Once the Mexican traffickers abduct or seduce the women and young girls, it's not other men who first indoctrinate them into sexual slavery but other women. The victims and officials I spoke to all emphasized this fact as crucial to the trafficking rings' success. 'Women are the principals,' Caballero, the Mexican federal preventive police officer, told me. 'The victims are put under the influence of the mothers, who handle them and beat them. Then they give the girls to the men to beat and rape into submission.' Traffickers understand that because women can more easily gain the trust of young girls, they can more easily crush them. 'Men are the customers and controllers, but within most trafficking organizations themselves, women are the operators,' Haugen says. 'Women are the ones who exert violent force and psychological torture.'
This mirrors the tactics of the Eastern European rings. 'Mexican pimps have learned a lot from European traffickers,' said Claudia, a former prostitute and madam in her late forties, whom I met in Tepito, Mexico City's vast and lethal ghetto. 'The Europeans not only gather girls but put older women in the same houses,' she told me. 'They get younger and older women emotionally attached. They're transported together, survive together.'
The traffickers' harvest is innocence. Before young women and girls are taken to the United States, their captors want to obliterate their sexual inexperience while preserving its appearance. For the Eastern European girls, this 'preparation' generally happens in En-senada, a seaside tourist town in Baja California, a region in Mexico settled by Russian immigrants, or Tijuana, where Nicole, the Russian woman I met in Los Angeles, was taken along with four other girls when she arrived in Mexico. The young women are typically kept in locked-down, gated villas in groups of sixteen to twenty. The girls are provided with all-American clothing-Levi's and baseball caps. They learn to say, 'United States citizen.' They are also sexually brutalized. Nicole told me that the day she arrived in Tijuana, three of her traveling companions were 'tried out' locally. The education lasts for days and sometimes weeks.
For the Mexican girls abducted by Los Lenones, the process of breaking them in often begins on Calle Santo Tomas, a filthy narrow street in La Merced, a dangerous and raucous ghetto in Mexico City. Santo Tomas has been a place for low-end prostitution since before Spain's conquest of Mexico in the sixteenth century. But beginning in the early nineties, it became an important training ground for under-age girls and young women on their way into sexual bondage in the United States. When I first visited Santo Tomas, in late September, I found one hundred and fifty young women walking a slow-motion parabola among three hundred or four hundred men. It was a balmy night, and the air was heavy with the smell of barbecue and gasoline. Two dead dogs were splayed over the curb just beyond where the girls struck casual poses in stilettos and spray-on-tight neon vinyl and satin or skimpy leopard-patterned outfits. Some of the girls looked as young as twelve. Their faces betrayed no emotion. Many wore pendants of the grim reaper around their necks and made hissing sounds; this, I was told, was part of a ritual to ward off bad energy. The men, who were there to rent or just gaze, didn't speak. From the tables of a shabby cafe midblock, other men-also Mexicans, but more neatly dressed-sat scrutinizing the girls as at an auction. These were buyers and renters with an interest in the youngest and best-looking. They nodded to the girls they wanted and then followed them past a guard in a Yankees baseball cap through a tin doorway.
Inside, the girls braced the men before a statue of St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes, and patted them down for weapons. Then the girls genuflected to the stone-faced saint and led the men to the back, grabbing a condom and roll of toilet paper on the way. They pointed to a block of ice in a tub in lieu of a urinal. Beyond a blue hallway the air went sour, like old onions; there were thirty stalls curtained off by blue fabric, every one in use. Fifteen minutes of straightforward intercourse with the girl's clothes left on cost 50 pesos, or about $4.50. For $4.50 more, the dress was lifted. For another $4.50, the bra would be taken off. Oral sex was $4.50; 'acrobatic positions' were $1.80 each. Despite the dozens of people and the various exertions in this room, there were only the sounds of zippers and shoes. There was no human noise at all.
Most of the girls on Santo Tomas would have sex with twenty to thirty men a day; they would do this seven days a week usually for weeks but sometimes for months before they were 'ready' for the United States. If they refused, they would be beaten and sometimes killed. They would be told that if they tried to escape, one of their family members, who usually had no idea where they were, would be beaten or killed. Working at the brutalizing pace of twenty men per day, a girl could earn her captors as much as $2,000 a week. In the United States that same girl could bring in perhaps $30,000 per week.
In Europe, girls and women trafficked for the sex trade gain in value the closer they get to their destinations. According to Iana Matei, who operates Reaching Out, a Romanian rescue organization, a Romanian or Moldovan girl can be sold to her first transporter-who she may or may not know has taken her captive- for as little as $60, then for $500 to the next. Eventually she can be sold for $2,500 to the organization that will ultimately control and rent her for sex for tens of thousands of dollars a week. (Though the Moldovan and Romanian organizations typically smuggle girls to Western Europe and not the United States, they are, Matei says, closely allied with Russian and Ukrainian networks that do.)
Jonathan M. Winer, deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration, says, 'The girls are worth a penny or a ruble in their home village, and suddenly they're worth hundreds and thousands somewhere else.'
In November, I followed by helicopter the twelve-foot-high sheet-metal fence that represents the United States Mexico boundary from Imperial Beach, California, south of San Diego, fourteen miles across the gritty warrens and havoc of Tijuana into the barren hills of Tecate. The fence drops off abruptly at Colonia Nido de las Aguilas, a dry riverbed that straddles the border. Four hundred square miles of bone-dry, barren hills stretch out on the United States side. I hovered over the end of the fence with Lester Mc-Daniel, a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On the United States side, 'J-e-s-u-s' was spelled out in rocks ten feet high across a steep hillside. A fifteen-foot white wooden cross rose from the peak. It is here that thousands of girls and young women-most of them Mexican and many of them straight from Calle Santo Tomas-are taken every year, mostly between January and August, the dry season. Coyotes-or smugglers-subcontracted exclusively by sex traffickers sometimes trudge the girls up to the cross and let them pray, then herd them into the hills northward.
A few miles east, we picked up a deeply grooved trail at the fence and followed it for miles into the hills until it plunged into a deep isolated ravine called Cottonwood Canyon. A Ukrainian sex- trafficking ring force-marches young women through here, Mc-Daniel told me. In high heels and seductive clothing, the young women trek twelve miles to Highway 94, where panel trucks sit waiting. McDaniel listed the perils: rattlesnakes, dehydration, and hypothermia. He failed to mention the traffickers' bullets should the women try to escape.
'If a girl tries to run, she's killed and becomes just one more woman in the desert,' says Marisa B. Ugarte, director of the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition, a San Diego organization that coordinates rescue efforts for trafficking victims on both sides of the border. 'But if she keeps going north, she reaches the Gates of
Hell.'
One girl who was trafficked back and forth across that border repeatedly was Andrea. 'Andrea' is just one name she was given by her traffickers and clients; she doesn't know her real name. She was born in the United States and sold or abandoned here-at about four years old, she says-by a woman who may have been her mother. (She is now in her early to mid-twenties; she doesn't know for sure.) She says that she spent approximately the next twelve years as the captive of a sex-trafficking ring that operated on both sides of the Mexican border. Because of the threat of retribution from her former captors, who are believed to be still at large, an organization that rescues and counsels trafficking victims and former prostitutes arranged for me to meet Andrea in October at a secret location in the United States.
In a series of excruciating conversations,Andrea explained to me how the trafficking ring that kept her worked, moving young girls (and boys too) back and forth over the border, selling nights and weekends with them mostly to American men. She said that the ring imported-both through abduction and outright purchase- toddlers, children, and teenagers into the United States from many countries.
'The border is very busy, lots of stuff moving back and forth,' she said. 'Say you needed to get some kids. This guy would offer a woman a lot of money, and she'd take birth certificates from the United States-from Puerto Rican children or darker-skinned children-and then she would go into Mexico through Tijuana. Then she'd drive to Juarez'-across the Mexican border from El Paso, Texas-'and then they'd go shopping. I was taken with them once. We went to this house that had a goat in the front yard and came out with a four-year-old boy.' She remembers the boy costing around five hundred dollars (she said that many poor parents were told that their children would go to adoption agencies and on to better lives in America). 'When we crossed the border at Juarez, all the border guards wanted to see was a birth certificate for the dark-skinned kids.'
Andrea continued: 'There would be a truck waiting for us at the Mexico border, and those trucks you don't want to ride in. Those trucks are closed. They had spots where there would be transfers, the rest stops and truck stops on the freeways in the United States. One person would walk you into the bathroom, and then another person would take you out of the bathroom and take you to a different vehicle.'
Andrea told me she was transported to Juarez dozens of times. During one visit, when she was about seven years old, the trafficker took her to the Radisson Casa Grande Hotel, where there was a john waiting in a room. The john was an older American man, and he read Bible passages to her before and after having sex with her. Andrea described other rooms she remembered in other hotels in Mexico: the Howard Johnson in Leon, the Crowne Plaza in Guadalajara. She remembers most of all the ceiling patterns. 'When I was taken to Mexico, I knew things were going to be different,' she said. The 'customers' were American businessmen. 'The men who went there had higher positions, had more to lose if they were caught doing these things on the other side of the border. I was told my purpose was to keep these men from abusing their own kids.' Later she told me: 'The white kids you could beat but you couldn't mark. But with Mexican kids you could do whatever you wanted. They're untraceable. You lose nothing by killing them.'
Then she and the other children and teenagers in this cell were walked back across the border to El Paso by the traffickers. 'The border guards talked to you like, 'Did you have fun in Mexico?' And you answered exactly what you were told, 'Yeah, I had fun.' 'Runners' moved the harder-to-place kids, the darker or not-quite-as-well-behaved kids, kids that hadn't been broken yet.'
Another trafficking victim I met, a young woman named Montserrat, was taken to the United States from Veracruz, Mexico, six years ago, at age thirteen. (Montserrat is her nickname.) 'I was going to work in America,' she told me. 'I wanted to go to school there, have an apartment and a red Mercedes Benz.' Montserrat's trafficker, who called himself Alejandro, took her to Sonora, across the Mexican border from Douglas, Arizona, where she joined a group of a dozen other teenage girls, all with the same dream of a better life. They were from Chiapas, Guatemala, Oaxaca- everywhere, she said.
The group was marched twelve hours through the desert, just a few of the thousands of Mexicans who bolted for America that night along the two thousand miles of border. Cars were waiting at a fixed spot on the other side. Alejandro directed her to a Nissan and drove her and a few others to a house she said she thought was in Phoenix, the home of a white American family. 'It looked like America,' she told me. 'I ate chicken. The family ignored me, watched TV. I thought the worst part was behind me.'
A week after Montserrat was taken across the border, she said, she and half a dozen other girls were loaded into a windowless van. 'Alejandro dropped off girls at gas stations as we drove, wherever there were minimarkets,' Montserrat told me. At each drop-off there was somebody waiting. Sometimes a girl would be escorted to the bathroom, never to return to the van. They drove twenty-four hours a day. 'As the girls were leaving, being let out the back, all of them fourteen or fifteen years old, I felt confident,' Montser-rat said. We were talking in Mexico City, where she has been since she escaped from her trafficker four years ago. She's now nineteen, and shy with her body but direct with her gaze, which is flat and unemotional. 'I didn't know the real reason they were disappearing,' she said. 'They were going to a better life.'
Eventually, only Montserrat and one other girl remained. Outside, the air had turned frigid, and there was snow on the ground. It was night when the van stopped at a gas station. A man was waiting. Montserrat's friend hopped out the back, gleeful. 'She said goodbye, I'll see you tomorrow,' Montserrat recalled. 'I never saw her again.'
After leaving the gas station, Alejandro drove Montserrat to an apartment. A couple of weeks later he took her to a Dollarstore. 'He bought me makeup,' Montserrat told me. 'He chose a short dress and a halter top, both black. I asked him why the clothes. He said it was for a party the owner of the apartment was having. He bought me underwear. Then I started to worry.' When they arrived at the apartment, Alejandro left, saying he was coming back. But another man appeared at the door. 'The man said he'd already paid and I had to do whatever he said,' Montserrat said. 'When he said he already paid, I knew why I was there. I was crushed.'
Montserrat said that she didn't leave that apartment for the next three months; then for nine months after that, Alejandro regularly took her in and out of the apartment for appointments with various johns.
Sex trafficking is one of the few human rights violations that rely on exposure: victims have to be available, displayed, delivered, and returned. Girls were shuttled in open cars between the Plain-
