Modern-Day Sexual Slavery in Mexico: A Reformed Pimp Tells His Story Jo Tuckman - The Guardian
go to original February 4, 2014

The Women of Juarez is a short documentary on the women behind the "job." Music by Mike Ator (luis saenz)

MEXICO CITY - Pedro's life as a sex trafficker began when he offered a sweet to a pretty young domestic servant out on a Sunday stroll in a provincial city in central Mexico. "Once I got her laughing, I knew I was in with a chance," he recalls. "Then I got the sun, the moon and the stars down from the sky for her."

A week later he was roasting a pig at the home of her poverty-stricken family to celebrate their non-existent forthcoming nuptials. Within a month she was working an alley in a northern border city to raise money to help him pay off an imaginary debt. "The merchandise," he says, using the jargon of the Mexican sex-trafficking business, "had been activated."

After many years of largely ignoring the problem, federal deputies approved a people-trafficking law in 2012 that was supposed to spur a nationwide crackdown. So far, however, only Mexico City has responded with any gusto, ratcheting up the number of raids in the name of rescuing victims and arresting traffickers.

"Sexual exploitation is a modern form of slavery," says Juana Camila Bautista, the head of a special prosecutor's office set up last May to focus on the issue. "We are doing battle against this horror."

But the new official concern about sex trafficking in the capital has sparked controversy. Some say the raids have left many important traffickers untouched. Instead the authorities have been rounding up prostitutes and accusing them of complicity.

Read the rest at The Guardian

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