PORTUGAL-BRAZIL: Human Trafficking and Marriages – Another Link

By Mario de Queiroz Reprint | | Print |

Mario de Queiroz

LISBON, Oct 11 2006 (IPS) - Brazil’s influence in Portugal is not limited to music, television programming, football, cuisine and tropical beach vacations.

The world’s fifth-largest country in terms of both population (182 million) and land area (8.5 million square kilometers), Brazil is nearly 96 times the size of its former colonial ruler with a population 18 times larger.

Today it is also the main source of victims of human trafficking to Portugal, women who fall into prostitution and sexual exploitation networks, as well as a source of large numbers of women who marry Portuguese men.

Brazil is the favourite country for traffickers who form part of the prostitution networks that have mushroomed in Portugal, which is a springboard to wealthier European Union destinations, according to studies presented at a seminar organised Monday and Tuesday by the governmental Portuguese Youth Institute (IPJ).

The meeting drew experts on human trafficking in Portugal, one of the themes of a series of seminars and conferences held as part of the IPJ project “Towards a Europe without Borders”.

Fernando Flores, an inspector with the Service for Border Control and Aliens (SEF), told the seminar that “the biggest concern is the case of Brazil,” although the inflow of young women from China and Nigeria has also been increasing.

The official stressed the lack of statistical data on human trafficking. But he noted that the estimates point to a reduction in the numbers of women from eastern Europe, “especially Russia, Ukraine and Moldova,” among foreign sex workers in Portugal.

The trafficking of persons generates “enormous profits for procurers and pimps: one woman alone can generate 20,000 euros (some 25,600 dollars) in three or four months,” said Flores.

According to United Nations figures, “the trafficking of human beings is a seven to 10 billion euro (between 8.9 and 12.8 billion dollar) business today,” he added.

SEF reports that traffickers tend to be men between the ages of 20 and 50, who are either businessmen or employees in prostitution-related establishments. The victims, meanwhile, are typically young women between the ages of 18 and 24, with a low educational level.

The lack of adequate legislation to crack down on the phenomenon in Portugal, the geographic extension of the trafficking and prostitution rings, which are present throughout Europe, and the difficulties of meeting the high threshold of evidence required to prove the crime of trafficking are the biggest hurdles to fighting these criminal networks, said Flores.

Besides, he added, “the majority of the trafficked women are legal immigrants, with all of their documents in order and their visas up-to-date,” which makes it even harder for the authorities to take action. However, thanks to imminent reforms to the Portuguese penal code, that situation could change radically, said the SEF official.

A draft law submitted by the socialist government of Prime Minister José Sócrates, which is to be debated by parliament before the end of the year, provides for prison terms for traffickers and fines for those who resort to the services of victims of trafficking, sexual or otherwise.

José Falcão, with the non-governmental organisation SOS Racismo, told IPS that “we are obviously not in favour of repression, but we are talking about incredible hypocrisy, not only on the part of Portugal, but of the EU as a whole, which allows this kind of trafficking to continue.”

“These are non-existent, cynical battles, because human trafficking benefits unscrupulous European businesspeople, who profit from virtual slave labour, not only in the prostitution rings, but in the form of workers who are low-cost since they don’t ‘exist’ for the social security and medical coverage systems,” said the activist.

Sometimes overlapping with the phenomenon of trafficking is that of marriages between Portuguese men and women and foreign nationals.

Figures provided in the seminar by the National Statistics Institute (INE) show that one out of every 12 Portuguese people marry foreigners, with such marriages totaling 3,909 last year, compared to 1,346 in 1998 and 2,721 in 2002.

Falcão said it was normal for “people to marry whoever they wish, but there is a danger that this increase partly reflects marriages in which immigrants are seeking to obtain legal residency status.”

The threefold rise in the number of marriages with foreigners between 1998 and 2005 can be largely explained by the increase in immigration flows that have completed Portugal’s transition from a country of emigrants to a country of immigrants.

But Italian researcher Marzia Grassi, with the University of Lisbon Institute of Social Sciences, told IPS that some of the marriages are motivated by the desire to obtain a residency permit in an EU country.

Grassi pointed to marriages “arranged through marriage agencies, especially ones that hook up Portuguese men with women from former Soviet republics and Brazil.”

“While the numbers of Portuguese women marrying men from non-EU countries are small, Brazilian women are among the favourites of Portuguese men,” added the researcher.

In general, it is Portuguese men who are more open to marrying women of other nationalities: there were 2,563 such cases in 2005, compared to 1,346 cases in which Portuguese women married foreign nationals, according to INE figures.

The largest number of foreigners in these marriages were people from Brazil, while eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine and Romania, are gaining ground. By contrast, marriages with people from former Portuguese colonies in Africa – Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Sao Tomé and Príncipe – as well as East Timor in Asia are on the decline

Raisa, from Moldova, is the manager of one of the marriage agencies cited by Grassi. She arranges matches between Portuguese men and women and immigrants from central and eastern Europe, and denies that her company is “a way for people to gain legal migration status,” countering that “it is a way for people to find their soulmates.”

In a study carried out in March, Grassi reported on two other marriage agencies in Portugal specialising in matches with immigrants from eastern Europe, which advertise on-line and in Portuguese and foreign-language newspapers. The catalogues present women of different ages, who are single, widowed or divorced.

“Dozens of men turn to Raisa’s agency on a daily basis,” says the researcher, who adds that, according to Raisa,” for now, Portuguese girls are not at all interested in meeting young men from eastern Europe, unlike Portuguese men, who are very interested in women from eastern Europe.”

“For obvious reasons, Portugal is more open to becoming a multicultural society than the rest of Europe, due to its centuries-old contact with Brazil; its former African colonies; Timor, which it colonised until 1975; (its former possessions in) India (Goa, Diu and Daman), which expelled it in 1961; and China (Macau), which it pulled out of just five years ago,” says Grassi.

“This is a mosaic that began to be built 600 years ago and lasted until the very recent past, which clearly favours relationships with other cultures,” she said.