For thousands of adults, crossing the U.S.Mexico border every day means nothing more
than a safe passage to go to work or visit family.
But for thousands of children annually, crossing
into the U.S. means an induction into an
unimaginable nightmare. It is no secret that the
San Diego-Tijuana border is the busiest
international border in the world. Amidst all of
its day-to-day traffic, the trafficking of
children
for
commercial
sexual
exploitation runs rampant on both sides.
involved twenty-eight major cities in
Mexico, the U.S. and Canada.
According
to
the
report,
approximately 300,000 children in the
U.S. are at risk of commercial sexual
exploitation. Some organizations have
estimated this number is as high as
800,000 based on a Congressional
In 2001, the University of
Pennsylvania, School of Social Work,
released a study called the “The
Commercial Sexual Exploitation of
Children (CSEC).” The three-year study
1
Testimony in 2005. The CSEC study
names America’s Finest as an
international trafficking gateway city
used to traffic foreign children into the
U.S. Additionally, the United Nations
has listed Mexico as the number one
exporter of exploited children into North
America. Experts believe that like guns
and drugs are trafficked through the San
Diego-Tijuana border, so are children.
San Diego’s proximity to the Mexican
border, its coastal, tourist appeal as well
as its military bases are believed to be
some reasons for the high incidence of
CSEC.
confirm that local street gangs like
“Pimping Hoes Daily (PHD)” coerce
children into prostitution on the Internet,
escort agencies and on the streets.
Child exploitation is not new in
San Diego. In the early nineties,
hundreds of trans-border boys from
Mexico and Central America, some as
young as ten, crossed through the San
Diego-Tijuana border to be lured by
local gangs into child prostitution in
Balboa Park and downtown San Diego.
Some children reported that they
engaged in “survival sex” just to have a
warm meal or a place to sleep for the
night. According to the San Diego Youth
& Community Services (SDYCS) shelter
staff, young boys reported that
pedophiles, which the kids called
“chenchos” or “uncles,” would claim to
“adopt” them and promised to take care
of them in exchange for sexual favors.
American girls as young as 12 have been
prostituted on National City Boulevard and El
Cajon Boulevard in San Diego.
The San Diego County Probation
Department reported that up to 166
female juveniles were detained for
prostitution between fiscal years 20042005.
In 2003, the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) identified San Diego
as a “High Intensity Child Prostitution
Area (HICPA).” At any given time, girls
as young as 13 can be seen walking
down the City of San Diego’s El Cajon
Boulevard or listed on websites like “My
Space” or “Craig’s List.”
An escort agency dismantled by San Diego
authorities where young girls as young as 15
were coerced into prostitution—pictures are
courtesy of the San Diego County District
Attorney’s Office.
Local authorities have also
uncovered “reverse trafficking” cases
where U.S. street gangs like the 18
Street have transported American girls to
Cases like the People v. Cory
Smith and the People v. Dante Dears,
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Tijuana’s red-light district to exploit
them.
sex tourists choose Mexico as their
preferred place of destination.
Homeless, runaway and thrownaway children in San Diego have
reported to the SDYCS shelter staff that
they have been propositioned to travel to
major cities like Los Angeles, Phoenix
and Las Vegas to engage in prostitution
or pornography.
According to members of the
“Against Child Trafficking & Teen
Prostitution In Our Neighborhoods”
(ACTION) Network, a San Diego
coalition of over 40 agencies fighting
child exploitation, San Diego is one of
several cities included in the “pipeline”
wherein children are trafficked across
state lines throughout the U.S. This
phenomenon, which violates the Mann
Act, is known as internal or domestic
trafficking and is also extensive.
More tourists from the U.S. travel abroad to
have sex with children than from any other
country in the world.
Organized child sex tourism is
prevalent in Mexico, especially in highly
dense populated areas or in regions with
high concentrations of tourism according
to ECPAT, which stands for “End Child
Prostitution, Child Pornography and
Trafficking of Children for sexual
purposes.”
In late 2005, a 15-year-old
African American girl came to an
SDYCS youth shelter terrified. Only a
couple of days before, she had been
threatened by a local street gang. The
gang members took her to a house in
Southeast San Diego where they laid out
assault rifles and handguns on a kitchen
table and told her that if she refused to
leave with them to Las Vegas to
prostitute herself, they would kill her
grandmother and her younger sister.
The Tijuana-San Diego border is the busiest
international border in the world.
In response to a growing number
of Americans traveling to Mexico and
other countries to sexually exploit
children, President Bush signed into law
the PROTECT Act (2003). Among other
protections for children in the U.S., this
law makes it illegal for a U.S. citizen or
resident to travel abroad to have sex with
a minor. The new law eliminates the
need to prove that the alleged perpetrator
The exploitation of children is
also pervasive on Mexico’s side of the
border. International children’s rights
groups report that tens of thousands of
Americans travel abroad every year to
pay for sex with children. Americans
comprise the largest number of sex
tourists in the world. Thousands of these
3
traveled abroad with the intent to
sexually abuse children.
Around the world, human
trafficking is becoming more appealing
to traffickers because many countries
either have no laws against trafficking or
fail to enforce their existing laws. In the
U.S., sex trafficking is especially
appealing
to
organized
criminal
syndicates because there is a large,
lucrative sex industry fueled by a strong
demand for paid sex.
The PROTECT Act, which
stands for Prosecutorial Remedies and
Other Tools to End the Exploitation of
Children Today Act, increases penalties
for perpetrators to up to thirty years in
prison if convicted. It also eliminates the
statutes of limitations regarding sex
crimes committed against children
domestically and abroad.
While Mexico is primarily a
country of transit, the U.S. is mainly a
country of destination that receives
victims from over forty-nine countries
around the world. Domestically, cases
have been investigated in at least fortyeight states.
Human trafficking is also a
global phenomenon that transcends other
international borders. The U.S. State
Department estimates that each year
600,000 to 800,000 people, primarily
women and children, are trafficked
across world borders. Approximately
17,500 of these victims are brought into
the U.S. through our borders every year.
Victims are abducted or lured by
promises of a better life and are forced
or coerced to work in slave-like
conditions in commercial sex, domestic
servitude or other forms of labor or
service.
Trafficking has also become
appealing
to
organized
criminal
networks because they have learned that
a child who is forced to work at a brothel
can be used over and over making it
relatively easy for a brothel to earn tens
of thousands of dollars a year with only
a few child prostitutes. Compared to the
sale of drugs or weapons, which after
consumption or a point of sale leaves no
opportunity for further profit—the
bottom line is clear.
To date, drug trafficking remains
the largest form of organized crime in
the world while the illegal arms trade
follows in second place. Only a couple
of years ago, human trafficking ranked
third place as the largest form of
organized crime. According to the U.S.
Department of Justice, trafficking in
persons is now tied in second place with
the sale of illegal arms making it the
fastest growing form of organized crime
in the world. Some anti-trafficking
experts predict that based on this
exponential growth, within ten years, the
profits generated from human trafficking
will have caught up to those generated
by the sale of illegal drugs.
Experts often characterize this
egregious crime that threatens freedom
and violates the core of human rights as
a new form of slavery. “Human
trafficking is modern day slavery. It is
slavery in the 21st Century,” said Austin
Fitzpatrick, an analyst with Free the
Slaves, an internationally recognized
human rights organization based in
Washington D.C. that aims to abolish
slavery around the world. “Trafficking
into slavery is a profound violation of
the dignity and basic rights of a fellow
human being,” said Dr. Russell Dehnel,
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funds and more assistance to victims,”
Tenorio said. “Because many of our
victims are in the U.S. illegally, and
afraid to come to federal authorities for
help, we can now provide legal avenues
to allow them to stay and receive the
assistance they need.”
Executive Director of the Center for
Social Advocacy, and co-founder of the
San Diego Human Trafficking Trainers
Bureau.
To combat trafficking, the
Victims of Trafficking law was passed
virtually unanimously by both houses of
Congress and was signed into law by
President Bill Clinton on October 28th,
2000. “Victims are protected under the
Victims of Trafficking and Violence
Protection Act of 2000,” said Lou de
Baca, a federal prosecutor with the U.S.
Department of Justice. “The new
trafficking law is the first comprehensive
piece of U.S. legislation to address
trafficking in persons. This law is
groundbreaking
because
it
decriminalizes victims. It allows law
enforcement to view them as victims and
not as criminals—even though they may
be in the U.S. illegally or may engage in
illegal activity such as prostitution,” said
de Baca. The new law seeks to go after
the real perpetrator, which is the
trafficker and not the illegal immigrant
according to de Baca.
The trafficking law also provides
potential immigration relief to victims
through mechanisms such as continued
presence or the T-Visa, a special nonimmigrant visa for victims of trafficking.
However, unless victims are
minors under 18, they are required to
cooperate with the Department of Justice
in order to qualify for the T-Visa or
continued presence. The T-Visa is good
for up to three years. Victims can adjust
their status to permanent legal status
after three years in accordance to
immigration laws and regulations. Once
adult victims apply for a bona-fide TVisa or are granted continued presence
by the Citizenship and Immigration
Services (CIS), they become certifiable.
The
Office
of
Refugee
Resettlement, an office of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human
Services, in consultation with the U.S.
Attorney General, is authorized to certify
victims of trafficking. Once certified as a
victim of a severe form of trafficking in
persons, which is the technical legal
term, a victim is eligible for social
benefits to the same extent as a refugee.
Children do not need to cooperate with
law enforcement to be eligible for social
benefits or immigration relief. Criminal
elements such as force, fraud or coercion
are not necessary to trigger the effects of
the trafficking law when a crime
involves a minor under 18 who has been
induced to commit a commercial sex act.
Before the trafficking law was
passed, prosecutors did not have the
necessary tools to crack down on
trafficking rings. Plus victims did not
receive the proper care that they needed
to recover from their trauma. “The
Victims of Trafficking and Violence
Protection Act of 2000 was passed in
response to the need of prosecutors to
have more tools against criminals and
for the protection of victims,” said
Christopher Tenorio, Assistant U.S.
Attorney and Civil Rights Coordinator
for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in San
Diego. “The Act made it easier to prove
some trafficking offenses involving
juvenile victims and gave us access to
5
“I let hundreds of women slip through
my radar. I’m the first to admit that I
was completely ignorant about human
trafficking.”
Rick Castro, a deputy with the
San Diego County Sheriff’s Department
and chair of the newly funded San Diego
Region Task Force on Human
Trafficking, has been responsible for
dozens of raids in North County San
Diego since 1996. His boss gave him a
clear mandate: “end the stench of
prostitution in the city of Vista!” Since
then Castro has raided dozens of brothels
and migrant “sex camps” in northern San
Diego County.
Castro told the story of a sixteenyear-old girl who was nearly beaten to
death by Tomás Salazar-Juarez, one of
the brothers running the prostitution ring
in Vista. “She was brutally beaten for
attempting to escape a life of forced
prostitution,” said Castro.
He has literally interviewed
hundreds of women as a result of these
arrests.
One of the girls after changing her clothes and
now dressed in high heels and mini skirt. She’s
carrying a blanket and walking with a customer
to perform a sex act in broad day light.
A picture of the strawberry fields in Vista, CA
taken by Channel 4, Los Angeles. It shows a
sex trafficker taking young girls to have sex
with customers. The girls were forced to use
backpacks to hide their provocative clothing
and to make the community think that they
were students on their way home from school.
The sixteen-year-old told the
deputies that Salazar forced her into a
room and duct-taped her hands and feet.
Salazar then grabbed a wire clothes
hanger from a closet, wrapped it tightly
around his hand and forced the other
young girls to watch him beat her for
two hours. “She was bruised so bad that
it looked like she had been cut with a
filet knife. He then told the rest of the
girls ‘this is what will happen to anyone
else that tries to escape,’” said Castro.
However, the same theme
commonly stood out as Castro
conducted these interviews. “None of the
detained women showed signs that they
were being held against their will, said
Castro.” The women would not disclose
any type of force, fraud or coercion.
Castro, who thought that he was doing a
service to his community by putting
these women behind bars and eventually
turning them over to the former INS for
deportation, never imagined that any of
them were being forced into prostitution.
Neighbors called the police
thinking that it was a domestic violence
situation. Unfortunately, Salazar got
away before the deputies arrived at the
crime scene.
6
This fifteen-year-old girl, whose
baby was kidnapped prior to crossing the
border, and used as security to force her
to sell her body to up to thirty men per
day for nearly six months, helped him
realize that the same tragedy that was
forced upon her, was being forced upon
the rest of the women too. “This young
girl, Reina, helped me connect the dots,”
said Castro. “She helped me put all of
the missing pieces together. After that
interview, I knew that we were looking
at some form of sex slavery.”
This picture is courtesy of the San Diego
County Sheriff’s Department.
The deputies took a report and
pictures of the sixteen-year-old girl. This
report was a major milestone for the
Sheriff’s Office because it was the first
time that any of the so-called prostitutes
alleged abuse from their pimps. “This
girl’s testimony later inspired other
young women to come forward,” said
Castro.
These men are the problem, the sex customers
waiting for their turn to rape women &
children. Reina was raped up to 30 times per
day for up to 6 months by men like these.
Courtesy of NBC Channel 4, Los Angeles.
This picture is courtesy of the San Diego
Sheriff’s Department
However, Castro still didn’t
understand what he was up against. He
still believed that he was helping to rid
the city of prostitution. “I remember
arriving at the station one morning. A
deputy responded to what he believed
was a domestic violence call the night
before. He asked me to take a look at his
report.” Castro read that it involved a
fifteen-year-old Hispanic girl that was
being housed at the Polinsky Children’s
Center. He then rushed to Polinsky. “The
young girl told me everything that
happened to her. She was a victim of
something that I knew was ugly—I just
didn’t know what to call it,” said Castro.
Reina is just one out of the tens
of thousands of girls around the world
that are trafficked. Although difficult to
fathom, Reina is actually one of the
fortunate ones since she was able to
escape the terror of her captors. After
nearly six months of continual rapes and
beatings, she gathered the courage to run
for her life. Realizing that she may never
see her baby again, she fled from her
captors the minute she saw a window of
opportunity. She stood half-naked and
crying at the doorsteps of nearby
neighbors. The neighbors called the
police and the deputies transported her to
7
Polinsky where Castro reached out to
her.
To help Reina, Castro teamed up
with a social service provider with the
Escondido Youth Empowerment (EYE).
Reina was assigned a legal attorney that
worked closely with the Mexican
Consulate. After six months of residing
in an undisclosed shelter, Reina was
referred to San Diego Youth and
Community Services (SDYCS).
hearing her say how she regretted
allowing for this so-called boyfriend of
hers to manipulate her into legally
registering her son in Mexico under his
name. She allowed this while they
“dated” and then learned the hard way
that this man also had legal rights to her
baby even though he was not the
biological father. I knew that she was
hurting and I could feel that the pain and
guilt that Reina suffered was severe as
she exhausted herself in tears in my
office many nights. Her pain became so
unbearable that she ran away from the
shelter one day, got drunk and left the
country. She ended up in Tijuana and
called Lilia Velasquez, her attorney.
SDYCS, in coordination with
other service providers, helped Reina
with crisis intervention, emergency
shelter, interpretation services, mental
health counseling, medical services, case
management, independent living skills
training, advocacy and transportation
and referrals to other services. It took a
coalition of nearly seventeen agencies
from Mexico and the U.S. to help one
survivor of trafficking.
Reina was relieved to have
escaped her prison, but her baby was still
in the merciless hands of the traffickers.
She last saw her baby when he was four
months old. She was depressed and
angry with herself for believing in the
man that “romanced” and deceived her
into releasing her baby to him. “I know
that he’s crying. I can hear him crying.
These men are ruthless, they could care
less if he’s hungry or if he has a diaper
rash.”
Reina’s case had touched the
very core of our beings – all of us – that
formed a coalition of seventeen agencies
working together to help her. Velasquez
was working closely with the Mexican
Consulate to try and recover Reina’s
baby. Miraculously, we got word that the
kidnappers delivered Reina’s baby to
DIF, the social services department in
Mexico. The U.S. government was
pressuring one of the detained traffickers
until he called his accomplices in
Mexico and ordered them to give up
Reina’s baby to the Mexican Authorities.
It worked. The kidnappers apparently
feared getting caught by Mexican
authorities and extradited to the U.S. to
serve life in prison.
I had the distinct honor of
meeting with Reina many times. Once
she arrived at SDYCS, I became her
assigned case manager. This was my
first encounter with a survivor of human
trafficking and the experience changed
my life forever. I would sometimes
spend hours with Reina while she
grieved over her baby. I remember
However, Reina had left the
country and it was going to take another
miracle to bring her back. Velasquez had
to move heaven and earth to make
arrangements with the immigration
authorities and the Department of Justice
to parole Reina back into the U.S. so that
she could be reunited with her baby.
Velasquez called me and asked me if I
8
could go to Tijuana to try to find Reina.
It was like looking for a needle in a
haystack. I was to go to La Zona Norte,
Tijuana’s red-light district, where we
suspected that she might be and
convince her to come back to the U.S.
kisses and pulled on the shirts of wouldbe customers. “Vamos al cuarto,” which
means, “Let’s go to the room,” is what
they said to dozens of men that shopped
for sex.
It was heart wrenching to see
how young some of the girls at la Zona
were. A local police office was stationed
at the center of Avenida Constitución
and Callejón Cuahuíla, two main streets
in the seedy red-light district.
Walking down the sordid street
of Avenida Constitución in La Zona
Norte was an eye opening experience
that I won’t soon forget. Bar owners
auctioned young girls as if they were
live stock saying “Check it out, fresh
meat inside…thirteen and fourteen-yearold girls.” It sent a chill up my spine.
They shouted this as though the men
walked by a buffet food line. These
opportunistic bar owners saw these girls
as human commodities—mere body
parts for sale.
Young girls turning their backs in shame to
avoid the camera. Invisible Chains Report,
CBS Channel 4.
I was taken aback to see girls that
looked like they were no more than
twelve years old yet selling themselves
across the street from the police station.
Police officers walked by as though
these girls were invisible. Merchant
women sold provocative clothing to the
young girls. Taco stands, local stores,
shoeshine men and taxi drivers all
benefited economically at the children’s
expense.
El Burro Bar on Callejón Cuahuíla at
Tijuana’s red-light district.
In high heels and flamboyant,
skimpy clothes, hundreds of girls lined
themselves across several blocks of what
appeared to be a fast food chain of
exploited children. They hid their childlike faces behind red lipstick and cheap
make-up to give the illusion that they
were older. The locals call them las
paraditas (the girls that stand) because
they stand in front of the street bars and
hotel buildings for long hours waiting
for business. They threw flirtatious
An entire community turned a
blind eye to the children’s exploitation
because of the huge profits generated by
the sex tourism industry.
9
“Balboa Park kids” that prostituted
herself during the early nineties.
Many girls are terrified that someone from
their home town might recognize them.
Invisible Chains report, CBS Channel 4.
This is where the supply meets the demand.
Tijuana’s second most popular destination for
locals and sex tourists from North America,
Asia and Europe.
I especially looked for Reina at
La Zona Norte’s two main bars: the
Chicago Club and the Adelita Bar.
According to the taxistas, these are the
two “best” bars in Tijuana for
prostitution.
Now she was selling her body at
La Zona Norte—as have other American
kids—a trend that is becoming more
obvious at La Zona according to border
liaison Detective James Dickinson from
the San Diego Police Department’s
Criminal Intelligence Unit.
I was shocked to see our former
client selling herself at La Zona. I asked
her if she was working on her own.
Although she was always particularly
independent, she admitted to me that she
had a pimp. She told me that most young
girls that are at La Zona have pimps or
“padrotes.” I asked her if she knew of
girls that were recruited and forced to
work in prostitution at the red-light
district. “You hear about that all the
time,” she said, “but you just choose to
ignore it. Most of the girls are here not
because they want to but because they
need money to pay the bills.”
Tijuana’s shameful “meet market” where
exploitation rivals the red-light districts in
Bangkok, Thailand.
“The Chicago and the Adelita is
where you can get the most beautiful
girls. They’ll let you do anything you
want to them for sixty dollars plus
eleven for the room,” said one taxi driver
with a heavy Mexican accent.
I asked her if she knew about any
incidents where girls have tried to leave
prostitution and ended up harmed or
threatened. “A few weeks ago I heard
that a young girl, she was thirteen or
fourteen, what do I know, she was
While I walked up the grimy
Avenida Constitución, on the outskirts of
the red-light district, I heard a female
voice shout “Manolo!” It was a former
client of mine. She was one of the
10
beaten to death. We were told that it was
a john that killed her,” she said,
“Sometimes you do hear of girls that are
forced to work here. But those are only
the young and naïve girls. They’re the
ones that always get preyed on.”
Ironically, our conversation was
interrupted because she didn’t want her
pimp to see her talking to me too long.
Her statement only confirmed what I and
other trafficking specialists believe—
that force, fraud and coercion, especially
with young girls, does happen at
Tijuana’s red-light district—and too
often underneath the noses of an
indifferent community.
A look inside the sex industry.
Every year, thousands of
vulnerable, young girls are lured and
transported to places like La Zona to
prostitute themselves according to Stolen
Childhood, a recent child exploitation
study conducted in several major cities
in Mexico. The report confirmed that
each year, an estimated 16,000 Mexican
and Central American children fall prey
to organized child sex tourism in cities
of Mexico. Most of them are recruited or
kidnapped from poor, rural regions such
as Tenancingo, which is where Reina
was recruited. Tenancingo is located in
Tlaxcala, Mexico where according to
federal Mexican authorities exists a
breeding ground for the trafficking of
young girls into prostitution.
Aside from what local street
pimps do to coerce young girls into
prostitution at La Zona, it seems naïve to
believe that organized criminal networks
are not involved in organized child sex
tourism. Organized child sex tourism is,
for example, the systematic recruitment
of children to work in pornography,
brothels, bars, massage parlors, strip
clubs and the streets of La Zona Norte—
not to mention the escort agencies that
exist throughout Tijuana and can easily
be accessed by the click of a mouse.
The fact that there are websites
and American adult magazines that
blatantly advertise sex tours to Tijuana is
appalling. In these tours sex customers
can go on line and purchase a 3-4,000
dollar, 12-day sex package and can
enjoy “all the sex you can have,”
including a limousine ride from the San
Diego airport to Rosarito or Ensenada.
Although many of these businesses
advertise that they do not supply
children, it is a known fact that child
exploitation happens in many of these
establishments when the price is right.
According to Mexican Journalist
Karen Trejo, of La Opinion Digital,
since 1980, women and children have
been victims of a Mexican criminal
organization called Los Romanes. This
ruthless sex trafficking ring was named
after their leader, Roman.
In November 28th, 2005, Trejo
reported that locals from Tlaxcala
claimed that Los Romanes were a huge
trafficking ring and a true mafia. They
maintained that they knew at least thirty
sex traffickers that had kidnapped or
11
young girls they like to call “fresh
meat.”
lured 150 young females to Tijuana,
Mexico as well as into cities in the U.S.
like New York, Los Angeles and San
Diego. These types of reports concur
with what the locals from Tijuana are
saying. “You want me to be honest with
you,” said one Tijuana taxi driver, “it’s
‘Los Lenones’ [sex traffickers] that are
bringing in all the young girls to La
Zona.” I asked him if Los Lenones lured
girls through false promises of a better
life and he said, “of course they do…
that’s what they do and they are good at
it.” Lenones is the actual title used in
Mexico for those who traffic in humans.
The owners and operators of the
sex industry know that their customers
have an affinity for young girls and that
they are willing to pay hundreds and
sometimes thousands of dollars when
children are especially young. It does not
take rocket science to figure out that not
only are many of these girls actually
minors but many of them are not
prostituting out their own free will.
These girls are being abducted or tricked
through false promises of legitimate
work and forced into prostitution by sex
trafficking networks.
According to a former Tijuana
barber that once worked a few blocks
from La Zona, some young Lenones
hang out at a pool hall on Avenida Sexta
in downtown Tijuana. This former, local
barber claims that these young “lenones”
often bragged to him about how they
would get paid to go into rural Mexico
and romance young girls through the
promise of work or marriage and then
sell them to the sex industry operators
for thousands of dollars.
Of those named to hang out at
the pool hall was the notorious Alfonso
Zapian, AKA, “El Chivero,” who prior
to being arrested by Mexican authorities,
was on the U.S. Border Patrol’s 8th Most
Wanted List. Zapian was also the coyote
who was paid to smuggle Reina across
the border and hand her over to the sex
trafficking ring.
In this evil game of deceit, many
violent methods and schemes are used to
lure children into exploitation and keep
them disconnected from their friends,
family and communities. According to a
Mexican cab driver, strip club and bar
owners customarily sign month-tomonth contracts with girls to keep them
in constant transition modes. “These
girls are often trafficked to different
destinations,” said one taxi driver.
Tijuana is not only a city of destination
but a transit city as well. There are some
reports that Tijuana has been used as a
springboard before crossing children into
the U.S. For example, in Reina’s case,
she was raped and forced into
prostitution at La Zona prior to crossing
the border. She was told that she needed
to work to pay off her smuggling fee.
Although smuggling networks
and sex trafficking rings operate
independently from each other, they
have been known to work together. Sex
traffickers also work closely with
owners and operators of the sex industry,
which are the perpetrators that purchase
But why is it that sex traffickers
resort to such levels of violence and
trickery to recruit young children? With
thousands of poor children across
Mexico, would not the average person
conclude that poverty and other societal
factors are enough to compel these
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children to prostitute themselves simply
because they need to survive? Sadly,
there has not been a national public
outcry in Mexico condemning organized
child sex tourism. So why would sex
traffickers risk incurring the wrath of
public opinion by employing methods of
violence to subdue their victims if there
are allegedly scores of children and
women that would engage in prostitution
because of extreme poverty?
and trickery to ensure a consistent and
steady stream of young children into the
sex industry, while at the same time
establishing themselves as leading
competitors in a multi-million dollar
business. In all of this the ones that
suffer are the defenseless children whose
innocence has been taken from them
forever. As one national campaign
against organized child sex tourism
rightly stated to perpetrators that travel
to Mexico to pay for sex with children,
“you pay for one night, they pay with
their lives.”
Beside the obvious reasons like
the fact that sex trafficking is a lucrative
enterprise, one explanation is that
children, especially young children, and
no matter how poor they are, never wake
up and say “I want to be a child
prostitute.”
They
are
usually
propositioned
and
coerced
into
prostitution by an adult or another child
that’s used by an adult. Recruitment
often happens by someone the children
trust or someone more powerful than
they are. Sex traffickers understand that
poverty alone does not produce
thousands of children into the sex trade
each year. They, more than anyone,
understand the basic laws of supply and
demand.
Without doubt, the frequency in
travel and migration of vulnerable,
Mexican children and in such large
numbers and from similar geographic
locations is impossible without a
relatively organized system to finance
their recruitment and transportation. The
sad truth is that child trafficking and
organized child sex tourism are so linked
to corruption in Mexico that forged
documents are readily obtained and
government support or at least apathy is
easily bought by business owners in
Tijuana’s sex industry. Plus, now that
adult prostitution in Tijuana is virtually
legal, the corridors of human trafficking
are wide open.
Accordingly, due to a seemingly
endless number of sex customers, the
sex industry is challenged with meeting
the high demand for fresh, young and
new faces. Since the demand is ever
growing, the need for sex traffickers to
effectively supply the sex industry with
children is critical. In short, the supply
cannot keep up with the demand. And if
there is a shortage of supply the whole
industry suffers.
After one long day of searching
for Reina through most of the bars, I
found her in the least expected place.
She was standing in front of Nuestra
Señora
de
Guadalupe
Catholic
Cathedral, on the corner of Niños
Heroes and Calle Segunda de Benito
Juarez, just a couple of blocks from the
Tijuana red-light district. It seemed as
though she knew I’d somehow find her.
She looked like she had not slept for
days. She was strung out. “I know that I
messed up. I know I let you all down,”
Because the stakes for the sex
traffickers are exceedingly high they
then resort to extreme levels of violence
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she said while we sat at a restaurant
across the street corner from the
Cathedral.
flew out to Mexico immediately
accompanied by Adrian Martinez, an
attorney with the Mexican Consulate, to
attempt to recover her baby. Within a
matter of hours we got word from
Mexico. The judge granted Reina with
full custody of her baby son. We waited
anxiously for her to arrive at the U.S.
port of entry in San Ysidro.
I was able to bring Reina back
across the border the next day. She was
paroled into my custody by the
immigration authorities. The U.S.
document read: “for humanitarian
purposes.” When we got back to the
shelter, I looked at Reina and firmly told
her that she almost lost the only hope she
had of recovering her baby. “We had to
move heaven and earth to get you back
into the U.S. Do you even realize that
you almost blew it? You were this close
to never seeing your baby again.”
I told Reina that we had done
everything possible for her. The rest was
up to her. I thought to myself that my
words might sound too harsh for a
fifteen-year-old child survivor of human
trafficking. But I had to be firm with her.
I knew that she needed to change her
attitude in order to convince the judge in
Mexico that she was a responsible
mother and capable of caring for her
baby. Her days of self-pity needed to
end. It was time for her to grow up and
fast. It was time for Reina to think about
her baby and take full charge of her life.
This is the place where we met Reina after her
reunification with her baby.
Camera crews lined themselves
desperately trying to get a shot of the
reunification between a mother and baby
that were almost permanently lost to
child commercial sexual exploitation.
The sight of Reina covered with
tears and embracing her long-lost baby
was overwhelming and by far the most
rewarding feeling I have ever
experienced. It made me realize that it
was all worth while. All of the up-hill
battles, the tears, and the long nights
when she thought that she might never
see her baby again had finally paid off
for Reina. The fifteen-year-old child that
survived the horror of human trafficking,
after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border,
was now sixteen and finally safe and reunited with her child.
Fortunately, the thought of
seeing her baby again encouraged Reina.
With a little time she transformed into a
new person. Being just a child herself,
this new Reina realized that she would
need to mature in order to help us win an
unprecedented, international custody
battle over her baby.
After long months of what
seemed like endless waiting, we heard
that there was a Mexican judge with a
sympathetic ear to Reina’s case. She
Written by
Manolo Guillén
Freelance Writer
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