MEXICO.- Rafael Villoro closed the lens of his camera and began to film. It was night and he was an expert in discreet recordings. He would go unnoticed, he was sure. There was hardly any light on Coahuila street, the prostitution area of the city of Tijuana.
“They were all girls between 000 Y 15 years”, recalls the cameraman.
At that time, prior to the pandemic, he worked for one of the national broadcast television stations whose name he omits so as not to violate the legal labor agreements.
The red light of the camera flickered discreetly, a flashing light observed by one of the girls That girl shouted: “They are recording us”.
What followed was a melee: young girls running into a house, patrol sirens , agitated men… Why did the police show up so fast?
Villoro was accompanied by a producer, who got into the truck. The cameraman threw his equipment to the bottom of the trunk, threw clothes on top of it and when an unknown person approached to ask about the filming, he showed his phone.
He swore he had not started the recording and there was no longer anyone to contradict him. The policemen watched him.
“It was impossible for them to be there so soon without being involved in some way,” Violloro observed in an interview for this newspaper. “That is organized crime.”
The disappearance of 20,600 women in the present six-year period has as a background the trafficking of persons for prostitution among other crimes documented by various organizations of civil society and recognized by the authorities since shortly before 2018.
The Senate of the Republic, through its Belisario Domínguez research institute, documented with figures from the federal public ministry that exist in the country at least 29 organized crime groups involved in this scourge for sexual and labor purposes that operate mainly in Mexico City and in 17 states of the Republic.
He specified that Puebla, Chiapas, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Baja California Norte and the State of Mexico concentrated 76% of the total inquiries initiated in the area to local Likewise, at the national level, it identified 363 municipalities considered to be highly vulnerable and 200 to be of medium vulnerability. .
“It does not take much science to know that, as soon as a criminal organization takes control of a square, one of its main targets are women”, said Kali Victoria, an activist against femicide in the state of Guerrero.
“That is very proven. In Iguala, for example, everything was calm, there were no problems and when the Guerreros Unidos arrived they began to kill and disappear our sisters, mothers, nieces and nobody wanted to investigate, the authorities did not interfere”.
Last week, we learned of the disappearance of Yoseline Patricio Vendrel, from 16 years old but not because of a complaint to the local prosecutor’s office, but because his friends and family took the Autopista del Sol, one of the busiest tourist routes from Mexico City to the port of Acapulco.
Yoseline Patricio was kidnapped by armed men on Friday morning 20 in May when she went to her school, the College of Scientific and Technological Studies of the State of Guerrero, accompanied by her boyfriend.
Two armed individuals intercepted the teenagers, beat the boy and then took the girl away in a Volkswagen type White sedan.
Another case that only became known due to the occupation of the public highway was that of Nancy Yuriko Velázquez, of 25 years. Friends, groups fighting femicide, and relatives waited twelve days for the girl to appear in Chicoloapan, but when they found the body of another woman, they feared that Yuriko would have the same fate.
For So they marched and blocked the Mexico-Texcoco federal highway for several hours to demand a response from the Attorney General of the State of Mexico to the complaint about their disappearance. “Nancy did not leave, Nancy was taken!”, “! We are missing Nancy!” exclaimed the people who participated in the mobilization.
But the response was the same from the authorities: “ He’s not here”.
The study by the Belisario Domínguez Institute detailed that “diverse testimonies show that in Mexico trafficking is a business made up of networks of complicity between the political, economic power, the organized crime with links between men who own sex businesses involved in politics”.
Cameraman Villoro suggests that there could even be some media complicity. “After I prevented them from seizing the footage in Tijuana, the television station archived them, they did not want to broadcast them.”
The National Human Rights Commission has documented payments of between 25 and 80 thousand pesos (about 1,200 and 4,000 dollars) to ministerial police to freeze an investigation into human trafficking and 800 thousand pesos to the municipal authorities to avoid victim rescue operations.
He also calculated payments of up to 100 thousand pesos ( about 5, 10 dollars) for the defense of those responsible for the crime.
“It is one of the most violent, clandestine and difficult to identify crimes, particularly due to the lack of complaints by the victims –mostly women, girls and people of sexual diversity–, in addition to the corruption,” said Mario Luis Fuentes Alcalá, invest igator of the University Program for Development Studies of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Testimonies of women rescued from the trafficking networks reveal that the lack of reporting has two explanations: they do not trust the authorities and they fear for their lives.
Villoro believes that the warning given by the girl when was seen filmed was driven by the intimidation of pimps. “At that age it is very easy to get scared,” she warns. “At any age if you are vulnerable to such powerful criminal organizations.”
The report prepared by the Global Initiative against Organized Crime that measures the levels of crime in the member countries of the UN , placed Mexico this year in fourth place of 193 countries with the most organized crime, only surpassed by the Congo, Colombia and Myanmar.
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