Paraguay's Traffic Hub Imperils Female Teens

CIUDAD DEL ESTE, Paraguay (WOMENSENEWS)--The central business district
of this border city is lined with stalls selling counterfeit goods.
Shopping centers offer seemingly everything and at the right price to a
constant stream of shoppers from Brazil and Argentina and tourists on
their way to the magnificent nearby Iguazu Falls.

One dollar buys a bus ticket from Puerto Iguazu in Argentina, through
Foz da Iguazu in Brazil, and into Ciudad del Este in Paraguay.

After leaving Argentina there are no further customs or passport
checks. From the center of Ciudad del Este, a rickety bus--boarded at
every stop by children selling bananas, socks or tissues--takes you to
a wealthier part of town, marked by a McDonald's restaurant and
security guards with huge guns outside half-constructed houses.

At the end of an unevenly cobbled street, facing a deserted park, is a
small outfit with a long name: the Office of the Center for Awareness,
Prevention and Companionship for Children and Adolescents in Situations
of Commercial Sexual Exploitation.

Seventy percent of the cases that the children's charity, set up in
2003, assists are trafficking victims. Seventy percent of those have
been trafficked internationally. All the children there are female.

Inside the building--which serves as an office as well as a temporary
home for survivors with nowhere else to go--female teens take turns
washing one another's hair. Two have young children crawling on the
floor; a third is heavily pregnant. A volunteer is teaching them the
basics of working in a beauty salon.

An important part of the charity's work is teaching skills to replace
prostitution, says Celina Figueredo, director of the charity.

Notorious Hub

Ciudad del Este's surrounding Tri Border Area--where Paraguay meets
Brazil and Argentina--has over the past five years attracted notoriety
as a major hub in international people-trafficking.

Eighty-five percent of trafficking in Paraguay is for sexual
exploitation, the International Organization of Migration estimates.

"Women are the victims," says Martha, who doesn't want her name
mentioned. She says she has received anonymous death-threats for her
anti-trafficking work in Paraguay and the wider region. "More than 90
percent of the victims are women, and more than 90 percent of the
exploiters are men."

Martha says that after women are sexually exploited some are used to
carry drugs "until they are caught or killed or whatever."

The region attracts women from the outlying countryside, mostly from
Paraguay where almost half of the population scrape out a subsistence
living from agriculture. Over a third of the population earns less than
$1 a day each.

False Promises, Financial Desperation

Some of the young women who wind up being trafficked have come to the
region following promises of work as domestic employees. Some are from
local families desperate for any form of income.

In Puerto Iguazu in Argentina, Marcelina Antunez, a program coordinator
with the anti-trafficking organization Light of Infancy, pulls out some
examples from a thick file of case studies and press clippings about
who gets trafficked.

Most are between 10 and 20 and were offered work in restaurants, as
salespeople or in domestic service. Initially, many cooperate with
traffickers and accept false documents to cross borders or lie to their
parents about the work they are expected to do.

In some cases, the captive girls and young women choose to stay so they
can earn small amounts of money and send it back to their families. But
many are subject to isolation, starvation and violence. Many are
introduced to drugs and alcohol--especially cheap cocaine derivatives
similar to crack--and forced to work in prostitution.

"With birth control proscribed by the Catholic Church, it is common to
find families of eight children all under 18, exacerbated by teenage
pregnancies at the age of 13 or 14," says Figueredo. "Many of the
families make the problem worse by making the children responsible for
providing for the family. They have to go out onto the street and bring
back money; it doesn't matter how. Often they get exploited so they can
bring back money, or sometimes in exchange for goods, clothes, fruit or
vegetables."

Grimly Realistic

Figueredo is grimly realistic about what her group can hope to achieve.
"It's not a question of getting back to normal, which is impossible,
but to regain some self-esteem and to find a way to live," she says.

Aside from the barely controlled movement of people over borders in the
region, another growth factor in prostitution and trafficking hub is
the recent influx of sex tourists drawn to the hotels and commercial
districts around the monumental Iguazu.

"Brazil is taking steps to shore up the border," says Martha. "But
their interest is mainly economic and doesn't take the social aspect
into consideration. The truth is that for the traffickers the borders
don't really exist. No one will ask who the child traveling with you
is."

But while the border is porous for traffickers advocates says it's
tough for anti-trafficking efforts because the area requires
triple-nation cooperation.

"There are so many different officials to deal with on three
levels--the local, regional and national--in three countries and in
three different languages," says Martha. In addition to Spanish and
Portuguese, advocates also need to understand Jopara, the mixture of
Spanish and the indigenous language, Guarani, used in Paraguay. "If the
area was one country it would be possible to control it much more
easily, but we are trying to get the different authorities to work with
each other when they don't even speak the same language."

Nonetheless, there are signs of progress.

In September the International Office of Migration--an
intergovernmental agency of 122 countries, established in 1951--opened
an office in Asuncion, Paraguay's capital, to focus, among other
issues, on the outflow of its citizenry.

There is also a widespread publicity campaign--now on radio, on posters
and on bus tickets--about the dangers of trafficking.

"The problem is that we're working like tortoises and there's an
enormous network out there," says Figueredo. "Some of the people
involved are very high up and untouchable. It's on a very big scale."

Andy Footner is a freelance writer and editor based in Buenos Aires.

Women's eNews welcomes your comments. E-mail us at
editors@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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For more information:

"Brazil Tries to Stem Tide of Sex Slavery": -
http://womensenews.org/article.cfm/dvn/aid/2342/

International Office for Migration: - http://www.iom.int

Copyright 2007 Women's eNews.
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