Inside Human Trafficking in Mexico

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Guatemalan army stole children for adoption, report says

(CNN)   The Guatemalan army stole at least 333 children and sold them for adoption in other countries during the Central American nation’s 36-year civil war, a government report has concluded.

Many of those children ended up in the United States, as well as Sweden, Italy and France, said the report’s author and lead investigator, Marco Tulio Alvarez.

In some cases, the report said, parents were killed so the children could be taken and given to government-operated agencies to be adopted abroad. In other instances, the children were abducted without physical harm to the parents.

“This was a great abuse by the state,” Alvarez told CNN on Friday.

Investigators started examining records in May 2008 for a period that spanned from 1977-89, said Alvarez, the director of the Guatemalan Peace Archive, a commission established by President Alvaro Colom.

Of 672 records investigators looked at, Alvarez said, they determined that 333 children had been stolen. The children were taken for financial and political reasons, he said.

Alvarez acknowledges that many more children possibly were taken. Investigators zeroed in on the 1977-89 period because peak adoptions occurred during that time frame, particularly in 1986. They will investigate through 1995 and hope to have another report ready by early next year, he said.

A presidential ministry has determined that about 45,000 people disappeared during the nation’s civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996. About 5,000 of those were children, the ministry said. Another 200,000 people died in the conflict between the leftist guerrillas and right-wing governments.

The nation’s public ministry and attorney general’s office will determine whether anyone is prosecuted over the abductions, Alvarez said.

Asked if he would like to see prosecutions, Alvarez answered, “I hope so.”

Alvarez said he has attended several reunions of abducted children — now adults — and family members.

“I can’t tell you how happy that makes me,” he said.

Adoption has served as a source of income in Guatemala for decades. The war just made it easier for abuses at the hands of soldiers to occur.

Guatemala has the world’s highest per capita rate of adoption and is one of the leading providers of adoptive children for the United States. Nearly one in 100 babies born in Guatemala end up with adoptive parents in the United States, according to the U.S. consulate in Guatemala.

Adoptions can cost up to $30,000, providing a large financial incentive in a country where the World Bank says about 75 percent of the people live below the poverty level. Officials fear that often times mothers are paid — or coerced — into giving up their children.

Some unscrupulous lawyers and notaries, who have greater power in Guatemala than they do in the United States, have taken advantage of the extreme poverty and limited government oversight over adoptions to enrich themselves. Alvarez said corrupt lawyers and notaries were the driving force behind many of the army abductions of children.

The problem is confounded because many Guatemalan parents can’t provide for their children. The United Nations’ World Food Programme says Guatemala has the fourth highest rate of chronic malnutrition in the world and the highest in Latin America and the Caribbean. Chronic undernutrition affects about half of the nation’s children under the age of 5, the U.N. agency said.

Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom Caballeros declared a state of national calamity this week because so many citizens do not have food or proper nutrition.

Despite the nation’s problems, Alvarez hopes some good will come of the report, which was released Thursday.

“We have to tell the truth about what happened,” he said. “Guatemalan society must know what happened and must never allow it to happen again.”

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/09/12/guatemala.child.abduction/index.html

Conspiracy Of Silence

Conspiracy of Silence, a documentary listed for viewing in TV Guide Magazine was to be aired on the Discovery Channel, on May 3, 1994. This documentary exposed a network of religious leaders and Washington politicians who flew children to Washington D.C. for sex orgies.

Many children suffered the indignity of wearing nothing but their underwear and a number displayed on a piece of cardboard hanging from their necks when being auctioned off to foreigners in Las Vegas, Nevada and Toronto, Canada.

At the last minute before airing, unknown congressmen threatened the TV Cable industry with restrictive legislation if this documentary was aired. Almost immediately, the rights to the documentary were purchased by unknown persons who had ordered all copies destroyed.

A copy of this videotape was furnished anonymously to former Nebraska state senator and attorney John De Camp who made it available to retired FBI Agent Ted L. Gunderson. While the video quality is not top grade, this tape is a blockbuster in what is revealed by the participants involved.

See for yourself…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggxiBWv4xYE

‘They stole my little girl,’ says mother judged too stupid to care for her baby

(DAILY MAIL)   A young mother who was judged too stupid to care for her own baby has accused social workers of ‘stealing’ the child from her.

The woman, who must be identified only as Rachel for legal reasons, is taking her case to the European Court of Human Rights in a last ditch attempt to halt the adoption of the child, now aged three.

She has told the Mail that she was bitterly unhappy with her treatment at the hands of social workers at Nottingham City Council.

Her daughter, referred to only as K, was born three months prematurely with severe medical complications. Officials felt the first-time mother lacked the intelligence to cope with the child and care for her in safety.

K was eventually discharged from hospital and given to a foster family.

But although her health has now improved to the point where she needs little or no day-to-day care, the child is due to be handed to adoptive parents within three months.

Rachel will then be barred from further contact.

The adoption is going ahead despite a recent psychiatrist’s report which declared that the 24-year-old has ‘good literacy and numeracy and that her general intellectual abilities appear to be within the normal range’.

It said the unemployed former cleaner had no previous history of learning disability or mental illness.

The single mother told the Mail that she had been ‘totally let down’ by the system.

She said: ‘Social workers and the psychologist keep saying I have got learning difficulties but I do not. They go after the wrong people. There are people out there harming children. All I want to do is look after mine but they will not let me.

‘That girl has been stolen from me. They might have stamped all the paperwork, but she has effectively been stolen from me.’

After a hearing earlier this month, a family court judge reduced her contact visits with K from 90 minutes every fortnight to five minutes a month in preparation for the adoption.

Rachel’s battle was compounded by the fact a psychologist concluded that her ‘learning difficulties’ would leave her unable to instruct her own solicitor.

As a result, Alastair Pitblado, the Official Solicitor, who acts for those who cannot represent themselves, was called in. He declined to contest the council’s adoption application, despite Rachel’s wish to do so.

A study last year found that Rachel’s IQ was rated at 71 – the IQ of an ‘average’ adult is 90-109.

Rachel will claim at the European Court that the lack of a fair hearing and the enforced adoption has infringed her human rights.

Social workers first raised doubts about Rachel’s parenting capabilities soon after her daughter was born with chronic lung disease and other complications.

They were ‘concerned’ that she initially only visited the baby for one or two hours each day.

K was discharged from hospital aged six months into the care of the foster parents she remains with today.

The child’s father, aged 66, has no contact with his daughter and he and Rachel are no longer together.

Rachel is being supported by Liberal Democrat MP John Hemming, a vocal critic of the family justice system.

Mr Hemming, MP for Birmingham Yardley, said Rachel had been ‘swept aside by a system that seems more interested in securing a child for adoption than preserving a natural family unit’.

The council wanted Rachel to remain anonymous, but she successfully argued that allowing her first name and picture to be used would allow the case to be discussed publicly.

The Daily Mail has long campaigned for greater openness in the family courts.

In February last year, Nottingham City Council conceded social workers had acted illegally in removing a baby boy two hours after his birth because no court order had been sought.

The council claimed that the mother’s troubled childhood and mental health problems threatened the baby’s welfare.

Nottingham City Council said that adoption cases were ‘decided by the courts, taking into account all the information presented by all parties and putting the future welfare of the child as the priority’.

Who will raise kids: Mom, Dad or state?

(WND)   Though efforts to pass a constitutional amendment protecting parental rights have failed in the past, two U.S. legislators are preparing to reintroduce the idea this week; and this time, they say, the effort is backed by more than 60 congressional members.

Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., who introduced a parental rights amendment by himself last year, told the Agence France-Presse that he will be joined by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., on Tuesday as they renew the fight.

Read more

Children in States Custody FOR JOB SECURITY

Jailing Kids for Cash

(AMY GOODMAN)   As many as 5,000 children in Pennsylvania have been found guilty, and up to 2,000 of them jailed, by two corrupt judges who received kickbacks from the builders and owners of private prison facilities that benefited. The two judges pleaded guilty in a stunning case of greed and corruption that is still unfolding. Judges Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan received $2.6 million in kickbacks while imprisoning children who often had no access to a lawyer. The case offers an extraordinary glimpse into the shameful private prison industry that is flourishing in the United States.

  Take the story of Jamie Quinn. When she was 14 years old, she was imprisoned for almost a year. Jamie, now 18, described the incident that led to her incarceration:

  “I got into an argument with one of my friends. And all that happened was just a basic fight. She slapped me in the face, and I did the same thing back. There [were] no marks, no witnesses, nothing. It was just her word against my word.”

  Jamie was placed in one of the two controversial facilities, PA Child Care, then bounced around to several other locations. The 11-month imprisonment had a devastating impact on her. She told me: “People looked at me different when I came out, thought I was a bad person, because I was gone for so long. My family started splitting up … because I was away and got locked up. I’m still struggling in school, because the schooling system in facilities like these places [are] just horrible.”

  She began cutting herself, blaming medication that she was forced to take: “I was never depressed, I was never put on meds before. I went there, and they just started putting meds on me, and I didn’t even know what they were. They said if I didn’t take them, I wasn’t following my program.” She was hospitalized three times.

  Jamie Quinn is just one of thousands that these two corrupt judges locked up. The Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center got involved when Hillary Transue was sent away for three months for posting a Web site parodying the assistant principal at her school. Hillary clearly marked the Web page as a joke. The assistant principal didn’t find it funny, apparently, and Hillary faced the notoriously harsh Judge Ciavarella.

  As Bob Schwartz of the Juvenile Law Center told me: “Hillary had, unknown to her, signed a paper, her mother had signed a paper, giving up her right to a lawyer. That made the 90-second hearing that she had in front of Judge Ciavarella pretty much of a kangaroo court.” The JLC found that in half of the juvenile cases in Luzerne County, defendants had waived their right to an attorney. Judge Ciavarella repeatedly ignored recommendations for leniency from both prosecutors and probation officers. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court heard the JLC’s case, then the FBI began an investigation, which resulted in the two judges entering guilty-plea agreements last week for tax evasion and wire fraud.

  They are expected to serve seven years in federal prison. Two separate class-action lawsuits have been filed on behalf of the imprisoned children.

  This scandal involves just one county in the U.S., and one relatively small private prison company. According to The Sentencing Project, “the United States is the world’s leader in incarceration with 2.1 million people currently in the nation’s prisons or jails—a 500 percent increase over the past thirty years.” The Wall Street Journal reports that “[p]rison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails.” For-profit prison companies like the Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) are positioned for increased profits. It is still not clear what impact the just-signed stimulus bill will have on the private prison industry (for example, the bill contains $800 million for prison construction, yet billions for school construction were cut out).

  Congress is considering legislation to improve juvenile justice policy, legislation the American Civil Liberties Union says is “built on the clear evidence that community-based programs can be far more successful at preventing youth crime than the discredited policies of excessive incarceration.”

  Our children need education and opportunity, not incarceration. Let the kids of Luzerne County imprisoned for profit by corrupt judges teach us a lesson. As young Jamie Quinn said of her 11-month imprisonment, “It just makes me really question other authority figures and people that we’re supposed to look up to and trust.”

www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090217_kids_for_cash/

State may compensate juveniles sentenced by judges in Luzerne

Washington Social Services Exposed – Browser logs and e-mails leaked

I found it hilarious that these emails whined about not having the tenth of November off and what to eat for lunch; however, the most interesting part about the emails is the template or form letters used to kidnap infants from the hospital.  Considering that a social worker really needs to have an infant taken from a hospital, shouldn’t they be writing the truth in a personalized letter to the hospital with the genuine reasons for ripping a child from their mother at birth?
 
It would stand to reason that if it is necessary to rip a newborn (who needs the mother’s antibodies in at LEAST the first three days of life) from their mother at birth, it would constitute a few moments to write an individual letter to explain why.  I encourage everyone to see their tax dollars hard at work in these emails.  There is a lot of repeating going on in them, but if you read through the entire thing, you will find everything I am discussing in this article.
 
Also, in the browser logs from the day our videos of the social workers were deleted, it showed that they were logging on to http://www.federaljack.com and http://serenahsangels.co.nr/ and our guess is that is how they came to know that we had the videos.  They searched for any information on the Berty family’s situation being publicized and did all they could to eliminate all evidence of their atrocious crime of kidnapping their newborn for no reason.  I wonder how they feel about the fact that we have the videos up on an offshore server that they cannot touch now.  One can only imagine.
 
C. Patience Summers can be reached at serenahsangels@yahoo.com

Child maid trafficking spreads from Africa to US

Shyima was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in northern Egypt to work in their California home. She awoke before dawn and often worked past midnight to iron their clothes, mop the marble floors and dust the family’s crystal. She earned $45 a month working up to 20 hours a day. She had no breaks during the day and no days off.

The trafficking of children for domestic labor in the U.S. is an extension of an illegal but common practice in Africa. Families in remote villages send their daughters to work in cities for extra money and the opportunity to escape a dead-end life. Some girls work for free on the understanding that they will at least be better fed in the home of their employer.

The custom has led to the spread of trafficking, as well-to-do Africans accustomed to employing children immigrate to the U.S. Around one-third of the estimated 10,000 forced laborers in the United States are servants trapped behind the curtains of suburban homes, according to a study by the National Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley and Free the Slaves, a nonprofit group. No one can say how many are children, especially since their work can so easily be masked as chores.

Once behind the walls of gated communities like this one, these children never go to school. Unbeknownst to their neighbors, they live as modern-day slaves, just like Shyima, whose story is pieced together through court records, police transcripts and interviews.

"I’d look down and see her at 10, 11 – even 12 – at night," said Shyima’s neighbor at the time, Tina Font. "She’d be doing the dishes. We didn’t put two and two together."

—

Shyima cried when she found out she was going to America in 2000. Her father, a bricklayer, had fallen ill a few years earlier, so her mother found a maid recruiter, signed a contract effectively leasing her daughter to the couple for 10 years and told Shyima to be strong.

For a year, Shyima, 9, worked in the Cairo apartment owned by Amal Motelib and Nasser Ibrahim. Every month, Shyima’s mother came to pick up her salary.

Tens of thousands of children in Africa, some as young as 3, are recruited every year to work as domestic servants. They are on call 24 hours a day and are often beaten if they make a mistake. Children are in demand because they earn less than adults and are less likely to complain. In just one city – Casablanca – a 2001 survey by the Moroccan government found more than 15,000 girls under 15 working as maids.

The U.S. State Department found that over the past year, children have been trafficked to work as servants in at least 33 of Africa’s 53 countries. Children from at least 10 African countries were sent as maids to the U.S. and Europe. But the problem is so well hidden that authorities – including the U.N., Interpol and the State Department – have no idea how many child maids now work in the West.

"In most homes, these girls are not allowed to use so much as the same spoon as the rest of the family," said Hany Helal, the Cairo-based director of the Egyptian Organization for Child Rights.

By the time the Ibrahims decided to leave, Shyima’s family had taken several loans from them for medical bills. The Ibrahims said they could only be repaid by sending Shyima to work for them in the U.S. A friend posed as her father, and the U.S. embassy in Cairo issued her a six-month tourist visa.

She arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on Aug. 3, 2000, according to court documents. The family brought her back to their spacious five-bedroom, two-story home, decorated in the style of a Tuscan villa with a fountain of two angels spouting water through a conch. She was told to sleep in the garage.

It had no windows and was neither heated nor air-conditioned. Soon after she arrived, the garage’s only light bulb went out. The Ibrahims didn’t replace it. From then on, Shyima lived in the dark.

She was told to call them Madame Amal and Hajj Nasser, terms of respect. They called her "shaghala," or servant. Their five children called her "stupid."

While the family slept, she ironed the school outfits of the Ibrahims’ 5-year-old twin sons. She woke them, combed their hair, dressed them and made them breakfast. Then she ironed clothes and fixed breakfast for the three girls, including Heba, who at 10 was the same age as the family’s servant.

Neither Ibrahim nor his wife worked, and they slept late. When they awoke, they yelled for her to make tea.

While they ate breakfast watching TV, she cleaned the palatial house. She vacuumed each bedroom, made the beds, dusted the shelves, wiped the windows, washed the dishes and did the laundry.

Her employers were not satisfied, she said. "Nothing was ever clean enough for her. She would come in and say, ‘This is dirty,’ or ‘You didn’t do this right,’ or ‘You ruined the food,’" said Shyima.

She started wetting her bed. Her sheets stank. So did her oversized T-shirt and the other hand-me-downs she wore.

While doing the family’s laundry, she slipped her own clothes into the load. Madame slapped her. "She told me my clothes were dirtier than theirs. That I wasn’t allowed to clean mine there," she said.

She washed her clothes in a bucket in the garage. She hung them to dry outside, next to the trash cans.

When the couple went out, she waited until she heard the car pull away and then she sat down. She sat with her back straight because she was afraid her clothes would dirty the upholstery.

It never occurred to her to run away.

"I thought this was normal," she said.

—

If you could fly the garage where Shyima slept 7,000 miles to the sandy alleyway where her Egyptian family now lives, it would pass for the best home in the neighborhood.

The garage’s walls are made of concrete instead of hand-patted bricks. Its roof doesn’t leak. Its door shuts all the way. Shyima’s mother and her 10 brothers and sisters live in a two-bedroom house with uneven walls and a flaking ceiling. None of them have ever had a bed to themselves, much less a whole room. At night, bodies cover the sagging couches.

Shown a snapshot of the windowless garage, Shyima’s mother in the coastal town of Agami made a clucking sound of approval.

"It’s much cleaner than where many people here sleep," said Helal, the child rights advocate. He explains that Shyima’s treatment in the Ibrahim home is considered normal – even good – by Egyptian standards.

Even though many child maids are physically abused, child labor is rarely prosecuted because the work isn’t considered strenuous. Many employers even see themselves as benefactors.

"There is a sense that children should work to help their family, but also that they are being given an opportunity," said Mark Lagon, the director of the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.

That’s especially the case for well-off families who transport their child servants to Western countries.

In 2006, a U.S. district court in Michigan sentenced a Cameroonian man to 17 years in prison for bringing a 14-year-old girl from his country to work as his unpaid maid. That same year, a Moroccan couple was sentenced to home confinement for forcing their 12-year-old Moroccan niece to work grueling hours caring for their baby.

In Germantown, Md., a Nigerian couple used their daughter’s passport to bring in a 14-year-old Nigerian girl as their maid. She worked for them for five years before escaping in 2001. In Germany, France, the Netherlands and England, African immigrants have been arrested for forcing children from their home countries to work as their servants.

In several of these cases, the employers argued that they took the children with the parents’ permission. The Cameroonian girl’s mother flew to Detroit to testify in court against her daughter, saying the girl was ungrateful for the good life her employers had provided her.

Shyima’s mother, Salwa Mahmoud, said her father believed she would have better opportunities in America.

"I didn’t want her to travel but our family’s condition dictated that she had to go," explained Mahmoud, a squat, round-faced woman with calloused hands and feet. She is missing two front teeth because she couldn’t afford a dentist.

"If she had stayed here in Egypt, she would have been ordinary," said Awatef, Shyima’s older sister. "Just like us."

—

On April 3, 2002, an anonymous caller phoned the California Department of Social Services to report that a young girl was living inside the garage of 28 Pacific Grove.

A few days later, Nasser Ibrahim opened the door to a detective from the Irvine Police Department. Asked if any children lived there beside his own, he first said no, then yes – "a distant relative." He said he had "not yet" enrolled her in school. She did "chores – just like the other kids," according to the police transcript.

Shyima was upstairs cleaning when Ibrahim came to get her. "He told me that I was not allowed to say anything," said Shyima. "That if I said anything I would never see my parents again."

When police searched the house, they turned up several home videos showing Shyima at work. They seized the contract signed by Shyima’s illiterate parents.

Asked by police if anyone other than his immediate family lived in the house, Eid, one of the twins, said: "Hummm … Yeah … Her name is Shyima," according to the transcript. "She uh … She works – she works for us at the house, like, she cleans up the dishes and stuff like that."

Twelve-year-old Heba got flustered: "Yeah. She’s uh – my – uh – How do I say this? Uh … My dad’s … Oh, wait, like … She’s like my cousin, but – She’s my dad’s daughter’s friend. Oops! The other way. Okay, I’m confused."

Heba eventually admitted that Shyima had lived with the family for three years in Egypt and in California.

The police put Shyima in a squad car. They noted her hands were red and caked with dead, hard-looking skin.

—

For months Shyima lied to investigators, saying what the Ibrahims had told her to say.

She went without sleep for days at a stretch. She was put on four different types of medication. She moved from foster home to foster home. Her mood swings alarmed her guardians. In school for the first time, she struggled to learn to read.

Investigators arranged for her to speak to her parents. She told them she felt like a "nobody" working for the Ibrahims and wanted to come home. Her father yelled at her.

"They kept telling me that they’re good people," Shyima recounted in a recent interview. "That it’s my fault. That because of what I did my mom was going to have a heart attack."

Three years ago, she broke off contact with her family. Since then she has refused to speak Arabic. She can no longer communicate in her mother tongue.

During the 2006 trial, the Ibrahims described Shyima as part of their family. They included proof of a trip she took with the family to Disneyland. Shyima’s lawyer pointed out that the 10-year-old wasn’t allowed on the rides – she was there to carry the bags.

The couple’s lawyers collected photographs of the home where Shyima grew up, including close-ups of the feces-stained squat toilet and of Shyima’s sisters washing clothes in a bucket.

In her final plea, Madame Amal told the judge it would be unfair to separate her from her children. Enraged, Shyima, then 17, told the court she hadn’t seen her family in years.

"Where was their loving when it came to me? Wasn’t I a human being too? I felt like I was nothing when I was with them," she sobbed.

The couple pleaded guilty to all charges, including forced labor and slavery. They were ordered to pay $76,000, the amount Shyima would have earned at the minimum wage. The sentence: Three years in federal prison for Ibrahim, 22 months for his wife, and then deportation for both. Their lawyers declined to comment for this story.

"I don’t think that there is any other term you could use than modern-day slavery," said Bob Schoch, the special agent in charge for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles, in describing Shyima’s situation.

Shyima was adopted last year by Chuck and Jenny Hall of Beaumont, Calif. The family lives near Disneyland, where they have taken her a half-dozen times. She graduated from high school this summer after retaking her exit exam and hopes to become a police officer.

Shyima, now 19, has a list of assigned chores. She wears purple eyeshadow, has a boyfriend and frequently updates her profile on MySpace. Her hands are neatly manicured.

But in her closet, she keeps a box of pictures of her parents and her brothers and sisters. "I don’t look at them because it makes me cry," she said. "How could they? They’re my parents."

When her father died last year, her family had no way of reaching her.

—

EPILOGUE: On a recent afternoon in Cairo, Madame Amal walked into the lobby of her apartment complex wearing designer sunglasses and a chic scarf.

After nearly two years in a U.S. prison cell, she’s living once more in the spacious apartment where Shyima first worked as her maid. The apartment is adorned in the style of a Louis XIV palace, with ornately carved settees, gold-leaf vases and life-sized portraits of her and her husband.

She did not agree to be interviewed for this story.

Before the door closed behind her, a little girl slipped in carrying grocery bags. She wore a shabby T-shirt. Her small feet slapped the floor in loose flip-flops. Her eyes were trained on the ground.

She looked to be around 9 years old.

—

EDITOR’S NOTE – This story is based on interviews in Los Angeles, Irvine and Beaumont, Calif., and in Cairo and Agami, Egypt, in September and October. In addition to interviews with Shyima, her mother and nine of her brothers and sisters, the AP also interviewed her neighbors in Irvine, law enforcement officials and the lawyer who prosecuted her case. Quotes and scenes were observed by the reporter or described by Shyima and confirmed in police transcripts and court records.

© 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081228/ap_on_re_af/the_slave_next_door

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