By Peter Landesman
New York Times - January 25, 2004
The house at 1212 1/2 West Front Street in Plainfield,
N.J., is a conventional midcentury home with slate-gray siding, white trim
and Victorian lines. When I stood in front of it on a breezy day in October,
I could hear the cries of children from the playground of an elementary school
around the corner. American flags fluttered from porches and windows. The
neighborhood is a leafy, middle-class Anytown. The house is set back off
the street, near two convenience stores and a gift shop. On the door of Superior
Supermarket was pasted a sign issued by the Plainfield police: ''Safe
neighborhoods save lives.'' The store's manager, who refused to tell me his
name, said he never noticed anything unusual about the house, and never heard
anything. But David Miranda, the young man behind the counter of Westside
Convenience, told me he saw girls from the house roughly once a week. ''They
came in to buy candy and soda, then went back to the house,'' he said. The
same girls rarely came twice, and they were all very young, Miranda said.
They never asked for anything beyond what they were purchasing; they certainly
never asked for help. Cars drove up to the house all day; nice cars, all
kinds of cars. Dozens of men came and went. ''But no one here knew what was
really going on,'' Miranda said. And no one ever asked.
On a tip, the Plainfield police raided the house in
February 2002, expecting to find illegal aliens working an underground brothel.
What the police found were four girls between the ages of 14 and 17. They
were all Mexican nationals without documentation. But they weren't prostitutes;
they were sex slaves. The distinction is important: these girls weren't working
for profit or a paycheck. They were captives to the traffickers and keepers
who controlled their every move. ''I consider myself hardened,'' Mark J.
Kelly, now a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (the
largest investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security), told me
recently. ''I spent time in the Marine Corps. But seeing some of the stuff
I saw, then heard about, from those girls was a difficult, eye-opening
experience.''
The police found a squalid, land-based equivalent of
a 19th-century slave ship, with rancid, doorless bathrooms; bare, putrid
mattresses; and a stash of penicillin, ''morning after'' pills and misoprostol,
an antiulcer medication that can induce abortion. The girls were pale, exhausted
and malnourished.
It turned out that 1212 1/2 West Front Street was one
of what law-enforcement officials say are dozens of active stash houses and
apartments in the New York metropolitan area -- mirroring hundreds more in
other major cities like Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago -- where under-age
girls and young women from dozens of countries are trafficked and held captive.
Most of them -- whether they started out in Eastern Europe or Latin America
-- are taken to the United States through Mexico. Some of them have been
baited by promises of legitimate jobs and a better life in America; many
have been abducted; others have been bought from or abandoned by their
impoverished families.
Because of the porousness of the U.S.-Mexico border
and the criminal networks that traverse it, the towns and cities along that
border have become the main staging area in an illicit and barbaric industry,
whose ''products'' are women and girls. On both sides of the border, they
are rented out for sex for as little as 15 minutes at a time, dozens of times
a day. Sometimes they are sold outright to other traffickers and sex rings,
victims and experts say. These sex slaves earn no money, there is nothing
voluntary about what they do and if they try to escape they are often beaten
and sometimes killed.
Last September, in a speech before the United Nations
General Assembly, President Bush named sex trafficking as ''a special evil,''
a multibillion-dollar ''underground of brutality and lonely fear,'' a global
scourge alongside the AIDS epidemic. Influenced by a coalition of religious
organizations, the Bush administration has pushed international action on
the global sex trade. The president declared at the U.N. that ''those who
create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished''
and that ''those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen
the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating
a form of slavery.''
Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000
-- the first U.S. law to recognize that people trafficked against their will
are victims of a crime, not illegal aliens -- the U.S. government rates other
countries' records on human trafficking and can apply economic sanctions
on those that aren't making efforts to improve them. Another piece of
legislation, the Protect Act, which Bush signed into law last year, makes
it a crime for any person to enter the U.S., or for any citizen to travel
abroad, for the purpose of sex tourism involving children. The sentences
are severe: up to 30 years' imprisonment for each offense.
The thrust of the president's U.N. speech and the scope
of the laws passed here to address the sex-trafficking epidemic might suggest
that this is a global problem but not particularly an American one. In reality,
little has been done to document sex trafficking in this country. In dozens
of interviews I conducted with former sex slaves, madams, government and
law-enforcement officials and anti-sex-trade activists for more than four
months in Eastern Europe, Mexico and the United States, the details and breadth
of this sordid trade in the U.S. came to light.
In fact, the United States has become a major importer
of sex slaves. Last year, the C.I.A. estimated that between 18,000 and 20,000
people are trafficked annually into the United States. The government has
not studied how many of these are victims of sex traffickers, but Kevin Bales,
president of Free the Slaves, America's largest anti-slavery organization,
says that the number is at least 10,000 a year. John Miller, the State
Department's director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in
Persons, conceded: ''That figure could be low. What we know is that the number
is huge.'' Bales estimates that there are 30,000 to 50,000 sex slaves in
captivity in the United States at any given time. Laura Lederer, a senior
State Department adviser on trafficking, told me, ''We're not finding victims
in the United States because we're not looking for them.''
ABDUCTION
In Eastern European capitals like Kiev and Moscow,
dozens of sex-trafficking rings advertise nanny positions in the United States
in local newspapers; others claim to be scouting for models and actresses.
In Chisinau, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Moldova -- the
poorest country in Europe and the one experts say is most heavily culled
by traffickers for young women -- I saw a billboard with a fresh-faced, smiling
young woman beckoning girls to waitress positions in Paris. But of course
there are no waitress positions and no ''Paris.'' Some of these young women
are actually tricked into paying their own travel expenses -- typically around
$3,000 -- as a down payment on what they expect to be bright, prosperous
futures, only to find themselves kept prisoner in Mexico before being moved
to the United States and sold into sexual bondage there.
The Eastern European trafficking operations, from
entrapment to transport, tend to be well-oiled monoethnic machines. One notorious
Ukrainian ring, which has since been broken up, was run by Tetyana Komisaruk
and Serge Mezheritsky. One of their last transactions, according to Daniel
Saunders, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, took place in late June
2000 at the Hard Rock Cafe in Tijuana. Around dinnertime, a buyer named Gordey
Vinitsky walked in. He was followed shortly after by Komisaruk's husband,
Valery, who led Vinitsky out to the parking lot and to a waiting van. Inside
the van were six Ukrainian women in their late teens and early 20's. They
had been promised jobs as models and baby sitters in the glamorous United
States, and they probably had no idea why they were sitting in a van in a
backwater like Tijuana in the early evening. Vinitsky pointed into the van
at two of the women and said he'd take them for $10,000 each. Valery drove
the young women to a gated villa 20 minutes away in Rosarito, a Mexican
honky-tonk tourist trap in Baja California. They were kept there until July
4, when they were delivered to San Diego by boat and distributed to their
buyers, including Vinitsky, who claimed his two ''purchases.'' The Komisaruks,
Mezheritsky and Vinitsky were caught in May 2001 and are serving long sentences
in U.S. federal prison.
In October, I met Nicole, a young Russian woman who
had been trafficked into Mexico by a different network. ''I wanted to get
out of Moscow, and they told me the Mexican border was like a freeway,''
said Nicole, who is now 25. We were sitting at a cafe on the Sunset Strip
in Los Angeles, and she was telling me the story of her narrow escape from
sex slavery -- she was taken by immigration officers when her traffickers
were trying to smuggle her over the border from Tijuana. She still seemed
fearful of being discovered by the trafficking ring and didn't want even
her initials to appear in print. (Nicole is a name she adopted after coming
to the U.S.)
Two years ago, afraid for her life after her boyfriend
was gunned down in Moscow in an organized-crime-related shootout, she found
herself across a cafe table in Moscow from a man named Alex, who explained
how he could save her by smuggling her into the U.S. Once she agreed, Nicole
said, Alex told her that if she didn't show up at the airport, '''I'll find
you and cut your head off.' Russians do not play around. In Moscow you can
get a bullet in your head just for fun.''
Donna M. Hughes, a professor of women's studies at
the University of Rhode Island and an expert on sex trafficking, says that
prostitution barely existed 12 years ago in the Soviet Union. ''It was suppressed
by political structures. All the women had jobs.'' But in the first years
after the collapse of Soviet Communism, poverty in the former Soviet states
soared. Young women -- many of them college-educated and married -- became
easy believers in Hollywood-generated images of swaying palm trees in L.A.
''A few of them have an idea that prostitution might be involved,'' Hughes
says. ''But their idea of prostitution is 'Pretty Woman,' which is one of
the most popular films in Ukraine and Russia. They're thinking, This may
not be so bad.''
The girls' first contacts are usually with what appear
to be legitimate travel agencies. According to prosecutors, the
Komisaruk/Mezheritsky ring in Ukraine worked with two such agencies in Kiev,
Art Life International and Svit Tours. The helpful agents at Svit and Art
Life explained to the girls that the best way to get into the U.S. was through
Mexico, which they portrayed as a short walk or boat ride from the American
dream. Oblivious and full of hope, the girls get on planes to Europe and
then on to Mexico.
Every day, flights from Paris, London and Amsterdam
arrive at Mexico City's international airport carrying groups of these girls,
sometimes as many as seven at a time, according to two Mexico City immigration
officers I spoke with (and who asked to remain anonymous). One of them told
me that officials at the airport -- who cooperate with Mexico's federal
preventive police (P.F.P.) -- work with the traffickers and ''direct airlines
to park at certain gates. Officials go to the aircraft. They know the seat
numbers. While passengers come off, they take the girls to an office, where
officials will 'process' them.''
Magdalena Carral, Mexico's commissioner of the National
Institute of Migration, the government agency that controls migration issues
at all airports, seaports and land entries into Mexico, told me: ''Everything
happens at the airport. We are giving a big fight to have better control
of the airport. Corruption does not leave tracks, and sometimes we cannot
track it. Six months ago we changed the three main officials at the airport.
But it's a daily fight. These networks are very powerful and
dangerous.''
ut Mexico is not merely a way station en route to the
U.S. for third-country traffickers, like the Eastern European rings. It is
also a vast source of even younger and more cheaply acquired girls for sexual
servitude in the United States. While European traffickers tend to dupe their
victims into boarding one-way flights to Mexico to their own captivity, Mexican
traffickers rely on the charm and brute force of ''Los Lenones,'' tightly
organized associations of pimps, according to Roberto Caballero, an officer
with the P.F.P. Although hundreds of ''popcorn traffickers'' -- individuals
who take control of one or two girls -- work the margins, Caballero said,
at least 15 major trafficking organizations and 120 associated factions tracked
by the P.F.P. operate as wholesalers: collecting human merchandise and taking
orders from safe houses and brothels in the major sex-trafficking hubs in
New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago.
Like the Sicilian Mafia, Los Lenones are based on family
hierarchies, Caballero explained. The father controls the organization and
the money, while the sons and their male cousins hunt, kidnap and entrap
victims. The boys leave school at 12 and are given one or two girls their
age to rape and pimp out to begin their training, which emphasizes the arts
of kidnapping and seduction. Throughout the rural and suburban towns from
southern Mexico to the U.S. border, along what traffickers call the Via Lactea,
or Milky Way, the agents of Los Lenones troll the bus stations and factories
and school dances where under-age girls gather, work and socialize. They
first ply the girls like prospective lovers, buying them meals and desserts,
promising affection and then marriage. Then the men describe rumors they've
heard about America, about the promise of jobs and schools. Sometimes the
girls are easy prey. Most of them already dream of El Norte. But the theater
often ends as soon as the agent has the girl alone, when he beats her, drugs
her or simply forces her into a waiting car.
The majority of Los Lenones -- 80 percent of them,
Caballero says -- are based in Tenancingo, a charmless suburb an hour's drive
south of Mexico City. Before I left Mexico City for Tenancingo in October,
I was warned by Mexican and U.S. officials that the traffickers there are
protected by the local police, and that the town is designed to discourage
outsiders, with mazelike streets and only two closely watched entrances.
The last time the federal police went there to investigate the disappearance
of a local girl, their vehicle was surrounded, and the officers were intimidated
into leaving. I traveled in a bulletproof Suburban with well-armed federales
and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
On the way, we stopped at a gas station, where I met
the parents of a girl from Tenancingo who was reportedly abducted in August
2000. The girl, Suri, is now 20. Her mother told me that there were witnesses
who saw her being forced into a car on the way home from work at a local
factory. No one called the police. Suri's mother recited the names of daughters
of a number of her friends who have also been taken: ''Minerva, Sylvia, Carmen,''
she said in a monotone, as if the list went on and on.
Just two days earlier, her parents heard from Suri
(they call her by her nickname) for the first time since she disappeared.
''She's in Queens, New York,'' the mother told me breathlessly. ''She said
she was being kept in a house watched by Colombians. She said they take her
by car every day to work in a brothel. I was crying on the phone, 'When are
you coming back, when are you coming back?' '' The mother looked at me
helplessly; the father stared blankly into the distance. Then the mother
sobered. ''My daughter said: 'I'm too far away. I don't know when I'm coming
back.''' Before she hung up, Suri told her mother: ''Don't cry. I'll escape
soon. And don't talk to anyone.''
Sex-trafficking victims widely believe that if they
talk, they or someone they love will be killed. And their fear is not unfounded,
since the tentacles of the trafficking rings reach back into the girls'
hometowns, and local law enforcement is often complicit in the sex
trade.
One officer in the P.F.P.'s anti-trafficking division
told me that 10 high-level officials in the state of Sonora share a $200,000
weekly payoff from traffickers, a gargantuan sum of money for Mexico. The
officer told me with a frozen smile that he was powerless to do anything
about it.
''Some officials are not only on the organization's
payroll, they are key players in the organization,'' an official at the U.S.
Embassy in Mexico City told me. ''Corruption is the most important reason
these networks are so successful.''
Nicolas Suarez, the P.F.P.'s coordinator of intelligence,
sounded fatalistic about corruption when I spoke to him in Mexico City in
September. ''We have that cancer, corruption,'' he told me with a shrug.
''But it exists in every country. In every house there is a devil.''
The U.S. Embassy official told me: ''Mexican officials
see sex trafficking as a U.S. problem. If there wasn't such a large demand,
then people -- trafficking victims and migrants alike -- wouldn't be going
up there.''
When I asked Magdalena Carral, the Mexican commissioner
of migration, about these accusations, she said that she didn't know anything
about Los Lenones or sex trafficking in Tenancingo. But she conceded: ''There
is an investigation against some officials accused of cooperating with these
trafficking networks nationwide. Sonora is one of those places.'' She added,
''We are determined not to allow any kind of corruption in this administration,
not the smallest kind.''
Gary Haugen, president of the International Justice
Mission, an organization based in Arlington, Va., that fights sexual exploitation
in South Asia and Southeast Asia, says: ''Sex trafficking isn't a poverty
issue but a law-enforcement issue. You can only carry out this trade at
significant levels with the cooperation of local law enforcement. In the
developing world the police are not seen as a solution for anything. You
don't run to the police; you run from the police.''
BREAKING THE GIRLS IN
Once the Mexican traffickers abduct or seduce the women
and young girls, it's not other men who first indoctrinate them into sexual
slavery but other women. The victims and officials I spoke to all emphasized
this fact as crucial to the trafficking rings' success. ''Women are the
principals,'' Caballero, the Mexican federal preventive police officer, told
me. ''The victims are put under the influence of the mothers, who handle
them and beat them. Then they give the girls to the men to beat and rape
into submission.'' Traffickers understand that because women can more easily
gain the trust of young girls, they can more easily crush them. ''Men are
the customers and controllers, but within most trafficking organizations
themselves, women are the operators,'' Haugen says. ''Women are the ones
who exert violent force and psychological torture.''
This mirrors the tactics of the Eastern European rings.
''Mexican pimps have learned a lot from European traffickers,'' said Claudia,
a former prostitute and madam in her late 40's, whom I met in Tepito, Mexico
City's vast and lethal ghetto. ''The Europeans not only gather girls but
put older women in the same houses,'' she told me. ''They get younger and
older women emotionally attached. They're transported together, survive
together.''
The traffickers' harvest is innocence. Before young
women and girls are taken to the United States, their captors want to obliterate
their sexual inexperience while preserving its appearance. For the Eastern
European girls, this ''preparation'' generally happens in Ensenada, a seaside
tourist town in Baja California, a region in Mexico settled by Russian
immigrants, or Tijuana, where Nicole, the Russian woman I met in Los Angeles,
was taken along with four other girls when she arrived in Mexico. The young
women are typically kept in locked-down, gated villas in groups of 16 to
20. The girls are provided with all-American clothing -- Levi's and baseball
caps. They learn to say, ''U.S. citizen.'' They are also sexually brutalized.
Nicole told me that the day she arrived in Tijuana, three of her traveling
companions were ''tried out'' locally. The education lasts for days and sometimes
weeks.
For the Mexican girls abducted by Los Lenones, the
process of breaking them in often begins on Calle Santo Tomas, a filthy narrow
street in La Merced, a dangerous and raucous ghetto in Mexico City. Santo
Tomas has been a place for low-end prostitution since before Spain's conquest
of Mexico in the 16th century. But beginning in the early 90's, it became
an important training ground for under-age girls and young women on their
way into sexual bondage in the United States. When I first visited Santo
Tomas, in late September, I found 150 young women walking a slow-motion parabola
among 300 or 400 men. It was a balmy night, and the air was heavy with the
smell of barbecue and gasoline. Two dead dogs were splayed over the curb
just beyond where the girls struck casual poses in stilettos and spray-on-tight
neon vinyl and satin or skimpy leopard-patterned outfits. Some of the girls
looked as young as 12. Their faces betrayed no emotion. Many wore pendants
of the grim reaper around their necks and made hissing sounds; this, I was
told, was part of a ritual to ward off bad energy. The men, who were there
to rent or just gaze, didn't speak. From the tables of a shabby cafe midblock,
other men -- also Mexicans, but more neatly dressed -- sat scrutinizing the
girls as at an auction. These were buyers and renters with an interest in
the youngest and best looking. They nodded to the girls they wanted and then
followed them past a guard in a Yankees baseball cap through a tin
doorway.
Inside, the girls braced the men before a statue of
St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, and patted them down for weapons.
Then the girls genuflected to the stone-faced saint and led the men to the
back, grabbing a condom and roll of toilet paper on the way. They pointed
to a block of ice in a tub in lieu of a urinal. Beyond a blue hallway the
air went sour, like old onions; there were 30 stalls curtained off by blue
fabric, every one in use. Fifteen minutes of straightforward intercourse
with the girl's clothes left on cost 50 pesos, or about $4.50. For $4.50
more, the dress was lifted. For another $4.50, the bra would be taken off.
Oral sex was $4.50; ''acrobatic positions'' were $1.80 each. Despite the
dozens of people and the various exertions in this room, there were only
the sounds of zippers and shoes. There was no human noise at all.
Most of the girls on Santo Tomas would have sex with
20 to 30 men a day; they would do this seven days a week usually for weeks
but sometimes for months before they were ''ready'' for the United States.
If they refused, they would be beaten and sometimes killed. They would be
told that if they tried to escape, one of their family members, who usually
had no idea where they were, would be beaten or killed. Working at the
brutalizing pace of 20 men per day, a girl could earn her captors as much
as $2,000 a week. In the U.S., that same girl could bring in perhaps $30,000
per week.
In Europe, girls and women trafficked for the sex trade
gain in value the closer they get to their destinations. According to Iana
Matei, who operates Reaching Out, a Romanian rescue organization, a Romanian
or Moldovan girl can be sold to her first transporter -- who she may or may
not know has taken her captive -- for as little as $60, then for $500 to
the next. Eventually she can be sold for $2,500 to the organization that
will ultimately control and rent her for sex for tens of thousands of dollars
a week. (Though the Moldovan and Romanian organizations typically smuggle
girls to Western Europe and not the United States, they are, Matei says,
closely allied with Russian and Ukrainian networks that do.)
Jonathan M. Winer, deputy assistant secretary of state
for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration, says, ''The
girls are worth a penny or a ruble in their home village, and suddenly they're
worth hundreds and thousands somewhere else.''
CROSSING THE BORDER
In November, I followed by helicopter the 12-foot-high
sheet-metal fence that represents the U.S.-Mexico boundary from Imperial
Beach, Calif., south of San Diego, 14 miles across the gritty warrens and
havoc of Tijuana into the barren hills of Tecate. The fence drops off abruptly
at Colonia Nido de las Aguilas, a dry riverbed that straddles the border.
Four hundred square miles of bone-dry, barren hills stretch out on the U.S.
side. I hovered over the end of the fence with Lester McDaniel, a special
agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On the U.S. side, ''J-e-s-u-s''
was spelled out in rocks 10 feet high across a steep hillside. A 15-foot
white wooden cross rose from the peak. It is here that thousands of girls
and young women -- most of them Mexican and many of them straight from Calle
Santo Tomas -- are taken every year, mostly between January and August, the
dry season. Coyotes -- or smugglers -- subcontracted exclusively by sex
traffickers sometimes trudge the girls up to the cross and let them pray,
then herd them into the hills northward.
A few miles east, we picked up a deeply grooved trail
at the fence and followed it for miles into the hills until it plunged into
a deep isolated ravine called Cottonwood Canyon. A Ukrainian sex-trafficking
ring force-marches young women through here, McDaniel told me. In high heels
and seductive clothing, the young women trek 12 miles to Highway 94, where
panel trucks sit waiting. McDaniel listed the perils: rattlesnakes, dehydration
and hypothermia. He failed to mention the traffickers' bullets should the
women try to escape.
''If a girl tries to run, she's killed and becomes
just one more woman in the desert,'' says Marisa B. Ugarte, director of the
Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition, a San Diego organization that coordinates
rescue efforts for trafficking victims on both sides of the border. ''But
if she keeps going north, she reaches the Gates of Hell.''
One girl who was trafficked back and forth across that
border repeatedly was Andrea. ''Andrea'' is just one name she was given by
her traffickers and clients; she doesn't know her real name. She was born
in the United States and sold or abandoned here -- at about 4 years old,
she says -- by a woman who may have been her mother. (She is now in her early
to mid-20's; she doesn't know for sure.) She says that she spent approximately
the next 12 years as the captive of a sex-trafficking ring that operated
on both sides of the Mexican border. Because of the threat of retribution
from her former captors, who are believed to be still at large, an organization
that rescues and counsels trafficking victims and former prostitutes arranged
for me to meet Andrea in October at a secret location in the United
States.
In a series of excruciating conversations, Andrea explained
to me how the trafficking ring that kept her worked, moving young girls (and
boys too) back and forth over the border, selling nights and weekends with
them mostly to American men. She said that the ring imported -- both through
abduction and outright purchase -- toddlers, children and teenagers into
the U.S. from many countries.
''The border is very busy, lots of stuff moving back
and forth,'' she said. ''Say you needed to get some kids. This guy would
offer a woman a lot of money, and she'd take birth certificates from the
U.S. -- from Puerto Rican children or darker-skinned children -- and then
she would go into Mexico through Tijuana. Then she'd drive to Juarez'' --
across the Mexican border from El Paso, Tex. -- ''and then they'd go shopping.
I was taken with them once. We went to this house that had a goat in the
front yard and came out with a 4-year-old boy.'' She remembers the boy costing
around $500 (she said that many poor parents were told that their children
would go to adoption agencies and on to better lives in America). ''When
we crossed the border at Juarez, all the border guards wanted to see was
a birth certificate for the dark-skinned kids.''
Andrea continued: ''There would be a truck waiting
for us at the Mexico border, and those trucks you don't want to ride in.
Those trucks are closed. They had spots where there would be transfers, the
rest stops and truck stops on the freeways in the U.S. One person would walk
you into the bathroom, and then another person would take you out of the
bathroom and take you to a different vehicle.''
Andrea told me she was transported to Juarez dozens
of times. During one visit, when she was about 7 years old, the trafficker
took her to the Radisson Casa Grande Hotel, where there was a john waiting
in a room. The john was an older American man, and he read Bible passages
to her before and after having sex with her. Andrea described other rooms
she remembered in other hotels in Mexico: the Howard Johnson in Leon, the
Crowne Plaza in Guadalajara. She remembers most of all the ceiling patterns.
''When I was taken to Mexico, I knew things were going to be different,''
she said. The ''customers'' were American businessmen. ''The men who went
there had higher positions, had more to lose if they were caught doing these
things on the other side of the border. I was told my purpose was to keep
these men from abusing their own kids.'' Later she told me: ''The white kids
you could beat but you couldn't mark. But with Mexican kids you could do
whatever you wanted. They're untraceable. You lose nothing by killing
them.''
Then she and the other children and teenagers in this
cell were walked back across the border to El Paso by the traffickers. ''The
border guards talked to you like, 'Did you have fun in Mexico?' And you answered
exactly what you were told, 'Yeah, I had fun.' 'Runners' moved the
harder-to-place kids, the darker or not-quite-as-well-behaved kids, kids
that hadn't been broken yet.''
Another trafficking victim I met, a young woman named
Montserrat, was taken to the United States from Veracruz, Mexico, six years
ago, at age 13. (Montserrat is her nickname.) ''I was going to work in America,''
she told me. ''I wanted to go to school there, have an apartment and a red
Mercedes Benz.'' Montserrat's trafficker, who called himself Alejandro, took
her to Sonora, across the Mexican border from Douglas, Ariz., where she joined
a group of a dozen other teenage girls, all with the same dream of a better
life. They were from Chiapas, Guatemala, Oaxaca -- everywhere, she said.
The group was marched 12 hours through the desert,
just a few of the thousands of Mexicans who bolted for America that night
along the 2,000 miles of border. Cars were waiting at a fixed spot on the
other side. Alejandro directed her to a Nissan and drove her and a few others
to a house she said she thought was in Phoenix, the home of a white American
family. ''It looked like America,'' she told me. ''I ate chicken. The family
ignored me, watched TV. I thought the worst part was behind me.''
IN THE UNITED STATES: HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT
A week after Montserrat was taken across the border,
she said, she and half a dozen other girls were loaded into a windowless
van. ''Alejandro dropped off girls at gas stations as we drove, wherever
there were minimarkets,'' Montserrat told me. At each drop-off there was
somebody waiting. Sometimes a girl would be escorted to the bathroom, never
to return to the van. They drove 24 hours a day. ''As the girls were leaving,
being let out the back, all of them 14 or 15 years old, I felt confident,''
Montserrat said. We were talking in Mexico City, where she has been since
she escaped from her trafficker four years ago. She's now 19, and shy with
her body but direct with her gaze, which is flat and unemotional. ''I didn't
know the real reason they were disappearing,'' she said. ''They were going
to a better life.''
Eventually, only Montserrat and one other girl remained.
Outside, the air had turned frigid, and there was snow on the ground. It
was night when the van stopped at a gas station. A man was waiting. Montserrat's
friend hopped out the back, gleeful. ''She said goodbye, I'll see you tomorrow,''
Montserrat recalled. ''I never saw her again.''
After leaving the gas station, Alejandro drove Montserrat
to an apartment. A couple of weeks later he took her to a Dollarstore. ''He
bought me makeup,'' Montserrat told me. ''He chose a short dress and a halter
top, both black. I asked him why the clothes. He said it was for a party
the owner of the apartment was having. He bought me underwear. Then I started
to worry.'' When they arrived at the apartment, Alejandro left, saying he
was coming back. But another man appeared at the door. ''The man said he'd
already paid and I had to do whatever he said,'' Montserrat said. ''When
he said he already paid, I knew why I was there. I was crushed.''
Montserrat said that she didn't leave that apartment
for the next three months, then for nine months after that, Alejandro regularly
took her in and out of the apartment for appointments with various
johns.
Sex trafficking is one of the few human rights violations
that rely on exposure: victims have to be available, displayed, delivered
and returned. Girls were shuttled in open cars between the Plainfield, N.J.,
stash house and other locations in northern New Jersey like Elizabeth and
Union City. Suri told her mother that she was being driven in a black town
car -- just one of hundreds of black town cars traversing New York City at
any time -- from her stash house in Queens to places where she was forced
to have sex. A Russian ring drove women between various Brooklyn apartments
and strip clubs in New Jersey. Andrea named trading hubs at highway rest
stops in Deming, N.M.; Kingman, Ariz.; Boulder City, Nev.; and Glendale,
Calif. Glendale, Andrea said, was a fork in the road; from there, vehicles
went either north to San Jose or south toward San Diego. The traffickers
drugged them for travel, she said. ''When they fed you, you started falling
asleep.''
In the past several months, I have visited a number
of addresses where trafficked girls and young women have reportedly ended
up: besides the house in Plainfield, N.J., there is a row house on 51st Avenue
in the Corona section of Queens, which has been identified to Mexican federal
preventive police by escaped trafficking victims. There is the apartment
at Barrington Plaza in the tony Westwood section of Los Angeles, one place
that some of the Komisaruk/Mezheritsky ring's trafficking victims ended up,
according to Daniel Saunders, the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted
the ring. And there's a house on Massachusetts Avenue in Vista, Calif., a
San Diego suburb, which was pointed out to me by a San Diego sheriff. These
places all have at least one thing in common: they are camouflaged by their
normal, middle-class surroundings.
''This is not narco-traffic secrecy,'' says Sharon
B. Cohn, director of anti-trafficking operations for the International Justice
Mission. ''These are not people kidnapped and held for ransom, but women
and children sold every single day. If they're hidden, their keepers don't
make money.''
I.J.M.'s president, Gary Haugen, says: ''It's the easiest
kind of crime in the world to spot. Men look for it all day, every
day.''
But border agents and local policemen usually don't
know trafficking when they see it. The operating assumption among American
police departments is that women who sell their bodies do so by choice, and
undocumented foreign women who sell their bodies are not only prostitutes
(that is, voluntary sex workers) but also trespassers on U.S. soil. No Department
of Justice attorney or police vice squad officer I spoke with in Los Angeles
-- one of the country's busiest thoroughfares for forced sex traffic -- considers
sex trafficking in the U.S. a serious problem, or a priority. A teenage girl
arrested on Sunset Strip for solicitation, or a group of Russian sex workers
arrested in a brothel raid in the San Fernando Valley, are automatically
heaped onto a pile of workaday vice arrests.
The U.S. now offers 5,000 visas a year to trafficking
victims to allow them to apply for residency. And there's faint hope among
sex-trafficking experts that the Bush administration's recent proposal on
Mexican immigration, if enacted, could have some positive effect on sex traffic
into the U.S., by sheltering potential witnesses. ''If illegal immigrants
who have information about victims have a chance at legal status in this
country, they might feel secure enough to come forward,'' says John Miller
of the State Department. But ambiguities still dominate on the front lines
-- the borders and the streets of urban America -- where sex trafficking
will always look a lot like prostitution.
''It's not a particularly complicated thing,'' says
Sharon Cohn of International Justice Mission. ''Sex trafficking gets thrown
into issues of intimacy and vice, but it's a major crime. It's purely profit
and pleasure, and greed and lust, and it's right under homicide.''
IMPRISONMENT AND SUBMISSION
The basement, Andrea said, held as many as 16 children
and teenagers of different ethnicities. She remembers that it was underneath
a house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood on the West Coast. Throughout
much of her captivity, this basement was where she was kept when she wasn't
working. ''There was lots of scrawling on the walls,'' she said. ''The other
kids drew stick figures, daisies, teddy bears. This Mexican boy would draw
a house with sunshine. We each had a mat.''
Andrea paused. ''But nothing happens to you in the
basement,'' she continued. ''You just had to worry about when the door
opened.''
She explained: ''They would call you out of the basement,
and you'd get a bath and you'd get a dress, and if your dress was yellow
you were probably going to Disneyland.'' She said they used color coding
to make transactions safer for the traffickers and the clients. ''At Disneyland
there would be people doing drop-offs and pickups for kids. It's a big open
area full of kids, and nobody pays attention to nobody. They would kind of
quietly say, 'Go over to that person,' and you would just slip your hand
into theirs and say, 'I was looking for you, Daddy.' Then that person would
move off with one or two or three of us.''
Her account reminded me -- painfully -- of the legend
of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. In the story, a piper shows up and asks for
1,000 guilders for ridding the town of a plague of rats. Playing his pipe,
he lures all the rats into the River Weser, where they drown. But Hamelin's
mayor refuses to pay him. The piper goes back into the streets and again
starts to play his music. This time ''all the little boys and girls, with
rosy cheeks and flaxen curls, and sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls''
follow him out of town and into the hills. The piper leads the children to
a mountainside, where a portal opens. The children follow him in, the cave
closes and Hamelin's children -- all but one, too lame to keep up -- are
never seen again.
Montserrat said that she was moved around a lot and
often didn't know where she was. She recalled that she was in Detroit for
two months before she realized that she was in ''the city where cars are
made,'' because the door to the apartment Alejandro kept her in was locked
from the outside. She says she was forced to service at least two men a night,
and sometimes more. She watched through the windows as neighborhood children
played outside. Emotionally, she slowly dissolved. Later, Alejandro moved
her to Portland, Ore., where once a week he worked her out of a strip club.
In all that time she had exactly one night off; Alejandro took her to see
''Scary Movie 2.''
All the girls I spoke to said that their captors were
both psychologically and physically abusive. Andrea told me that she and
the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them
off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced
to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to
play roles: the therapist's patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of
sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners -- toddler to age
4, 5 to 12 and teens -- as well as what she called a ''damage group.'' ''In
the damage group they can hit you or do anything they wanted,'' she explained.
''Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it's always violent, everything
was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.
''They'd get you hungry then to train you'' to have
oral sex, she said. ''They'd put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you
had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open
up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy
or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older I'd teach the
younger kids how to float away so things didn't hurt.''
Kevin Bales of Free the Slaves says: ''The physical
path of a person being trafficked includes stages of degradation of a person's
mental state. A victim gets deprived of food, gets hungry, a little dizzy
and sleep-deprived. She begins to break down; she can't think for herself.
Then take away her travel documents, and you've made her stateless. Then
layer on physical violence, and she begins to follow orders. Then add a foreign
culture and language, and she's trapped.''
Then add one more layer: a sex-trafficking victim's
belief that her family is being tracked as collateral for her body. All
sex-trafficking operations, whether Mexican, Ukrainian or Thai, are vast
criminal underworlds with roots and branches that reach back to the countries,
towns and neighborhoods of their victims.
''There's a vast misunderstanding of what coercion
is, of how little it takes to make someone a slave,'' Gary Haugen of
International Justice Mission said. ''The destruction of dignity and sense
of self, these girls' sense of resignation. . . . '' He didn't finish the
sentence.
In Tijuana in November, I met with Mamacita, a Mexican
trafficking-victim-turned-madam, who used to oversee a stash house for sex
slaves in San Diego. Mamacita (who goes by a nickname) was full of regret
and worry. She left San Diego three years ago, but she says that the trafficking
ring, run by three violent Mexican brothers, is still in operation. ''The
girls can't leave,'' Mamacita said. ''They're always being watched. They
lock them into apartments. The fear is unbelievable. They can't talk to anyone.
They are always hungry, pale, always shaking and cold. But they never complain.
If they do, they'll be beaten or killed.''
In Vista, Calif., I followed a pickup truck driven
by a San Diego sheriff's deputy named Rick Castro. We wound past a tidy suburban
downtown, a supermall and the usual hometown franchises. We stopped alongside
the San Luis Rey River, across the street from a Baptist church, a strawberry
farm and a municipal ballfield.
A neat subdivision and cycling path ran along the opposite
bank. The San Luis Rey was mostly dry, filled now with an impenetrable jungle
of 15-foot-high bamboolike reeds. As Castro and I started down a well-worn
path into the thicket, he told me about the time he first heard about this
place, in October 2001. A local health care worker had heard rumors about
Mexican immigrants using the reeds for sex and came down to offer condoms
and advice. She found more than 400 men and 50 young women between 12 and
15 dressed in tight clothing and high heels. There was a separate group of
a dozen girls no more than 11 or 12 wearing white communion dresses. ''The
girls huddled in a circle for protection,'' Castro told me, ''and had big
eyes like terrified deer.''
I followed Castro into the riverbed, and only 50 yards
from the road we found a confounding warren of more than 30 roomlike caves
carved into the reeds. It was a sunny morning, but the light in there was
refracted, dreary and basementlike. The ground in each was a squalid nest
of mud, tamped leaves, condom wrappers, clumps of toilet paper and magazines.
Soiled underwear was strewn here and there, plastic garbage bags jury-rigged
through the reeds in lieu of walls. One of the caves' inhabitants had hung
old CD's on the tips of branches, like Christmas ornaments. It looked vaguely
like a recent massacre site. It was 8 in the morning, but the girls could
begin arriving any minute. Castro told me how it works: the girls are dropped
off at the ballfield, then herded through a drainage sluice under the road
into the riverbed. Vans shuttle the men from a 7-Eleven a mile away. The
girls are forced to turn 15 tricks in five hours in the mud. The johns pay
$15 and get 10 minutes. It is in nearly every respect a perfect extension
of Calle Santo Tomas in Mexico City. Except that this is what some of those
girls are training for.
If anything, the women I talked to said that the sex
in the U.S. is even rougher than what the girls face on Calle Santo Tomas.
Rosario, a woman I met in Mexico City, who had been trafficked to New York
and held captive for a number of years, said: ''In America we had 'special
jobs.' Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous,
harder.'' She said that she believed younger foreign girls were in demand
in the U.S. because of an increased appetite for more aggressive, dangerous
sex. Traffickers need younger and younger girls, she suggested, simply because
they are more pliable. In Eastern Europe, too, the typical age of sex-trafficking
victims is plummeting; according to Matei of Reaching Out, while most girls
used to be in their late teens and 20's, 13-year-olds are now far from
unusual.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the Cyber
Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., are finding that when it comes to sex, what
was once considered abnormal is now the norm. They are tracking a clear spike
in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. ''We've become
desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit,'' says
I.C.E. Special Agent Perry Woo. Cybernetworks like KaZaA and Morpheus / through
which you can download and trade images and videos -- have become the Mexican
border of virtual sexual exploitation. I had heard of one Web site that
supposedly offered sex slaves for purchase to individuals. The I.C.E. agents
hadn't heard of it. Special Agent Don Daufenbach, I.C.E.'s manager for undercover
operations, brought it up on a screen. A hush came over the room as the agents
leaned forward, clearly disturbed. ''That sure looks like the real thing,''
Daufenbach said. There were streams of Web pages of thumbnail images of young
women of every ethnicity in obvious distress, bound, gagged, contorted. The
agents in the room pointed out probable injuries from torture. Cyberauctions
for some of the women were in progress; one had exceeded $300,000. ''With
new Internet technology,'' Woo said, ''pornography is becoming more pervasive.
With Web cams we're seeing more live molestation of children.'' One of I.C.E.'s
recent successes, Operation Hamlet, broke up a ring of adults who traded
images and videos of themselves forcing sex on their own young children.
But the supply of cheap girls and young women to feed
the global appetite appears to be limitless. And it's possible that the crimes
committed against them in the U.S. cut deeper than elsewhere, precisely because
so many of them are snared by the glittery promise of an America that turns
out to be not their salvation but their place of destruction.
ENDGAME
Typically, a young trafficking victim in the U.S. lasts
in the system for two to four years. After that, Bales says: ''She may be
killed in the brothel. She may be dumped and deported. Probably least likely
is that she will take part in the prosecution of the people that enslaved
her.''
Who can expect a young woman trafficked into the U.S.,
trapped in a foreign culture, perhaps unable to speak English, physically
and emotionally abused and perhaps drug-addicted, to ask for help from a
police officer, who more likely than not will look at her as a criminal and
an illegal alien? Even Andrea, who was born in the United States and spoke
English, says she never thought of escaping, ''because what's out there?
What's out there was scarier. We had customers who were police, so you were
not going to go talk to a cop. We had this customer from Nevada who was a
child psychologist, so you're not going to go talk to a social worker. So
who are you going to talk to?''
And if the girls are lucky enough to escape, there's
often nowhere for them to go. ''The families don't want them back,'' Sister
Veronica, a nun who helps run a rescue mission for trafficked prostitutes
in an old church in Mexico City, told me. ''They're shunned.''
When I first met her, Andrea told me: ''We're way too
damaged to give back. A lot of these children never wanted to see their parents
again after a while, because what do you tell your parents? What are you
going to say? You're no good.''
Peter Landesman is a contributing writer for the
magazine. He last wrote about illegal weapons trafficking.
No comments:
Post a Comment