Office opens in Tijuana to aid victims of sex rings
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/mexico/tijuana/20041115-9...
By Anna Cearley
November 15, 2004
TIJUANA ? A San Diego-based group is opening an office in Tijuana to provide services to people who have been exploited by child pornography,
prostitution and forced labor rings.
The Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition began work to open the Tijuana office after obtaining a two-year grant from the U.S. State Department. Marisa
Ugarte, executive director of the 4-year-old group, said the $1.2 million will be used to develop outreach programs along the border.
Ugarte said the multiagency effort in Tijuana will channel victims to shelters, provide them with counseling and support them in finding other work,
such as running beauty salons.
Ugarte said many victims are afraid to go to authorities, making it hard to estimate how many such rings operate along the border. She likened the
traffickers to c-ckroaches.
"If you find one c-ckroach, you know that there are more than 100 for each one," Ugarte said.
The center is near the city's Zona Rio section, a few blocks from the State Attorney General's Office. It was inaugurated in October, but the
two-story building is still being fixed up. Workers were repairing the roof last week.
"The idea is prevention, but also to promote a culture of denouncement," Ugarte said.
The group's coordinator in Mexico, Jorge Bedoya, has been holding meetings with representatives of several local social service groups that will be
working with the coalition. Those groups are more focused on providing counseling and medical treatment to people infected with sexually transmitted
diseases, said Bedoya, but they work with the same population the coalition wants to focus on.
The coalition project is particularly interested in the plight of children. Bedoya said adolescents sometimes end up being sexually exploited as they
attempt to cross illegally into the United States.
"They arrive here at the border and they are told it will cost them $2,000 to cross, and the trafficker says they will help them find work in a bar,
and that leads to creating a vicious cycle," he said.
U.S. law enforcement officials suspect that child pornographers from the United States are setting up shop in Tijuana to run Internet operations.
Tijuana's thriving sex trade includes about 4,000 prostitutes of all ages, said Victor Clark, a Tijuana-based human rights activist who isn't involved
in the project. Many are recruited from other Mexican states and brought here through small trafficking rings that seem to be evolving into larger
enterprises, Clark said.
Other trafficking groups operate along the border to bring people illegally into the United States for sexual or labor exploitation, Ugarte said.
In 2001, U.S. authorities arrested 44 people believed to be involved in a prostitution ring serving migrant farmworkers in North County. Many of the
girls and young women had been promised work as maids and were smuggled into San Diego from Mexico and Central America. However, authorities said that
they weren't able to build a strong enough case in the rush to rescue minors, and charges were dropped.
Also in 2001, a couple of Russian descent were convicted in San Diego for smuggling women from Russia to California to work as prostitutes.
The San Diego-based Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition includes about 40 government and nongovernment agencies in Mexico and the United States that
hope to reduce slavery and human trafficking. It also recently started a North County satellite coalition.
The group focuses on women and children who are trafficked for the purpose of prostitution and pornography, as well as anyone trafficked to perform
forced labor. The organization holds educational seminars for law enforcement, organizes outreach for victims, and advocates for tougher legislation.
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