Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS-VENEZUELA: Child Trafficking Network Dismantled

Estrella Gutierrez

CARACAS, Jan 9 1998 (IPS) - Around 15 Ecuadorean children were rescued this week from lives of exploitation and squalor in an on-going operation to dismantle a child trafficking network in Venezuela.

The four to 17-year-old girls and boys were freed by police officers in poor neighbourhoods in Caracas, after two teenage girls escaped and – with the support of community organisations and parliamentarians – alerted the police Tuesday.

Nine adults, Ecuadorean nationals according to police reports, have been arrested so far on charges of trafficking in minors. Their attorneys deny that they are involved in organised crime. Another individual has also been arrested in Quito.

The raids on poor areas of the city will continue for several days. Investigators are looking for a police officer – known only as ‘Ramirez’ – who the two girls said provided key support in concealing the existence of the network.

Eleven months ago, the Ecuadorean consul, Luis Teran, reported a supposed network of traffickers who subjected minors to virtual slave labour in domestic work, street vending and prostitution.

Teran’s reports were given little credit at the time by police and the National Institute of Minors (Inama), which carried out a superficial investigation and informed that Ecuadorean children were not found in the specific areas of two large Caracas street markets indicated by the consul.

The majority of the children belong to the Jatari indigenous people, a peasant community living along the banks of the Bamba river, some 80 kms from Quito, Teran told IPS this week.

He added that the Technical Judicial Police – which is conducting the operation to rescue an additional undetermined number of children – had asked him not to make further comments.

The children rescued this week are presently in Inam custody, said the institution’s president, Nancy Montero. The Ecuadorean Embassy is collaborating in locating their families back home.

Maria Marta and Maria Gladys, the two young cousins who escaped last month and were given refuge by a neighbour family, shed some light on the network’s modus operandi.

The two girls were brought to Venezuela two years ago, at the ages of 12 and 15, after members of the network promised their parents that they would be sent 130 dollars a year out of the girls’ wages, and that their daughters would receive training and be well-fed and cared for, with “a clean bed to sleep in.”

But things looked very different in Caracas, where the cousins ended up after being smuggled across the Ecuadorean and Colombian borders. They found themselves working more than 12 hours a day in exchange for two filled corn flour pies as vendors in two large informal street markets, one of which was closed down early this month. And their parents apparently never received the promised remittances.

Police Commissioner Nerio Rengifo, chief of the Division against Organised Crime, said several of the detainees had been living in Venezuela for around 10 years, and had presumably been smuggling children for the past five.

The girls said Ramirez, allegedly a member of the Metropolitan Police force, protected the network, giving the go ahead for the minors to arrive at the markets or engage in their other activities while avoiding controls and inspections.

It was Ramirez who staged an unsuccessful search for the two cousins after they escaped. According to other reports he had recaptured other minors who attempted to flee their exploiters in the past.

In February 1997, Teran denounced that hundreds of Ecuadorean children were brought to Venezuela, mainly Caracas, where they were exploited and worked as slaves in private homes and street markets.

He added at the time that on occasions, the victims were also forced to work as prostitutes and participate in criminal activities, and were hidden away in crowded slums and poor neighbourhoods.

While the superficial probe conducted at the time failed to come up with results, witnesses in areas swarming with street vendors told IPS that children panhandling or selling merchandise had said they were from Ecuador.

In a story on the problem of child labour published a few years ago, the now defunct daily ‘Diario de Caracas’ discussed the Ecuadorean origin of minors who could be seen improvising songs on street corners throughout the city.

A survey conducted by Inam indicated that 72 percent of the children forming part of the Venezuelan labour force worked in the informal sector, while four percent were involved in illegal activities such as drug smuggling, robbery or prostitution.

At least 28 percent of child workers are under the age of 12, and around 11,000 girls over 13 are exploited as commercial sex workers. Seventy percent of child workers are subjected to double or triple workdays, without rest, described as “outright human exploitation” by the president of Inam.

Meanwhile, Venezuelan law bars children under the age of 14 from working.

 
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