Mexican cartels move into human trafficking

MEXICO CITY — The Salvadoran single mother was hoping to support her children in the United States. Instead, gunmen from the Zeta drug cartel kidnapped her in Mexico and forced her to cook, clean and endure the rapes of multiple men.

Now the survivor of this terrifying three-month ordeal is a witness for a growing group of legislators, political leaders and advocates who are calling for action against the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation in Mexico.

Mexico has become a major destination for sex traffic, as well as a transit point and supplier of victims to the United States. Drug cartels are moving into the trade, preying on immigrant women, sometimes with the complicity of corrupt regional officials, according to diplomats and activists.

“If narcotics traffickers are caught they go to high-security prisons, but with the trafficking of women, they have found absolute impunity,” said Rosi Orozco, a congresswoman in Mexico and sponsor of a proposed new law against human trafficking.

In Mexico, thousands of women and children are forced into sex traffic every year, Orozco said, most of it involving lucrative prostitution rings.

“It is growing because of poverty, because the cartels have gotten involved, and because no one tells them ‘no,’” said Teresa Ulloa, the regional director of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women and Girls in Latin America and the Caribbean. “We are fighting so that their lives and their bodies are not merchandise.”

“This is an inferno of sexual exploitation for thousands and thousands of women,” President Felipe Calderon told officials in mid-July, after they heard the testimony of a young survivor. “With this new law we will all be obliged to act, and no authority can say it’s not my responsibility or turn a blind eye to the terrible crime of human trafficking.”

Mexico passed a law against human trafficking in 2007.

Hopes for enforcement have been raised by the appointment of Mexico’s first female attorney general, Marisela Morales, who was praised for her efforts against human trafficking earlier this year when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton honored her as an “International Woman of Courage.”

Authorities said federal police mounted a massive raid against human trafficking in bars and hotels in Ciudad Juarez last weekend, arresting hundreds of suspects and recovering a missing 15-year-old girl and four minors who were being used for sexual exploitation.

But convictions are still rare, making the latent attention seem like empty political rhetoric, or a response to international pressure, said Saul Arellano, an analyst at the CEIDAS think tank. He viewed the new proposed law as a much-needed step in the right direction — but said it would have to be matched by a stronger effort to arrest and convict traffickers.

A ‘godfather’ sentenced

U.S. prosecutors have won stiff sentences for Mexican traffickers in recent years, often in cooperation with Mexican authorities. A Mexican “padrote,” or godfather, from a trafficking stronghold in Tlaxcala state, got 40 years in Atlanta in March for forcing 10 girls, one of them 14, into immigrating north for prostitution. If they refused, he beat them.