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.