How Organized Crime Profits from Modern Slavery in Latin America David Gagne - InSight Crime
go to original June 6, 2016

Political analyst Laura Carlsen joins “Americas Now” anchor Elaine Reyes from Mexico City to discuss the impact of illegal enterprises on government and society in Latin America. (CCTV America)

A new report sheds light on how vulnerable populations subjected to slave-like conditions line the pocketbooks of organized crime networks across Latin America.

The 2016 Global Slavery Index (pdf) published by Walk Free Foundation estimates that 2.2 million of the world's 45.8 million enslaved people live in the Americas.

The highest number of regional victims are found in Mexico, with 376,800, followed by Colombia with 308,200. The countries with the highest percentage of the population living in slavery are Haiti and the Dominican Republic, at nearly 1 percent.

The report highlights how trafficking networks and other criminal groups profit from exploiting marginal populations, especially women and children. By some estimates, 70 percent of all modern slavery cases in Mexico involve organized crime groups. This includes the kidnapping of mostly girls and women for forced prostitution and mostly boys and men for forced labor. The town of Tenancingo in Tlaxcala state is considered the sex trafficking capital of the world, with traffickers smuggling indigenous girls into the United States and to other parts of Mexico.

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Drug cartels are believed to be involved in sex trafficking, the document says, using the same organized crime networks used to move drugs and weapons to smuggle human victims across the border into the United States.

Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence suggests some of Mexico's disappeared population - which numbers in the tens of thousands - are held in camps where prostitution, forced labor and other criminal acts are authorized by cartels.

The report found domestic and international sex trafficking is also pervasive in the Dominican Republic. Foreign tourists account for roughly 25 percent of all Dominican cases of sexual exploitation. At the international level, Dominican girls have been rescued from neighboring Haiti and found in countries across the globe, from the United States to Europe to Japan.

But sex trafficking in the Americas is most concentrated in the gold mines of Peru and Colombia, according to the report, in part due to the involvement of organized crime groups in the mining industry which operates in remote regions of those countries.

Criminal groups are not the only ones enriching themselves on the backs of slaves. The report noted that in both Mexico and the Dominican Republic authorities at the local, state and federal level are either complicit or suspected of being complicit in the human trafficking operations.

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InSight Crime is a foundation dedicated to the study of the principal threat to national and citizen security in Latin America and the Caribbean: organized crime. We seek to deepen and inform the debate about organized crime in the Americas by providing the general public with regular reporting, analysis and investigation on the subject and on state efforts to combat it.

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