventually processed into chocolate and slurpies and cupcakes for Americans and other wealthy Westerners. It's dangerous and incredibly difficult work. But Luis is not alone. He is just one of around 320,000 children in Bolivia thought to be exploited in child labor. And sugarcane production is one of the worst forms exploitative child labor.
Exploited and forced child labor in sugar production is an issue all over the world, from the Philippines to Bolivia. Sugarcane harvesting is an industry in which child labor and slave labor thrive for a number of reasons. First of all, the price of raw sugar today is the highest it's been in over 30 years, which is causing many farmers who left the industry to switch back. The crop is also an economic draw for poor and migrant families; the long growing season and multiple harvests provide steady income roughly between April and November, longer than most crops. Harvesting sugarcane is a dangerous and dirty task since most of it is still done manually. The crops must be cut in the field, burned to remove unwanted foliage, and then chopped down the canes. They also must be stacked and loaded for transportation and processing. All of these factors mean that the job of harvesting sugarcane often go the the most powerless -- children and slaves.
Too much of the sugar available at the grocery store today and used to the create sweet treats that we enjoy come from places like Bolivia and the Philippines, where large portions of the industry uses child and exploited labor to harvest the sugarcane. In part, exploitation is so prolific because of a global demand for cheap sugar. And we are the people who are demanding that sugar.
So how can you reduce that demand and help reduce child labor in sugar? The easiest step is to buy Fair Trade sugar at the grocery store. Increasingly, grocery stores are carrying Fair Trade staples, like sugar and coffee, but they may still be difficult to find in some areas. If that's the case, you can buy it online.
But if you're busy and/or domestically-challenged like me, you're not making a lot of cookies from scratch. So how can you make a difference? There are a number of ways you can encourage the products you buy and the businesses you frequent to buy Fair Trade sugar. Does your workplace provide coffee and sugar for employees? Try creating a petition for Fair Trade sugar. Do you have a favorite coffee shop or bakery? Let them know that you're concerned about the sugar you eat being made by exploited children. When businesses hear from customers they value, they are more likely to meet those customers' requests and increase demand for fairly-produced sugar.
Child exploitation in the sugar industry is a serious problem, but it's something you can help by making better choices about the sugar you buy and encouraging businesses to do the same. When sugar is fair, it can be a sweet life for all of us.
Photo credit: dweekly
To Better Know A Country: Human Trafficking in Panama
Published October 07, 2009 @ 07:00AM PT
Every year, the U.S. State Department releases a Trafficking in Persons report which rates countries on their efforts to combat human trafficking. Each week, I'll be providing a brief glance at human trafficking in one of those countries, based off the 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report, with my own (often snarky) analysis added. This is just a snapshot of what's going on in the country. For more information, you can check out the full text of the 2009 Trafficking in Persons Report here.
This Week's Country..... Panama 
Basic Stats
- Ranking: Tier 2
- Status: Source, transit and destination country for trafficking victims
- Political Stability: You know that scene in Superbad where the cops are drunkenly doing donuts in the car to Van Halen's "Panama"? That's about what it's like.
- Cash Flow: Van Halen has yet to pay royalties.
- Do I Think They Care?: As long as the U.S. funds them to care, why not?
Who Are the Victims and What Are They Doing?
- Women:commercial sex
- Girls: commercial sex, domestic servitude
- Note: Forced labor is not illegal in Panama, and thus not included here. But it happens.
Where Are They Coming From and Where Are They Going?
- Victims are trafficked from Panama to Jamaica, Europe, and Israel.
- Victims are trafficked from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Central America to Panama.
- Panamanian victims are trafficked internally.
What's Gotta Happen?
- Amend laws to prohibit labor trafficking, including domestic servitude.
- Investigate and prosecute traffickers.
- Dedicate more resources to victims' services.
- Develop a system of identifying trafficking victims in prostitution.
What Can I Do
- You can support Sustainable Harvest International, an organization which helps farmers in Panama and other parts of Central America get out of poverty and support their families.
In summary, Panama is a natural transit point for human trafficking victims. It contains the Panama Canal which can allow ships to carry humans from South America to the U.S. and Europe and connects South and North America. Unfortunately, Panama's border security it woefully inadequate. Things are getting better in Panama for victims trafficked internally, but border security remains a huge issue. My reccomended solution? I think Panama should adopt the Van Halen song of the same name as their national anthem. Sure it's actually about a car, not the country, but it's energetic and catchy. And who could possibly violate the borders of a country that David Lee Roth seems to love so much?
Dear San Francisco: "Sell Crack or Die" Isn't a Real Choice
Published September 28, 2009 @ 02:00PM PT
Dear San Francisco Superior Court Jury,
After hearing of your recent decision convicting an apparent trafficking victim of selling drugs at gunpoint, I felt compelled to write to you about the concept of control, since it is apparently a foreign concept to you. Should you care to look it up, the definition is here, but I can summarize by saying one person controls another when he has the power to direct or determine that other person's thoughts and/or actions. One example of full and coercive control you may have heard of is the institution of human trafficking, aka modern-day slavery. Since human trafficking has recently been the subject of a Lifetime mini-series, several feature films, and a New York Times series, I will assume that you have not been, in fact, living under rocks and have heard of it.
What you apparently don't understand, based on the explanations you gave of your recent decision that Rigoberto Valle is guilty of being a drug dealer and not a human trafficking victim, is how modern-day slavery works. In modern-day slavery, a trafficker uses force, fraud, or coercion to exploit someone's labor under violence or the threat of violence. Now I don't know if you've ever been forced to do something at gun-point or knife-point (as Mr. Valle described his interaction with his traffickers), but it greatly reduces your bargaining power. If your trafficker holds a gun to your head and says "pick tomatoes," you pick tomatoes over being shot. If he holds a knife to your chest and says "have sex with this man", you have sex over being stabbed. And if he threatens to shoot or stab you if you don't sell crack, well, then you sell crack.
What most trafficking victims don't have the power to do is tell the trafficker "I'm sorry, I'd prefer for you to enslave me in a legal industry, so if I get caught in a police sting, there won't be any confusion as to who was in the wrong." If they can do that, they probably can escape trafficking. So, when you say,
"To me, it came down to that he knew what he was doing was illegal. I don't think he honestly cared,"
I have to disagree. I think he cared a great deal not to be shot, arrested, or deported. I think he cared that he was being forced to do something dangerous and illegal in a country where he didn't understand the legal system. I think he cared not to put his family into further debt. Did he "choose" selling crack over death? Can that really be considered a choice?
I did not sit and listen to two lawyers hash this case out as you did, so perhaps this was not the miscarriage of justice it seems to be. Perhaps Mr. Valle was guilty of selling drugs of his own free will and wove a well-crafted lie about being a pawn in an international organized criminal syndicate to get out of going to jail. I can't say for sure that he's innocent. I can, however, say for sure that trafficking victims are enslaved every day in both legal and illegal industries. Some victims in illegal industries like prostitution and drug-selling are recognized by law enforcement for what they are: innocent people forced to do something against their will. But too often they are arrested as prostitutes or drug dealers or illegal immigrants and deported. The "sell crack or die defense" isn't just a defense -- it's a reality for some trafficking victims.
So, San Francisco Superior Court Jury, when you say you wanted to find Mr. Valle not guilty, I ask you to look deep inside and ask yourselves why you didn't. Was it really easier to believe him capable of inventing a story about evil traffickers forcing him to sell crack than to believe men were capable of enslaving him as a drug-dealer? Or was it easier to think that because he was a grown man, he should have been able to fight back? Was it easier to think that because he was an immigrant who had entered the country illegally, he could have committed other crimes as well? Thinking about human trafficking in a real and meaningful way is rarely easy. And neither are the lives of its victims, no matter what they are forced to do.
Photo credit: Marco Gomes
Guatemalan Army Admits to Trafficking Kids for Adoption
Published September 21, 2009 @ 12:07PM PT
When it comes to talking about the human rights abuses that took place during their long and painful civil war, the Guatemalan military has acted like a cat next to a bathtub: willing to make a lot of noise but not jump in to the issue at hand. Surprisingly, however, the Guatemalan army has finally admitted to kidnapping and selling hundreds of children in international adoptions from 1977 to 1989.
If you're not up on your Guatemalan history, here's the over-simplified version: From the 1960 to 1996, Guatemala was engaged in a bloody, brutal civil war between right-wing, pro-Reaganonmics type government and the left-wing, Che-had-the-right-idea type insurgents. Over 200,000 people were killed or "dissapeared" by the government and the insurgents committed their share of murders and rapes as well. Human rights were about as well-respected as Paris Hilton's quantum physics term paper. And throughout the whole bloody mess, the army kidnapped kids and sold them as part of "international adoptions" both as a way to generate revenue and punish parents who spoke out against the government.
International adoption in Guatemala is nothing new; it has been a source of income there for decades. The chaos and brutality of the civil war meant less regulation of the army's activities and more opportunities for abuse. Guatemala has the highest per capita adoption rate in the world and is a leading provider of children for adoption to the U.S. In fact, 1 in 100 babies born in Guatemala are eventually adopted to parents in the U.S. who are willing to pay up to $30,000 in fees for a child. This money is a huge financial incentive in a country where 75% of the people live below the poverty level and $30,000 may represent untold hope for a desperate family. Advocates fear that mothers may be coerced, financially or politically, into putting their children up for adoption. Similarly, child advocates want to be sure children aren't being adopted into families which will abuse or exploit them.
The issue of international adoption as a front for human trafficking is international, and has affected several countries, including Guatemala. Romania actually banned international adoptions because the problems with exploitation were so severe. Many international agencies and the U.S. government have since asked Romania to lift or relax the ban, since the country cannot support the number of children who need care and Western families are eager to adopt Romanian children. There are a number of model policies for how to screen potential families and set up protective mechanisms to prevent children from being adopted by unscrupulousindividuals and couples. There are not, however, very many model policies for how to prevent mothers from being coerced into giving up their children. That is an area the international adoption community should look into more thoroughly.
It takes some guts to admit that you did something as heinous as kidnap kids for political reasons and then sell them for profit, but the Guatemalan army did the right thing by telling the truth. Their revelation has helped hundreds of families reunite with lost children, most of whom are now adults. It has also shed light on the important issue of international adoption used as a front for trafficking, which will hopefully help other countries identify policy measures to take in order to protect both mothers and children.
Photo credit: cotaro70s
From Budapest to Toronto: Timea Eva's True Story of Slavery
Published September 06, 2009 @ 09:00AM PT
This story was collected from KMBC. Timea Eva's experiences as a trafficking victim are common. They're so common that situations like her's -- a young, Eastern European woman tricked into the commercial sex industry -- have become the norm for mainstream coverage and examples of human trafficking. But this situation was real for Timea Eva and thousands of other women from Eastern Europe from the 1990s to today.
The summer Timea Eva Nagy was 20, she decided to take a summer job in Canada. It was far away from her home in Budapest, Hungary, but she would earn money and have an interesting international experience. Shortly arriving in Toronto, however, she was kidnapped and forced to strip and sell her body for sex.
During her captivity, Nagy desperately wanted to leave, but her traffickers threatened to harm her family back in Hungary if she tried to escape. They starved her to keep her weak and thin. She tried to find help. She eventually even tried suicide. But it seemed nothing would release her from this nightmare. But despite it all, Nagy suppressed the urge to panic and break down. She stayed calm and went into "survival mode", determined to finally find a way to break free.
Finally she found a way out. Nagy managed to use a Hungarian-English dictionary to explain to a DJ and a security guard that she was being abused, and that she wanted to leave. They helped her escape her captors and find safety.
Nagy's story has as happy an ending as such a story can have. She now tours the U.S. talking about her experience and educating people on the reality of human trafficking. She has even written a book called "Walk with Me: A Memoir of a Sex Slave Worker."
Photo credit: Mysi anne
Beef Tacos and Forced Prostitution
Published September 03, 2009 @ 12:00PM PT
La Cabana, a Mexican restaurant in Atlanta suburb Woodstock, GA, was famous for two things -- the beef tacos in the front of the house and the young women and teen girls selling sex in the back. That's because this Mexican restaurant was a front for a human trafficking operation from Central and South America to metro Atlanta. Selling ethnic foods by day and human beings by night is a trend among traffickers all over the country.
At La Cabana, women and girls as young as 15 were smuggled from Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador into the U.S. While the restaurant was open, they served customers plates of Hispanic delicacies. But after the kitchen closed, the restaurant became a gentleman's club, and they serviced the mostly Hispanic male audience sexually. In a back room, the women and girls were forced to engage in prostitution to pay off their smuggling debt. Interestingly enough, none of the news reports I found on this case called it human trafficking. But if this isn't human trafficking, then I'll buy Rush Limbaugh's greatest hits tape.
Keeping trafficking operations within one cultural, racial, or ethic group are one technique traffickers use tp avoid detection by the police. The philosophy is that operating a criminal enterprise within a community of "friends" is safer. This happens often with suburban brothels in private homes that sell cater exclusively to Korean men, Hispanic men, East African men, etc. But large numbers of men going in and out of a private home at odd hours might look suspicious to neighbors. Therefore, an ethnic restaurant provides an ideal cover for the traffickers. Plus, they have two sources of income from the women they are exploiting: their labor in the restaurant and their sexual exploitation. In this case, fortunately, the police were a couple steps ahead.
The La Cabana trafficking ring got busted because someone, presumably who lived in the area, called in a tip about the loud music late at night and Hispanic women going in and out of the building frequently. This is one more example of how people like you, just by being aware of your surroundings, can help trafficked people to safety. If you see something suspicious, don't trick yourself into believing you're the Dark Knight and go running in guns-or-video-cameras-blazing. But do call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-3737-888 or call local law enforcement.
Photo credit: Loco beef taco by jasonlam
