RIGHTS: Brazil Battles Trafficking in Human Beings

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, May 2 2002 (IPS) - Efforts are consolidating in Brazil to fight the trafficking of human beings, an illicit activity that involves more than 700,000 victims – mostly women and children – worldwide each year.

Multidisciplinary teams are already active in several Brazilian state capitals that are believed to serve as hubs for human trafficking, such as Recife, Salvador and Rio de Janeiro, all located on the country’s Atlantic coast.

The teams are creating databases, conducting investigations, providing training and mobilising the various entities involved with protecting citizens from falling victim to traffickers.

Delegates from the government, police, services specialising in preventing crimes against women, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are taking part in the effort.

The National Programme to Prevent and Combat Trafficking in Humans (TSH) was created in Brazil to fight this growing scourge, which today is only surpassed on the global level by illegal weapons sales and drug trafficking in the context of international organised crime.

Trafficking of persons moves some 5.0 to 7.0 billion dollars a year worldwide, according to the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention (ODCCP).

No country is immune to this problem, says the ODCCP. Trafficking in human beings has grown in the last decade to epidemic proportions, fuelled by economic globalisation, disappearing international borders, and pressure for cheaper labour.

The UN office cites a recent report from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which estimates that “45,000 to 50,000 women and children are brought to the United States every year under false pretences and are forced to work as prostitutes, abused labourers or servants.”

Trafficking in humans is growing fastest in Central and Eastern Europe, particularly in the countries that were part of the former socialist bloc or the Soviet Union. The victims are used mainly to supply Germany’s sex industry.

Brazil is believed to be among the leading countries of origin of these modern-day slaves, though the lack of hard data stands in the way of rigorous comparisons with the numbers of victims coming from other countries.

The Brazilian anti-trafficking programme, TSH, was launched in December with ODCCP support.

The European sex market is the main destination of the Brazilian women who fall victims to traffickers. Others also end up in Europe, working in relatively safer conditions as household domestics.

According to Brazil’s Federal Police, the routes most often followed by traffickers pass through the northeastern cities of Fortaleza, Recife or Salvador, the central-west city of Goiania or, in the south, Curitiba or Rio de Janeiro. They then head to Germany, Spain, Netherlands and Italy with their illegal human “cargo”.

“The dream of marrying a foreigner from a wealthy country seduces many young women,” facilitating the work of the traffickers, Carla Maldonato, psychologist at the Women Life Collective, an NGO in Recife, told IPS.

The TSH Programme invited the Women Life Collective, which has been working for more than a decade with marginalized girls and women, to participate in the multidisciplinary team due to the group’s efforts to fight sex tourism and to raise awareness about the risks of prostitution.

The sex tourism industry, which is very active in Recife and in neighbouring beach cities, is a principal “gateway” for women to fall victims to traffickers. Adolescent women do not recognise it as a form of prostitution and so are easily duped, Maldonato said.

Many young women who were attracted by promises of marriage and a better life, usually in Europe, have met a tragic fate, as in the case of a Brazilian woman who was stabbed by her German “boyfriend”, said the psychologist.

However, there are always a few lucky ones, and their success fuels the fantasies of other women to follow in their footsteps.

The reality is, however, that most victims of this illegal trade are kept in slave-like conditions in the country of destination.

The traffickers take away the women’s passports, threaten them with violence, charge them for travel expenses and other trumped up debts, keeping the women captive while forcing them into prostitution.

Men also fall into the trap, fooled by promises of a decent job that turns out to be “dirty work” that is dangerous and in conditions of servitude.

Sociologist Gabriela Cordeiro, technical adviser for the THS Programme’s centre in Recife, said that city was selected among the first for implementation because it is a key point in the trafficking of women and also of allegedly adopted children.

Experts at the Recife centre are currently investigating the apparently illegal adoption of 25 children who were sent to unknown destinations.

In the southern city of Paraná, the National Movement for Disappeared Children suspects that many illegal adoptions are being used to disguise the trafficking of minors.

Furthermore, along the border with Paraguay and Argentina, authorities have identified several trafficking networks that supply women to the neighbouring countries’ sex industries.

The ODCCP stresses the differences between illegal immigration, which involves some four million people around the world each year, and trafficking in human beings. In the first case, individuals act on their own volition in taking the related risks, though they may end up living in the same conditions as the victims of traffickers do.

But trafficking of persons can also take place within a single country, as is the case of many women who are tricked into working in the brothels in the mining areas of the Brazilian Amazon, and of men forced into slave labour in northern Brazil.

Fighting the illegal trade in human beings is difficult because the victims themselves usually refuse to report the crime or to provide testimony because they fear retaliation or being charged as an accomplice, or simply because they are ashamed, says Elizabeth Sussekind, Brazil’s National Secretary of Justice.

As a result, trafficking in human beings is a business that offers high profits and impunity, and is therefore attractive to organised crime rings. The Brazilian Federal Police have launched more than 1,500 investigations of suspected traffickers, but have brought few to justice.

A Madrid-based police office specialising in immigrants’ affairs met with similar frustrations, investigating 141 networks in 1998 believed to be engaged in human trafficking, but able to dismantle only a few dozen.