Houston: Sex Ring Crackdown

From the Chron:

The farewell party was in full swing at midnight when police came for Maximino "El Chimino" Mondragon, his accomplices and his victims — scantily dressed women and girls he forced to sell beers and sexual favors under the flashing lights of a revolving crystalline disco ball inside his strip mall bar off Hempstead Highway.

Mondragon was celebrating his retirement at El Potrero de Chimino bar, also known as the Wagon Wheel. He had a one-way ticket back to his native El Salvador and blueprints in the bar for a brand-new hotel back home.

Then uninvited guests arrived.

Pickups packed the parking lots at five related bars and restaurants in northwest Houston, as more than 100 officers from federal, state and local agencies rushed in the night of Nov. 13, 2005. Interviews with the arresting agents and documents recently obtained by the Houston Chronicle provide the first detailed account on how one of the nation's largest sex trafficking rings was dismantled in Houston — considered both a center of operations and transit point for international sex and labor traffickers.

Task force members — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the FBI, the Harris County Sheriff's Office and the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission — had expected to find 50 or 60 women. Eventually, they rescued about 120 victims.

In interviews, victims told agents they had been forced to work six or seven nights a week and to allow men to buy them overpriced drinks in exchange for their company or for sexual favors.

The main targets were the lead cantina owner, Mondragon; head smuggler, Walter Corea; as well as their relatives and wives. Corea was sentenced in May to 15 years; Mondragon's sentencing, the last, is set for Sept. 22.

Faced with reams of evidence, seven have pleaded guilty.

To the members of the then-nearly new Human Trafficking Rescue Alliance, the mass arrests and rescues represented a significant enforcement victory. The size of the Mondragon ring, as well as others dismantled elsewhere, convinced law enforcement authorities that the problem of forced labor in the U.S. is likely much larger than anyone anticipated and continues to proliferate in Houston.

For years, the ring preyed on women and girls from Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala, illegally bringing them to Houston with false promises of legitimate work and then forcing them to work in cantinas to pay off smuggling fees from $8,000 to $15,000 — as well as all living expenses, according to court records and interviews with investigators.

Read the full article

Well Intentioned, but Potentially Harmful...

This article has been brought to my attention several times over the last few days and I think it would be good to break it down a bit.

It's entitled, "Escaping El Salvador's sex traffickers" and it's by Linda Pressly who writes for the Crossing Continents program for the BBC. As a matter of principle, I'm not going to copy the information directly from the article, because I believe this is an example of reporting that was intended to bring to light the plight of one young woman from Central America who was trafficked to El Salvador under the guise of a lawful job as a waitress, but was instead thrown into a brothel and suffered from physical and sexual abuse. She finally made it back home and is preparing to tesify against the traffickers who were arrested in the bust by San Salvador police.

Sergeant Jose Ayala of the Police Trafficking Unit was involved in helping rescue this young woman as well as others. He responded to the alarm of the victim's family member who had been contacted by the victim from San Salvador.

The article itself is a stark and realistic description of what a victim of trafficking suffers from and how the process happens. I thought the descriptions of the guilt the victim felt, the extreme depression and loneliness as well as the danger the victim still faces all contribute to a better overall picture of the reality of trafficking.

However, I take major issues with this article for multiple reasons.

1.) It reveals the real names of the victim and her caregiver. At least, there is absolutely no indication otherwise. It reveals specific details about the case, and is to specific about the current location of the victim. This type of reporting could potentially put the victim back in harms way if members of the trafficking network are still at large.

2.) There is not one statement from the victim. Her story is told entirely by her godmother. There is no indication the victim wanted to tell her story, or wanted her trauma to be advertised in a public manner. Consent is not present at all. This quote from the godmother, in particular, infuriated me:

"I am speaking out to you to say to any single mother or any adolescent, 'If you are offered a good job, do not be dazzled by the high salaries, because the price you pay is too heavy'," she says.

"We do not always have the courage to talk about trafficking, but we must be open about these things so this story is not repeated in other families."

It's not necessarily what the godmother said that upsets me. It indicates that she was well-intentioned to help other families prevent this tragedy from happening to someone they love. And I understand she is distraught by the whole event, too.

But the author should have been more responsible! There are ways of writing this kind of story with the same powerful effect on readers without revealing so many details that it runs the risk of putting the victim back in danger or of retraumatizing her by making her story permanently public. Especially if no traffickers have actually been convicted and there is no indication that the victim actually wanted it to be told. The article offers better protection of the traffickers than it does the victim! It even acknowledges that few people have actually been convicted of the crime in Central America. So you release an article with details about a victim before her traffickers have been convicted in a part of the world notorious for not convicting traffickers? This author needs to learn a way to report this problem responsibly. Her writing style is effective, but if she contributes to the victim's suffering, it doesn't mean a damn thing.