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MSNBC Undercover: Sex Slaves in America
 | Video |
 | The rise of sex slaves in America Dec. 3: The human trafficking industry is thriving. TODAY anchor Meredith Vieira shares one woman’s story of how she got lured into this life of prostitution. Today show |
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Look closely along the streets and highways of major American cities, and the trained eye can spot the tell-tale signs of sex for sale. While eager patrons may welcome a growth in secret brothels that advertise new girls every week, law enforcement sees a growing menace, where foreign nationals are forced into modern-day sexual slavery.
Maritza Conde-Vasquez, FBI Agent: You see a pretty girl, heavy makeup, sexy dress, and you automatically think she's enjoying what she's doing.
FBI agent Maritza Conde-Vasquez says the men who frequent these secret brothels should understand the girls they buy work under duress.
Conde-Vasquez: The truth is when you are told you're going to be here working as a prostitute, and if you don't do that they're going to kill your family, your children, your siblings, or they going to beat you up.They're going to kill you. That's enough to keeping you there. You don't have to be in chains, because the chains in this case are psychological, not physical.
In just 2 years, the Houston field office of the FBI has interviewed over 100 women who say they were virtual prisoners. Prisoners forced to sell their bodies for cash, 14 hours a day, 6 days a week.
Conde-Vasquez: They were usually young, as young as 14 years old.
Agent Conde-Vasquez, who heads the trafficking task force, says hundreds of young women are held here in these seemingly harmless looking bars and restaurants.
Conde-Vasquez: Cantinas do look very normal from the outside. And if you drive by one of them, you would not think more than, oh, what a busy business.
Carla Sanchez: He raped me. I didn't know him.
20 year old Carla Sanchez says instead of the restaurant job she was promised the man who brought her here from El Salvador beat and raped her within hours of her arrival in Houston.
Carla: He said, I'm gonna introduce you to some guys and you're going to drink with them because every drink you have goes toward paying off your trip here.
Sanchez says that Victor's Cantina, like dozens of other cantinas work like this. If a client bought a beer, it cost him 3 dollars. If the client wanted a girl, he had to pay 13 dollars for her beer. In the time it took that girl to drink that beer, he was allowed to touch her anywhere on her body.
Lucia Hernandez: He took me over to one of the clients who was a good friend of his. He said, look, fresh meat from El Salvador.
Just a few weeks after, single mother Lucia Hernandez said goodbye to her toddlers, Hernandez found herself in a cantina, surrounded by strange men.
Lucia: He grabbed my hand and swung me around. He put me between the man's legs. And he said, here, you can do whatever you want with her. The man grabbed me and put his hands on me. And I said, let go of me! He said, Jimina can force the women if they don't want it. But not me, I said.
Hernandez had left her successful bakery business in El Salvador, for what she thought was a well paying factory job. Instead like Carla and 20 other women, she found herself trapped in a squalid cantina. The devoted mother, who never drank alcohol and lived a respectful life, pleaded with her captor.
Lucia: I said, Walter, I don't like this work. I'm leaving; I'll pay you some other way. But I will pay you. He said, don't forget, you have 2 months to pay me back. $6500. If you don't pay me back in 2 or 3 months it'll be $9000. He said, you can't leave here. I said, why, if I'm still going to pay you with what I owe. He said, just see what happens if you try to leave. I'll go after your family.
Agent Conde-Vasquez says, traffickers view women as human ATMs. If the $13 beers aren't enough, they offer patrons access to private rooms in the back of the cantina.
Conde-Vasquez: That's how the scheme worked. $65 for 50 minutes of sex, several times a night per girl. Some of them even have quotas to comply with. One of the girls was told you need to make a thousand dollars a night. Or if you don't, we're going to beat you up. You're going to be in trouble. And if you do the math, $65 per 20, 30 clients a night, that's a lot of money.
Lucia: Every time I started work I had to drink 5 or 6 beers. So that I wouldn't feel like I existed. So that I could escape.
Every month the girls were given birth control injections. If the girls became pregnant, they were forced to have an abortion. Just how brutal were the traffickers? The FBI says a 16 year old girl who arrived from El Salvador, 5 months pregnant, was forced to have an abortion. She took this picture to remember her child.
Jose Benitez: This girl could be my sister.
Jose Benitez provides services for victims of human trafficking and forced labor in Houston. He says ruthless traffickers have no qualms exploiting children recruited outside their high schools.
Jose: One day I saw one girl. She's 15 years old. And I asked her how many men she has had in her life. She told me, more than 200, and believe me, she reminded me of my daughter. And this is- (crying), I don't want to remember this story because it makes me cry. Because I saw her body, you know? I was in the hospital when I saw her like this; very bad.
For the 100 women and young girls held in the Mondragon cantinas freedom came in the form of a late night raid, when the Harris County task force stormed the cantina.
Lucia: Immigration and the FBI raided us. They surrounded the whole cantina. I wanted to escape through the back door. When I ran there was a helicopter shining a light down on us. I turned around and they told me if I ran they would shoot me so I stopped. They brought us back inside. One of the agents hit me and pushed me and I fell on the carpet. He treated us like animals.
Fear and suspicion of law enforcement kept both women from initially disclosing their stories. So they were kept in jail for 6 months until agents convinced them to cooperate and testify against their trafficker.
Today, nearly a year after their traffickers were convicted, the women's visas are about to expire. And they fear the long arm of Central American organized crime, where it costs less than $100 to kill someone.
Lucia: They could kill me for my statement and for telling the truth. I'm afraid for my children, my mother and for me.
Meanwhile, traffickers like Geraldo Salazar have alluded the authorities. The FBI believes he is traveling between Mexico and Houston and they have issued a $5000 for information leading to his arrest.
Agent Conde-Vasquez says the economic windfall that each women represents in a country hungry for cheap sex will only increase the likelihood of new victims every day.
Vasquez: How profitable is the business of human trafficking? When you have a kilo of cocaine and you’re going to sell it, once that kilo of cocaine is gone, you don't have anything. When you have a human being, you have a reusable resource. These human beings can be used over and over and over again, on a daily basis, maybe for years.
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