Increase of Trafficking of Indigenous Girls in Honduras
Increase of Trafficking of Indigenous Girls in Honduras
The majority of the minors have between 12 to 15 years of age
09.22.2011
From El Heraldo, a Honduran newspaper, translated by Gillian
Tegucigalpa, Honduras
The trafficking of indigenous girls in Honduras to Mexico has increased, announced Mexican organizations that fight child sexual exploitation.
The members of the organization Enlace, Comunicación and Capacitación, Ana Elena Barrios, assured that the majority of the minors have between 12 to 15 years of age and are exploited in the city of Chiapas, bordering with Tapachula.
Barrios warned that this is “one of the largest points of prostitution of the world.” She opines that separate from Honduras, the trafficking of indigenous girls from Guatemala and El Salvador to Mexico has equally increased.
The co-author of this investigation “South beginning of a road,” that deals with the rights of the Central American migrant, revealed that there are new routes, more isolated, to introduce Central Americans through the zone of Mesilla, of the municipal Frontier of Comapala, Chiapas.
This rising phenomenon is ignored in Mexico for racial and gender discrimination, signaled America Martinez, of the Asociación para el Desarrollo Integral (APADI) [Association for the Integral Development], that does campaigns of sexual health for sex workers and against trafficking.
How trafficking functions
The buyers can be men of the community that migrated and are now “enganchadores” [one who decoys], or unknown men who get the parents or local authorities and go after girls around eight years of age, the investigations reveal.
“He that sexually searches for these girls is obviously much more violent, because it is an absolute expression of power, where the girls do not have an option to defend themselves, nor even use a condom,” lamented America Martinez.
The other method of the “enganchadores” is that to win the love of the children and promise to marry them, and one more is to offer employment outside of the community.
These children end up in brothels in the region, are labor slaves, or are trafficked for their organs, for which they are also brought to other Mexican states or even the United States, indicate the studies.
Teresa Ulloa, head of the Coalición Regional Contra el Tráfico de Mujeres y Niñas en América Latina y el Caribe (CATW in the English acronym [Coalition Against Trafficking in Women]), observes that the increase of this crime also is due to “the arrival of organized crime to the indigenous communities” and the failed strategy of the State against narco-trafficking.
In her opinion the drug trafficker recently discovered in the girls in general a potential to exploit “because they do not pay attention, and already began to recruit hawks, hired assassins…or sex slaves, and this is trafficking, because in the end they are using the girls to protect their business.”
Equally, they put the responsibility of increase of child trafficking to the strategy of the State against the drug traffickers: “generally where they move the joint operation there is more trafficking in this place, more rapes of women, more prostitution, and more femicides.”
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