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.”