The sobering reality of child trafficking

 

Larry Lambert writes:

DRSZ teaches in the humanities and one of his interests has been alien smuggling. On the order of 12 years ago, DRSZ reached out to me and asked me if I had something that he could write a paper on. Something that he could publish and present to other academics at conferences. I asked if it had to deal with snakeheads and Asians and he said that it didn’t.

I explained how the system worked in Tijuana at the time. Mexican traffickers traveled throughout Central America and Mexico buying children from families who had many children and could not afford to feed or house them. The going rate was US$20-35 in local currency. The traffickers posed as priests and nuns and promised to take the youngsters (pre-teen) to a better place. SZ was intrigued. Could he meet the smugglers and the slaves? Of course. He could even buy a child at the going rate then which was US$75-150 in Tijuana.

I knew/still know the MEXGOV official who oversees this so we went to TJ and met G. G is his name and also stands for Gordo. G took DRSZ to the building where the children were housed. Once purchased they had a no-return policy. Snuff the child or do whatever but they didn’t want them back when you were done with them. SZ met the alien smugglers and the slaves. The smugglers had people among them dressed in police uniforms to convince the children that going to the police for help was a bad idea.

There's more at the link.  Go read the whole thing.

Larry's not exaggerating at all.  I saw the beginning of one of the child smuggling pipelines in Africa, where "excess" children are sold by their parents, or stolen from refugee camps where their parents can't always keep track of them.  If they're pretty, they'll end up as sex slaves;  if they're not, they'll end up as regular slaves, worked to death to extract minerals or labor in dangerous factories.  There are regular markets in the Middle East and north Africa where those in the know can gather to examine the "merchandise" and bid on it.  From there, the children are smuggled into First World nations where they're sold or rented out to the highest bidder.

Many of the illegal aliens coming across our southern border are accompanied by children, because they get better treatment that way from the authorities here.  Relatively few of those children are related to those with whom they're found.  Furthermore, when "relatives" in the USA claim them, there's seldom any DNA testing done to ensure that they are, indeed related.  Commonly, they're not.  The children are simply being moved along the pipeline to where their "owners" can make the most money out of them.  Nobody in authority seems to care about that, or have the time to verify that the children are OK.

Most terrifying of all is that many of these children will be used for sexual abuse.  Nobody knows them;  nobody wants them - so when the abusers have done with them, they can be "disappeared" without anybody in authority knowing they even existed.  The bodies can be hidden in many ways and places, or even used to make more money.  (I read of one investigation into the ingredients of a popular brand of dog food in another country.  You don't want to know what they discovered.  It never made the headlines.)

I regard child kidnappers or sellers in the same light as child abusers.  Prison is far, far too good for them.

Peter