My trip to Paraguay has ended, and after my conversation with local experts, they express their legal challenges in order to fight human trafficking:

1. Slavery and human trafficking is also forced labor. The law in Paraguay does not recognize that smuggling people into other countries for forced labor is human trafficking. The law focuses only on fighting forced sexual exploitation.
2. Lack of prevention and aftercare services. The law focuses on persecuting and sanctioning the crime, but not on protecting the victims, which makes it very difficult to guarantee social services and the protection of the victims of trafficking and slavery.

“Come and hear your fortune!” is what you read in a sign, without knowing that the fortune tellers may be trying to recruit you for forced sexual exploitation.

Lourdes Barbosa, a former governmental officer in Paraguay, explains that fortune tellers may tell their clients that they will have a travel opportunity accompanied with good economical gain. After the session, while walking in the street, a person will approach the victim and offer travel and job opportunities to Europe or the USA. The naïve victims usually feel that this is a sign and that they need to go for it. They do not know that, in the destination countries, they will land in the hands of traffickers.

Yesterday I presented at a conference in Asuncion, Paraguay in front of a group of people that all together represented more than 80 non-profits and governmental organizations.

A newspaper, ABC, writes an article about my talk: restoring people’s life is about them being able to re-imagine their own identity – especially if that identity has been for years of a slave – and to actively participate, with and for others, in the social, political, and economical decisions that affect their lives.

Read the entire article (in Spanish)

In Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, a group of homeless children were recruited to work at a shopping mall to help the customers carry their bags and to also clean the bathrooms, the floors, and parking lots of the mall. They were promised compensation from the shopping mall but what they got were only the tips from some of the costumers. The children were afraid of saying something to the owners because they knew that they could lose even the tips from the customers. However, a small group of courageous kids protested for their salary.

The owners immediately fired the protesters, cleared them out of the area, and did not pay them for their work. They made sure to tell everyone that letting the children receive a tip and stay in the mall during the day is more than enough because the streets are dangerous.

I met with CONNATS, a social movement of children run by children, that was created to protect working children’s rights and to prevent the exploitation and slavery of children. CONNATS decided that it was necessary to take this case to court because there is a corporate culture in Paraguay (and in the rest of the world) that makes children consent to unpaid work due to their necessity to subsist.

In order to compete, businesses may find ways to justify the use of coercion. Giving a street child something to eat, is an act of charity. But we cannot ask a child to work for eight hours as exchange for food when s/he has no other option. The recruitment of children by the abuse of a position of vulnerability for the purpose of gaining from their free labor is also slavery.

The children won the case, but the company has appealed the judge’s decision.