Mexican women and children trafficked to the US

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12 January 2010

A Channel 4 News investigation has uncovered the trafficking of Mexican women and children to the US.

The trade was revealed by Maria (not her a real name), a woman who had been held captive by human traffickers for four months. Maria was only 16 years old when she was kidnapped by a young man on the streets of Ciudad Juarez on the Mexican/US border.

Ciudad Juarez is notorious for having the highest murder rate in the world. Last year alone, 1,900 people were killed in the border town during an ongoing turf war between two rival drug cartels fighting for control of the drugs route into the US.

Amidst the bloodshed Ciudad Juarez has also become the centre for the trafficking of women and children into the US. In 2009, 55 girls disappeared from the town. The US state department estimates more than 20,000 young women and children are trafficked across the border from Mexico each year.

Many of the women are befriended by traffickers who give out gifts and offer promises of good jobs, who then abuse them once they have gained their trust. Maria was kidnapped after being promised an office job by a trafficker. Instead she was drugged and raped and sold to a gang who planned to force her into prostitution into the US.

Maria explained that the gang held the women in a house on the Mexican border and was only able to escape after being left alone on one occasion.

Maria told Channel 4 News what the gang burnt another girl alive for trying to escape. She said: “They took a gallon of gasoline and started pouring it over her. Even though the girl was on fire they kept hitting her. They were laughing as if they were enjoying what they were doing.”

Maria also described how the gangs kidnap children ‘to order’ for clients in the US and described the phone conversation of a woman from New York who demanded a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old girl within three days.

Maria is willing to give evidence against the gang if they are caught. She said: “Women are sold, they are abducted, bought and even killed by these men. If these men are ever found, jail won’t be enough to make them pay for the way they’ve made us feel.”