Borderline Slavery

Mexico, United States, and the Human Trade

Moira Murphy-Aguilar, Susan Tiano, Moira Murphy-Aguilar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409439684
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317173168
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Exploring human trafficking in the US - Mexico borderlands as a regional expression of a pressing global problem, Borderline Slavery sheds light on the contexts and causes of trafficking, offering policy recommendations for addressing it that do justice to border communities' complex circumstances. This book focuses on both sexual and labor trafficking, proceeding thematically from global to regional levels to provide an empirically grounded, theoretically informed, and policy-relevant approach, which examines the problem through the eyes of scholars and researchers from various fields, as well as journalists, public officials, law enforcement personnel, victims' advocates and NGO representatives. Discussing the multinational networks, global economics, and personal motives that fuel a multibillion dollar trade in human beings as cheap labor, Borderline Slavery suggests future directions for effective policies and law enforcement strategies to prevent the advance of human trafficking. As such, it will be of interest to both policy makers and scholars across the social sciences working in the fields of migration, exploitation and trafficking.

Part I The Global Context: Setting the Stage for Sex and Labor Trafficking

1 Introduction

Susan Tiano

DOI: 10.4324/9781315569727-1

Concern is building across North America about the growing violence along Mexico’s northern border. Thousands have died in the bloody conflict between the criminal networks and Mexican law enforcement that has ensued in the wake of President Calderón’s get-tough policies. Recognition is just beginning to dawn that border violence and the illicit trade that fuels it is not just about drugs and guns—it is also about human trafficking. Growing numbers of people are being transported against their will across the increasingly militarized but persistently permeable border between Mexico and the United States to labor in households, fields, factories, and brothels. Some travel to the borderlands from home communities in Mexico; some arrive after traversing Mexico from its southern border with Guatemala; others are shipped from Europe or Asia to northern Mexican border cities serving as entry points into the lucrative U.S. market for sex workers and other kinds of coerced labor.

Many traffickers obtain their victims legally via a labor contracting system established through guest-worker provisions within U.S. immigration law. Many victims begin their journeys voluntarily, paying smugglers huge sums to transport them to the beckoning U.S. labor market—only to become enslaved, exploited, and exchanged, often repeatedly, with the profits from their sale increasing with each transaction. Many are trafficked by the same networks that move drugs and other contraband, after being kidnapped from or sold by migrant smugglers (called “coyotes” or “polleros” in the borderlands) who have betrayed their clients’ trust. Many end up dead, used as pawns to manipulate rival trafficking rings, or killed for failing to conform to their traffickers’ dictates.

The steady stream of news about the border violence mostly focuses on drug trafficking and gun running, the better known forms of the illicit border trade. But accounts are beginning to emerge of humans who are being bought, sold, and transported through Mexico and across the borderlands. The world was shocked to discover the murders of 72 Ecuadorian, Guatemalan, and Honduran immigrants in San Fernando, Tamaulipas, a short distance from the border with McAllen, Texas, in August 2010. They were victims of Los Zetas, a criminal cartel known for dominating the illicit smuggling channel running up the Mexican gulf coast from Quintana Roo to Tamaulipas and into South Texas. The few survivors were unclear whether the group had been kidnapped by the violent cartel, or were instead delivered into its hands by unscrupulous migrant smugglers. But even if some media accounts have been reluctant to label the tragedy as a straightforward case of human trafficking (The Economist 2010), security experts have recognized the signs (Burton 2010).

Since then, a growing range of similar incidents has come to light. Tamaulipas is increasingly being seen as a “black hole” for migrant deaths in the borderlands (Pastrana 2010). In April 2011, the corpses of 183 murdered men and women, most of them migrants from Central or South America, were discovered in some 40 mass graves in San Fernando—the same town where the 72 migrants had been murdered eight months earlier. Their deaths were similarly attributed to Los Zetas, though the rival cartel, El Golfo, may also have been involved (Sicar 2011). In July 2011, National Public Radio investigator Jason Beaubien reported that some 150 Central and South American migrants had been captured, tortured, and held hostage for days waiting for their families back home to pay exorbitant ransoms; those whose families were unable to wire the funds were shot at blank range in front of the others (Beaubien 2011). While Tamaulipas is especially notorious for migrant victimization, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Baja California are also witnessing a growing plague of cartel-induced torture, extortion, and murder of migrants. Regardless of how the migrants had begun their journeys, they had ended them as victims of human trafficking.

Mexico’s role in the human trafficking chains that increasingly blanket the globe is not simply as a transit site for victims from Central America or elsewhere in the Global South attempting to enter the United States, either as their final stop or before being trafficked somewhere else. It is a destination country for many trafficked victims who remain in Mexico’s mines, sweatshops and brothels—or in upper-class households whose longstanding cultural traditions of domestic servitude can obscure evidence of human trafficking occurring in their midst. More often, Mexico serves as a source country whose citizens are absorbed in substantial numbers into the trafficking chains that transit the globe. In Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, a steady stream of teen-age women have gone missing—389 cases were reported in 2010, up from 326 in 2008 and 259 in 2009, according to an October 17, 2011, issue of the El Paso Times (Cárdenas 2011). Juárez is not alone; women and children are going missing all along the borderlands and in many other parts of Mexico. But whether it is losing its own young citizens or is becoming a murder site for uncooperative passengers en route to the United States, Mexico’s trauma is not always portrayed as human trafficking.

Until human trafficking is seen for what it is—the involuntary transport of men, women and children within and across national borders for purposes of exploitation, extortion, or other kinds of victimization—its looming presence in U.S.–Mexican borderlands will not be recognized to its full extent. Nor will we make much progress in tracing the intricate links between human trafficking, migrant smuggling, and the illicit trade in drugs, guns, and other contraband that can compound the dangers for trafficked victims. As long as drug trafficking takes center stage in media reports and political discussions of border violence; human trafficking is seen as something confined to women and youth forced into the sex industry; and the increasing migrant death toll in the borderlands is blamed on the migrants themselves and their “reckless” decision to allow themselves to be smuggled through a region dominated by drug cartels, human trafficking is unlikely to be recognized for the widespread and systematic danger it poses to growing numbers of men, women, and children in and beyond the borderlands.

This volume was written to dispel these and other misleading stereotypes and to shed light on the reality of the human trade. Faced with the irrefutable evidence that human trafficking is a reality in 21^st century United States and its borderlands, many within the academic, law enforcement, and victims’ services communities are calling for concerted political action to apprehend the perpetrators, rescue and rehabilitate the victims, and eliminate the practice altogether. A key component of this effort is to educate the public about the existence, nature, and scope of human trafficking so that they might become allies in the effort to end the practice. Human trafficking is occurring world-wide, with victims being trafficked to and from all of the world’s regions; but the conditions on the U.S.–Mexico border add a unique regional cast to this global phenomenon, and they need to be understood before effective strategies can be developed for halting its progress in the borderlands.

As long-time residents and scholars of the borderlands, we have produced Borderline Slavery with this end in mind. The chapters in this volume situate human trafficking within the global context that is encouraging its proliferation, and show how its manifestation in the U.S.–Mexican borderlands is assuming its own distinctive shape reflecting regional conditions. Mexico’s unique status as a key “portal” to the world’s richest economy for goods and people from Latin America and other parts of the world poses unique challenges for law enforcement efforts to thwart the lucrative trade in humans and other contraband commodities. Yet we are only beginning to understand how trends in Mexico are influencing and in turn being shaped by, the human trade. Our aim is to trace the contours of human trafficking in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands toward the end of illuminating the kinds of social changes, policy shifts, law enforcement strategies and victims’ services and advocacy that will be needed to confront the problem in the years ahead.

Clarifying Our Focus on Human Trafficking

During the past decade, human trafficking has morphed from an obscure or unknown practice into a salient social issue, as journalists have begun reporting on it and academics have attempted to study it empirically and explain it theoretically. Our growing awareness reflects not only the dramatic increase in the illicit human trade in the globalization era, but also the perceptual shift among politicians, law enforcement officials, and the public at large, as they abandon preconceived stereotypes that disguise or conceal it—such as the myth that slavery in the United States ended with the Civil War—and begin to see it for what it is: a widespread scourge that is destroying lives, wrecking communities, and endangering national security.

Human trafficking dwarfs most kinds of crime in creating public disdain and igniting punitive impulses. Who could fail to be horrified by the buying and selling of human beings in order to enslave them for power and profit? The fact that most recognized victims are women and children and that many are trafficked outside of their home countries to places where they are helpless in the face of foreign languages, cultures and legal systems, compounds public sympathy for the victims and disgust for their traffickers. One would think that a practice so alien to American values would mobilize a massive public outcry and a determined demand for law enforcement to devote the necessary resources to halt the practice—even though this might require taxpayers to dip into their pockets to foot the bill. Yet, as often as not, the U.S. media, politicians, and the public at large engage in “selective perception”: they just don’t see it for what it is because it is so antithetical to their cultural ideals of human freedom and equality.

So they confuse it with other phenomena: enslaved migrant laborers are simply undocumented workers who are in the country illegally; sex trafficking victims are merely prostitutes plying an illegal trade. With such conceptual sleights of hand, trafficking disappears behind other kinds of crimes, themselves neither effectively monitored nor consistently prosecuted, rather than showing itself for the real and growing social problem that it is. Misinformation and stereotypes feed this selective perception and the resulting masking of the problem behind other, lesser offenses: when traffickers can disguise themselves as “pimps” or “coyotes” rather than revealing themselves as traders in human beings, the human trade can continue to operate invisibly under the radar of law enforcement and public opinion. And when apprehended human traffickers receive the relatively light sentences meted out to petty pimps and smugglers, the threat of criminal prosecution offers little deterrence against the practice.

A key contribution to the cultural myopia that keeps us from facing the facts about human trafficking in North America is its confusion with one of the key “hot button” issues of the 21^st century—immigration and the complicated economic, political, and social issues that accompany this intensely debated phenomenon. The discussion is so raucous and politically charged that questions such as whether border crossers entered into their travel arrangements voluntarily or under coercion, become irrelevant. And it is easy for human trafficking to disappear behind the smuggling of undocumented workers because the latter is much more pervasive and politically salient.

The two are indeed closely linked. Undocumented immigration can fuel human trafficking in times like the present, when stepped-up border patrol attempts to apprehend undocumented crossers promote migrants’ reliance on coyotes—and in so doing, increase their vulnerability to trafficking networks such as Los Zetas or El Golfo, to which the human smugglers are increasingly connected. As Sandro Calvani and Olivia Jung convincingly argue in Chapter 3, when lawful immigration becomes ever-more restrictive relative to the number of cases seeking admission into the United States or elsewhere, this promotes both migrant smuggling and human trafficking. Yet while the intimate links between the two practices need to be understood to derive a more complete picture of the factors that promote human trafficking, conflating them does little to illuminate the complex forces promoting the human trade and the necessary strategies for confronting it.

This conceptual confusion between the two allows human trafficking to flourish under the radar of news reporters and law enforcement officials alike. When migrants’ bodies are exhumed from mass graves in Tamaulipas or found decaying in the Arizona desert, attributing their deaths to their unfortunate choice to place themselves in the inept hands of coyotes who carelessly put them at risk of cartel violence, belies the reality of how human trafficking rings operate in the borderlands. Traffickers often pose as mom-and-pop smuggling operations just long enough to entrap their victims, or they purchase their human cargo from unscrupulous coyotes at some point along the transit route. Migrants held hostage in order to extort their families for huge sums of money may have been “kidnapped” by criminal elements—but they are just as likely to have been victimized by their own traffickers-posing-as-smugglers.

Cartels like Los Zetas and El Golfo traffic in humans as well as drugs, weapons, and other kinds of contraband, and often force trafficked victims to act as “mules” to transport the illicit goods. Those who are murdered are often killed to punish them for their refusal, or to set an example to make others in their group more compliant. When investigators dismiss their cases as smuggling gone awry rather than the purposive and systematic strategies of human trafficking cartels, they unwittingly—or perhaps deliberately, if they are in cahoots with the traffickers, as some law enforcement authorities appear to be—perpetuate the conditions that allow human trafficking to flourish undetected. When this happens, the supply of unwitting migrants who are fodder for the trafficking cartels is undiminished because knowledge of the cartels’ ways of operating fails to percolate back through migrant networks to the victims’ home communities to deter others from taking the same risks. In this way, human trafficking in the borderlands continues unabated, hidden in the shadows of misinformation, selective perception, and stereotype.

Human trafficking needs to be acknowledged as a unique phenomenon that is shaped by different socioeconomic forces and responds to different kinds of preventive strategies, than the smuggling of undocumented migrants. The two practices may share certain similarities in that both are ultimately rooted in the desire for a better way of life and the willingness to travel to a new context in the hopes of achieving it. But the process and end points are drastically different: the smuggled migrant, once delivered to his or her destination, is free to experience the opportunities and pitfalls of the new context, while the trafficked victim is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• PART I: THE GLOBAL CONTEXT: SETTING THE STAGE FOR SEX AND LABOR TRAFFICKING
• PART II: HUMAN TRAFFICKING IN MEXICO
• PART III: HUMAN TRAFFICKING ALONG THE U.S.–MEXICO BORDER
• PART IV: COMBATING HUMAN TRAFFICKING: COORDINATED RESPONSES ACROSS COMMUNITIES AND BORDERS
• Index