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Speaking as part of St. Mary’s University (StMU) President’s Peace Commission symposium, “Trafficking in Humans,” Coonan’s presentation on “Seeking Solutions: Making Laws Work,” was peppered with actual cases here in the United States, including ones he had personally been involved with.
Coonan’s background covers human rights work in Russia, Thailand, Kazakhstan and Central America (including torture victims in Chile); working for human rights with the United Nations in Geneva; serving as an advisor to U.S. judges on immigration and refugee laws; and founding the FSU Center for the Advancement of Human Rights, where he was a lead investigator on the report “Florida Responds to Human Trafficking.”
Slavery in America did not end with the Civil War, Coonan related, but instead this “ancient evil” has emerged in new forms equally as chilling. Hearteningly, however, human rights groups, law enforcement and numerous community service providers have joined forces in recent years in response.
Human trafficking today is not based on the color of one’s skin, said Coonan. “It’s based rather on exploiting some kind of vulnerability. And, for the most part, that vulnerability is that someone is illegally here in the United States.” These people are threatened by the traffickers, today’s “slavers,” either with physical harm or by the threat of being reported to the immigration authorities and deported.
He noted 95 percent of U.S. human trafficking cases investigated involve illegal or undocumented immigrants. “Whether it’s sex trafficking, which is forced prostitution, whether it’s labor trafficking, which could be forced to work on a farm or in a factory or sweatshop, the dynamic is almost exactly the same in every case,” he said. “It’s a person who thinks, ‘I have to pay off this money to my trafficker — and until then I’m a slave.’”
With $9 billion a year generated through human trafficking, Coonan observed that human trafficking is now second only to drug trafficking in organized crime throughout the world. The reason for its staggering growth in the past 10 to 15 years, he said, can be found in two occurrences: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the tenfold increase in poverty worldwide.
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, borders became easier to cross, with smugglers (who often became human traffickers) being the first to benefit from this. Grinding poverty has also fed the human slave trade. “We have desperately poor people who are willing to cross international boundaries,” said Coonan, “go to places where they don’t speak the language, where they don’t know anyone, where in fact they entrust their very lives to a human trafficker who has promised them a job and ends up being a person who exploits them.”
He spoke of the Cadena Case in Florida, in which around 60 girls between the ages of 14 and 20 were promised jobs in restaurants, hotels and nursing homes by their traffickers, but were instead forced into prostitution. The FSU Human Rights Center’s pro bono lawyers represented these young women when the case came to trial and learned the girls had been recruited in Mexico by what appeared to be attractive, successful-looking women in their 30s.
Driving nice cars, wearing fashionable clothes and flashing diamond rings, these women would tell the girls and their families how they themselves had been brought to the United States by the Cadena brothers, adding, “And look at me now!” The women also told of being able to send thousands of dollars home to their families.
“All those young girls and their families thought they had hit the jackpot,” said Coonan. “What awaited them was not a better life. In fact it was not the ‘American dream.’ It was more the ‘American nightmare.’” After crossing the border, they wound up being gang raped, beaten and starved in Houston brothels or in “safe houses” for two weeks before being transported to Florida for work as sex slaves.
In Florida, they were taken to brothels consisting of trailers on the edges of migrant farm worker camps and forced, mostly at gunpoint, to have sex 35 to 50 times a day up to 16-hours a day. Every two weeks they were rotated to a new brothel. Eventually the guns were not needed, as the threat of harm to their families back home was enough to keep the girls in subjugation.
The two requirements that define human trafficking, noted Coonan, are that the labor be forced and that the victim be unable to leave it. It could take the form of forced sex, working as a nanny or cook in a private home, or laboring in a sweatshop or factory or on a farm.
With the alarming number of human trafficking cases coming to light, Congress realized a new definition of slavery was required for prosecution and a new law, the Trafficking Victim Protection Act (TVPA), was passed in 2000. It redefined slavery as being held captive either by force, fraud or coercion, including psychological coercion.
“Up until then,” said Coonan, “if you trafficked heroin into the United States, you could get a life sentence, but if you trafficked a 13-year-old girl into the United States, prior to 2000, you could only get a three or four year sentence.” Needless to say, traffickers switched from smuggling drugs to smuggling human beings.
Human traffickers, said Coonan, are basically business people looking at the bottom line.
“None of them ever grew up thinking, ‘Gee, when I grow up, I want to be a human trafficker,’” he said. “No, they all just want to make a lot of money and they want to make it as quickly and efficiently as possible.” With human trafficking having become one of the most lucrative illegal businesses worldwide in recent years (including in the United States), these people have naturally gravitated to it.
The passage of the TVPA also changed the way we look at illegal immigrants, Coonan, noted. Now, victims who have entered the country illegally have the opportunity to become legal if they assist in the prosecution of their traffickers and can even bring over their families to join them.
Coonan related that we actually do not know how many “slaves” are currently being held in the United States. At one time it was estimated that as many as 50,000 women and children were being trafficked in yearly. “What we think though,” he said, “is that the victims that we do see are just the tip of the iceberg.”
So few are ever found and emancipated because the victims are not aware of their rights through the TVPA. They also fear law enforcement, having come from countries where the police or government is often corrupt. Additionally, they feel they must pay off their debt to their traffickers or their families back home will suffer.
While women trafficked from Mexico and Central America tend to owe between $2,000 to $3,000 for their crossing, Coonan noted that women brought in from Asian countries typically owe $40,000 to $50,000. Many recent busts have discovered Korean women working in massage parlors in Dallas, San Francisco and Los Angeles, where they were actually sex slaves paying off the debt they incurred in coming to the United States.
Russian women usually owe around $10,000 to $15,000, and Coonan related their prevalence along the Florida coast, where the Russian mob has bought up the majority of strip clubs from Miami to Palm Beach. The girls are told they can make hundreds of dollars a night as exotic dancers (supposedly considered “high brow” entertainment in Russia), but once here they are forced into prostitution.
“In every single instance, though,” Coonan said, “we found that the debt never goes down.” The victims, whether men or women, are charged for everything — $20 for a bar of soap, $10 a day for rice. “It’s the old notion of the company store,” he said. “The victims will be charged for everything they use or need and that is added to their debt.”
Traffickers have been extremely creative in achieving their ends, he said. Notable was a case in which hundreds of farm workers from Mexico and Central America were smuggled over the Arizona border, where they were met by busses with mechanics aboard to ensure speedy repair of any breakdowns on the way to Florida.
In Florida the Ramos brothers, former fruit pickers themselves, moved 700 slave laborers from field to field and state to state for two years. The workers fell victim to the same debt servitude, being charged for their daily rides out to the fields and the tools they used. They slept on concrete floors in labor camps surrounded by barbed wire (placed to keep them in) with locks on the outsides of doors and windows. This, noted Coonan, was a good clue that these laborers were being held against their will.
Other indicators of forced labor are observing domestic help who never leave their employer’s house or German shepherd dogs guarding farm laborers’ quarters, he said.
“The difference between people who simply owe a debt and trafficking victims is that trafficking victims are not free to walk across the street and work somewhere else to pay off that debt,” said Coonan. He also pointed out the difference between smuggling and trafficking. A smuggler gets his money up front and the relationship ends when the person has been brought into the country. With a trafficker, victims are told they can pay later, but wind up working off their debt under the trafficker’s control.
Immigrants are not the only victims of trafficking, however, with U.S. citizens being subjected to it as well, Coonan said. He went on to describe the area around Disney World in Florida as a haven for homeless teen-agers from around the country, with traffickers cruising the streets there for runaway or homeless teens to force into sex trafficking or other forced labor situations.
In another Florida case, human traffickers recruited crack-addicted men from homeless shelters, keeping them in virtual bondage picking oranges. The men were paid in crack cocaine and beaten the rest of the time to keep them working.
A case in Atlanta involved a colorful pimp who put together a prostitution ring. Thinking he was avoiding prosecution under the Mann Act (with its stiff penalties) by being sure none of the women he used (or even the cars or condoms involved) crossed state borders, he was ultimately able to be prosecuted under human trafficking.
A number of different tactics are being used to make victims aware of their rights, and Coonan has found himself advising telenovelas on creating plots involving human trafficking. A campaign in Florida has placed anti trafficking messages, along with hotline numbers for victims, inside hard candy wrappers and on Band-Aids handed out at emergency rooms, where forced laborers are more likely to be taken. Messages are also being placed inside women’s restroom stalls, at bus stops, highway stops and in restaurants — places to which a victim might have likely access.
Law enforcement is not set up to handle long-term care of victims, Coonan noted, with victims in the past often held in jails after being emancipated — not the best situation for people already leery of law enforcement. “Not surprisingly, most of those victims did not want to take part in prosecutions,” Coonan said, “because they felt like they had just exchanged one master for another.”
In recent years, however, human rights groups have begun working with law enforcement to help victims. These community groups, immigrant advocacy groups and community coalitions (many of which are congregations of nuns or priests) are providing facilities for victims’ security and helping them adjust.
“I’ve found that police care deeply about these victims,” Coonan said, “but ultimately they have to be about prosecuting and getting convictions.” Human rights groups focus on the victims’ ultimate good and helping them to heal. “Together, that makes for a very effective working coalition,” said Coonan, “and one that I think will probably be the future here in the United States of fighting this human trafficking.” |