HUMAN TRAFFICKING FLOURISHES IN MEXICO

10-15 thousand migrants from Central America go ‘missing’ in Mexico each year

Much has been made of human trafficking within the U.S., but it appears as though Mexico has a much bigger human trafficking problem and is doing little about it.

NOT INCLUDED ON GOVERNMENT DEATH/MISSING RECORDS, 380 MIGRANTS GO ‘MISSING’ EACH DAY IN MEXICO

Borderland Beat
August 10, 2014

The legal advisor of the group United Against Trafficking, María Teresa Paredes Hernández, affirmed that every 24 hours 380 people go missing in Mexico, 80% of them channeled into the forced prostitution or forced labor trades, slave labor or organized crime.

10-15 thousand economic migrants go "missing" each year. Yet they are never counted in any official government tally of missing, or death counts. They are the invisible people of Mexico. Racism, abuse and neglect await Central American migrant in Mexico.

The federal government admitted last April that efforts to access justice and prosecute cases in order to combat human trafficking are insufficient and need to be reinforced. (Something said in each administration but to no avail.)

Then they revealed that in the last two and a half years, only 1.02 percent of the 195 preliminary investigations of human trafficking led to a conviction. As a consequence, only two people were convicted.

In the National Program for the Prevention, Punishment and Eradication of Human Trafficking Offenses and for Protection and Aid to Victims of these Offenses 2014-2018, they admitted that there is insufficient momentum to harmonize [state and federal laws] for this kind of crime to attend to these cases. To this is added the distrust generated by the conduct of authorities toward the victims, which fosters little or no reporting of the crime, fomenting impunity and the invisibility of the problem.

According to the analysis, federal ministerial authorities of the common law and of the Federal District are not properly trained and specialized in national and international regulations to detect all the actions or admission related to human trafficking.