have been abducted; others have been bought from or abandoned by their impoverished families.
Because of the porousness of the United States-Mexico border and the criminal networks that traverse it, the towns and cities along that border have become the main staging area in an illicit and barbaric industry, whose 'products' are women and girls. On both sides of the border, they are rented out for sex for as little as fifteen minutes at a time, dozens of times a day. Sometimes they are sold outright to other traffickers and sex rings, victims and experts say. These sex slaves earn no money, there is nothing voluntary about what they do, and if they try to escape they are often beaten and sometimes killed.
Last September, in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly, President Bush named sex trafficking as 'a special evil,' a multibillion-dollar 'underground of brutality and lonely fear,' a global scourge alongside the AIDS epidemic. Influenced by a coalition of religious organizations, the Bush administration has pushed international action on the global sex trade. The president declared at the United Nations that 'those who create these victims and profit from their suffering must be severely punished' and that 'those who patronize this industry debase themselves and deepen the misery of others. And governments that tolerate this trade are tolerating a form of slavery.'
Under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act of 2000-the first U.S. law to recognize that people trafficked against their will are victims of a crime, not illegal aliens-the U.S. government rates other countries' records on human trafficking and can apply economic sanctions on those that aren't making efforts to improve them. Another piece of legislation, the Protect Act, which Bush signed into law last year, makes it a crime for any person to enter the United States, or for any citizen to travel abroad, for the purpose of sex tourism involving children. The sentences are severe: up to thirty years' imprisonment for each offense.
The thrust of the president's U.N. speech and the scope of the laws passed here to address the sex-trafficking epidemic might suggest that this is a global problem but not particularly an American one. In reality, little has been done to document sex trafficking in this country. In dozens of interviews I conducted with former sex slaves, madams, government and law-enforcement officials, and anti-sex-trade activists for more than four months in Eastern Europe, Mexico, and the United States, the details and breadth of this sordid trade in the United States came to light.
in fact, the United States has become a major importer of sex slaves. Last year, the CIA estimated that between eighteen thousand and twenty thousand people are trafficked annually into the United States. The government has not studied how many of these are victims of sex traffickers, but Kevin Bales, president of Free the Slaves, America's largest antislavery organization, says that the number is at least ten thousand a year. John Miller, the State Department's director of the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, conceded: 'That figure could be low. What we know is that the number is huge.' Bales estimates that there are thirty thousand to fifty thousand sex slaves in captivity in the United States at any given time. Laura Lederer, a senior State Department adviser on trafficking, told me, 'We're not finding victims in the United States because we're not looking for them.'
In Eastern European capitals like Kiev and Moscow, dozens of sex-trafficking rings advertise nanny positions in the United States in local newspapers; others claim to be scouting for models and actresses.
In Chisinau, the capital of the former Soviet republic of Moldova-the poorest country in Europe and the one experts say is most heavily culled by traffickers for young women-I saw a billboard with a fresh-faced, smiling young woman beckoning girls to waitress positions in Paris. But of course there are no waitress positions and no 'Paris.' Some of these young women are actually tricked into paying their own travel expenses-typically around $3,000-as a down payment on what they expect to be bright, prosperous futures, only to find themselves kept prisoner in Mexico before being moved to the United States and sold into sexual bondage there.
The Eastern European trafficking operations, from entrapment to transport, tend to be well-oiled monoethnic machines. One notorious Ukrainian ring, which has since been broken up, was run by Tetyana Komisaruk and Serge Mezheritsky. One of their last transactions, according to Daniel Saunders, an assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, took place in late June 2000 at the Hard Rock Cafe in Tijuana. Around dinnertime, a buyer named Gordey Vinitsky walked in. He was followed shortly after by Komisaruk's husband, Valery, who led Vinitsky out to the parking lot and to a waiting van. Inside the van were six Ukrainian women in their late teens and early twenties. They had been promised jobs as models and babysitters in the glamorous United States, and they probably had no idea why they were sitting in a van in a backwater like Tijuana in the early evening. Vinitsky pointed into the van at two of the women and said he'd take them for $10,000 each. Valery drove the young women to a gated villa twenty minutes away in Rosarito, a Mexican honky-tonk tourist trap in Baja California. They were kept there until July 4, when they were delivered to San Diego by boat and distributed to their buyers, including Vinitsky, who claimed his two 'purchases.' The Komisaruks, Mezheritsky, and Vinitsky were caught in May 2001 and are serving long sentences in U.S. federal prison.
In October, I met Nicole, a young Russian woman who had been trafficked into Mexico by a different network. 'I wanted to get out of Moscow, and they told me the Mexican border was like a freeway,' said Nicole, who is now twenty-five. We were sitting at a cafe on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and she was telling me the story of her narrow escape from sex slavery-she was taken by immigration officers when her traffickers were trying to smuggle her over the border from Tijuana. She still seemed fearful of being discovered by the trafficking ring and didn't want even her initials to appear in print. (Nicole is a name she adopted after coming to the United States.)
Two years ago, afraid for her life after her boyfriend was gunned down in Moscow in an organized-crime-related shootout, she found herself across a cafe table in Moscow from a man named Alex, who explained how he could save her by smuggling her into the United States. Once she agreed, Nicole said, Alex told her that if she didn't show up at the airport, ' 'I'll find you and cut your head off.' Russians do not play around. In Moscow you can get a bullet in your head just for fun.'
Donna M. Hughes, a professor of women's studies at the University of Rhode Island and an expert on sex trafficking, says that prostitution barely existed twelve years ago in the Soviet Union. 'It was suppressed by political structures. All the women had jobs.' But in the first years after the collapse of Soviet Communism, poverty in the former Soviet states soared. Young women-many of them college-educated and married-became easy believers in Hollywood-generated images of swaying palm trees in Los Angeles. 'A few of them have an idea that prostitution might be involved,' Hughes says. 'But their idea of prostitution is Pretty Woman, which is one of the most popular films in Ukraine and Russia. They're thinking, This may not be so bad.'
The girls' first contacts are usually with what appear to be legitimate travel agencies. According to prosecutors, the Komisaruk/ Mezheritsky ring in Ukraine worked with two such agencies in Kiev, Art Life International and Svit Tours. The helpful agents at Svit and Art Life explained to the girls that the best way to get into the United States was through Mexico, which they portrayed as a short walk or boat ride from the American dream. Oblivious and full of hope, the girls get on planes to Europe and then on to Mexico.
Every day, flights from Paris, London, and Amsterdam arrive at Mexico City's international airport carrying groups of these girls, sometimes as many as seven at a time, according to two Mexico City immigration officers I spoke with (and who asked to remain anonymous). One of them told me that officials at the airport- who cooperate with Mexico's federal preventive police (PFP)- work with the traffickers and 'direct airlines to park at certain gates. Officials go to the aircraft. They know the seat numbers. While passengers come off, they take the girls to an office, where officials will 'process' them.'
Magdalena Carral, Mexico's commissioner of the National Institute of Migration, the government agency that controls migration issues at all airports, seaports, and land entries into Mexico, told me: 'Everything happens at the airport. We are giving a big fight to have better control of the airport. Corruption does not leave tracks, and sometimes we cannot track it. Six months ago we changed the three main officials at the airport. But it's a daily fight. These networks are very powerful and dangerous.'
But Mexico is not merely a way station en route to the United States for third-country traffickers, like the Eastern European rings. It is also a vast source of even younger and more cheaply acquired girls for sexual servitude in the United States. While European traffickers tend to dupe their victims into boarding one-way flights to Mexico to their own captivity, Mexican traffickers rely on the charm and brute force of 'Los Lenones,' tightly organized associations of pimps, according to Roberto Caballero, an officer with the PFP. Although hundreds of 'popcorn traffickers'-individuals who take control of one or two girls-work the margins, Caballero said, at least fifteen major trafficking organizations and one hundred and twenty associated factions tracked by the PFP operate as wholesalers: collecting human merchandise and taking orders from safe houses and brothels in the major sex-trafficking hubs in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Chicago.
Like the Sicilian Mafia, Los Lenones are based on family hierarchies, Caballero explained. The father controls the organization and the money, while the sons and their male cousins hunt, kidnap, and entrap victims. The boys leave school at twelve and are given one or two girls their age to rape and pimp out to begin their training, which emphasizes the arts of kidnapping and seduction.
Throughout the rural and suburban towns from southern Mexico to the United States border, along what traffickers call the Via Lactea, or Milky Way, the agents of Los Lenones troll the bus stations and factories and school dances where under-age girls gather, work, and socialize. They first ply the girls like prospective lovers, buying them meals and desserts, promising affection and then marriage. Then the men describe rumors they've heard about America, about the promise of jobs and schools. Sometimes the girls are easy prey. Most of them already dream of El Norte. But the theater often ends as soon as the agent has the girl alone, when he beats her, drugs her, or simply forces her into a waiting car.
The majority of Los Lenones-80 percent of them, Caballero says-are based in Tenancingo, a charmless suburb an hour's drive south of Mexico City. Before I left Mexico City for Tenancingo in October, I was warned by Mexican and United States officials that the traffickers there are protected by the local police, and that the town is designed to discourage outsiders, with mazelike streets and only two closely watched entrances. The last time the federal police went there to investigate the disappearance of a local girl, their vehicle was surrounded, and the officers were intimidated into leaving. I traveled in a bulletproof Suburban with well-armed federales and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
On the way, we stopped at a gas station, where I met the parents of a girl from Tenancingo who was reportedly abducted in August 2000. The girl, Suri, is now twenty. Her mother told me that there were witnesses who saw her being forced into a car on the way home from work at a local factory. No one called the police. Suri's mother recited the names of daughters of a number of her friends who have also been taken: 'Minerva, Sylvia, Carmen,' she said in a monotone, as if the list went on and on.
Just two days earlier, her parents heard from Suri (they call her by her nickname) for the first time since she disappeared. 'She's in Queens, New York,' the mother told me breathlessly. 'She said she was being kept in a house watched by Colombians. She said they take her by car every day to work in a brothel. I was crying on the phone, 'When are you coming back, when are you coming back?' ' The mother looked at me helplessly; the father stared blankly into the distance. Then the mother sobered. 'My daughter said: 'I'm too far away. I don't know when I'm coming back.' ' Before she hung up, Suri told her mother: 'Don't cry. I'll escape soon. And don't talk to anyone.'
Sex-trafficking victims widely believe that if they talk, they or someone they love will be killed. And their fear is not unfounded, since the tentacles of the trafficking rings reach back into the girls' hometowns, and local law enforcement is often complicit in the sex trade.
One officer in the PFPs antitrafficking division told me that ten high-level officials in the state of Sonora share a $200,000 weekly payoff from traffickers, a gargantuan sum of money for Mexico. The officer told me with a frozen smile that he was powerless to do anything about it.
'Some officials are not only on the organization's payroll, they are key players in the organization,' an official at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City told me. 'Corruption is the most important reason these networks are so successful.'
Nicolas Suarez, the PFP's coordinator of intelligence, sounded fatalistic about corruption when I spoke to him in Mexico City in September. 'We have that cancer, corruption,' he told me with a shrug. 'But it exists in every country. In every house there is a devil.'
The U.S. Embassy official told me: 'Mexican officials see sex trafficking as a United States problem. If there wasn't such a large demand, then people-trafficking victims and migrants alike- wouldn't be going up there.'
When I asked Magdalena Carral, the Mexican commissioner of migration, about these accusations, she said that she didn't know anything about Los Lenones or sex trafficking in Tenancingo. But she conceded: 'There is an investigation against some officials accused of cooperating with these trafficking networks nationwide.
Sonora is one of those places.' She added, 'We are determined not to allow any kind of corruption in this administration, not the smallest kind.'
Gary Haugen, president of the International Justice Mission, an organization based in Arlington, Virginia, that fights sexual exploitation in South Asia and Southeast Asia, says: 'Sex trafficking isn't a poverty issue but a law-enforcement issue. You can only carry out this trade at significant levels with the cooperation of local law enforcement. In the developing world the police are not seen as a solution for anything. You don't run to the police; you run from the police.'
