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LATIN
AMERICA - TRAFFICKING OF 5 MILLION WOMEN & GIRLS
By Emilio Godoy - September 22, 2010
Puebla, Mexico, (IPS) - The fight against human trafficking
in Latin America is ineffective and has led to the emergence of intra-regional
markets for the trade, according to experts and activists meeting this Hjek in
this Mexican city.
"Responses to the trade in human beings have been more
formal than real, as have the changes in legislation. Governments are not
interested: it is not their priority," Ana Hidalgo, from the Costa Rican
office of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), told IPS.
Hidalgo is one of the 450 academics and activists who
took part in the Second Latin American Conference on Smuggling and
Trafficking of Human Beings, under the theme "Migrations, Gender and Human
Rights", Sept. 21-24 in Puebla, 129 kilometres south of Mexico City.
Ana Chávez, a lawyer with Argentina's Peace and Justice
Service (SERPAJ) said, "Victims are listened to, and criminal prosecutions
are initiated, but no one is sentenced because of impunity. The consumers, that
is, the pimps, clients or rapists, do not come into the equation."
In Mexico some 20,000 people a year fall victim to the
modern-day slave trade, according to the Centre for Studies and Research on
Social Development and Assistance (CEIDAS), which monitors the issue.
The total number of victims in Latin America amounts to
250,000 a year, yielding a profit of 1.35 billion dollars for the traffickers,
according to statistics from the Mexican Ministry of Public Security. But the
data vary widely. Whatever the case, the United Nations warns that human
trafficking has steadily grown over the past decade.
Organisations like the Coalition Against Trafficking of
Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean (CATW-LAC) estimate that
over five million girls and women have been trapped by these criminal networks
in the region, and another 10 million are in danger of falling into their
hands.
The United Nations today defines human trafficking as
"the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of
persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of
abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of
vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve
the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of
exploitation."
Smuggling of persons, again according to the U.N., is
limited to "the procurement of the illegal entry of a person into a state
party of which the person is not a national or a permanent resident, in order
to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit."
Latin America is a source and destination region for human
trafficking, a crime that especially affects the Dominican Republic, Brazil and
Colombia.
The conference host, David Fernández Dávalos, president of
the Ibero-American University of Puebla (UIA-Puebla), said in his inaugural
speech that human trafficking is a modern and particularly malignant version of
slavery, only under better cover and disguises.
On Aug. 31, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged member
states to implement a Global Plan of Action to Combat Trafficking in Persons,
because it is "among the worst human rights violations," constituting
"slavery in the modern age," and preying mostly on "women and
children."
The congress coincides with the International Day Against
the Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking of Women and Children on Thursday,
instituted in 1999 by the World Conference of the Coalition Against Trafficking
in Women (CATW).
Government authorities and non-governmental organisations
(NGOs) in Mexico concur that criminal mafias in this country have been proved
to combine trafficking in persons with drug trafficking, along both the
northern and southern land borders (with the United States and with Guatemala,
respectively).
Most Latin American countries have established laws against
human trafficking, and have ratified the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and
Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, supplementing the
United Nations Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, in force since
Sept. 29, 2003.
In Mexico, a federal Law to Prevent and Punish Trafficking
in Persons has been on the books since 2007, but the government has yet to
create a national programme to implement it, although this is stipulated in the
law itself.
The Puebla Congress, which follows the first such conference
held in Buenos Aires in 2008, is meeting one month after the massacre of 72
undocumented migrants in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas, which
exemplified the connection between drug trafficking and trafficking in persons,
and drew International attention to the dangers faced by migrants in Mexico.
Miguel Ortega, a member of the Democratic Alliance of Civil
Society Organisations, a Mexican umbrella group representing 50 NGOs, told IPS:
"In first place, the problem is invisible, and until the state makes
appropriate changes to the laws, there will be no progress. We want to see
prompt and decisive action."
IOM's Hidalgo said, "our investigations and research
have found that Nicaraguan women are trafficked into Guatemala and Costa Rica,
and Honduran women are trafficked into Guatemala and Mexico."
Women from Colombia and Peru have been forced into
prostitution in the southern Ecuadorean province of El Oro, according to a
two-year investigation by Martha Ruiz, a consultant responsible for updating
and redrafting Ecuador's National Plan against Human Trafficking.
SERPAJ's Chávez said, "We have not been able to get
governments to take responsibility for investigating these crimes. The states
themselves are a factor in generating these crimes."
Out of the 32 Mexican states, eight make no reference to
human trafficking in their state laws. Mario Fuentes, head of CEIDAS, wrote
this week in the newspaper Excélsior that the country is labouring under
"severe backwardness and challenges in this field, because it lacks a
national programme to deal with the problem, as well as a system of statistics."