Children Forced into Prostitution in San Diego Agricultural Camps
En
Español
Girls
and adolescents are kidnapped and taken to San
Diego, where they are obliged to prostitute
themselves in agricultural camps
El
Universal (The Universal Newspaper)
Thursday,
January 9, 2003
Anabel
Hernández García (translated by Chuck Goolsby)
Courtesy
of El Universal newspaper from Mexico City
Part
I of III
SAN
DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - When Rick Castro, a deputy
sheriff for San Diego County burst in to the house
in Vista, a lower middle class neighborhood to the
north of San Diego, the first thing that he saw was
the destitute brown eyes of a slight girl no older
than fourteen, whose hair hung to the middle of her
back, dressed in a short black miniskirt and a white
tee shirt with the red and blue letters
"USA" on it.
The
officer was moved by her beauty, but was moved even
more by the look of terror in her eyes. Paola had
just arrived a few weeks ago at this house of
prostitution, dragged there from Morelos, Mexico by
the Salazar brothers. Julio, Tomás y Luciano
Salazar-Juárez are the dons of the largest local
network trafficking and sexual exploiting Mexican
girls and adolescents, who have operated for over
ten years in the agricultural camps and suburbs of
San Diego.
The
three men from the Mexican state of Oaxaca had found
in the land of opportunity the perfect place to
build their empire, trafficking from southern Mexico
to the U.S. border with their human merchandise. In
their path, they kidnap, extort, corrupt and violate
our national laws and those of the United States,
with nobody to stop them.
This
is the first of three parts of an investigation
conducted by El Universal, during which we received
testimonies, data, documents and physical evidence
showing the methods used by this criminal
organization, that according to our information has
extended its reach to Fresno, Nevada and New York.
Christopher
Tenorio, U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor for
the Southern District of California, and San Diego
deputy sheriff Rick Castro revealed for our
newspaper the details of how this gang operates. At
the end of 2001 the FBI began a formal investigation
against the Salizar brothers, whom were also
presumed to be involved in drug trafficking.
Hundreds
of girls, from 12 to 18 years old, originating in
Oaxaca, Michoacan, Morelos and Veracruz, have been
kidnapped or duped into being stripped of all of
their human rights and converted into sexual slaves
in local farm labor camps. The locations in San
Diego where this network operates are: Vista; Las
Casitas de Escondido; Las Antenas, Carlsbad;
Carrizales, Oceanside; Del Mar, and Los Gatos, in
Valley Center.
Paola,
the "USA" girl, having been filed away in
the gang's "system" was handled by Tomas
Salazar. During her few days in the American union
she had been passed through all of the exploitation
camps. Because of her beauty, she became
preferred merchandise, and day and night had to
service long lines of men, indoors and out. Of the
20 dollars that each "client" paid, she
never saw one dollar. Tomas keep all of the money.
The
houses of prostitution
This
is the largest prostitution outfit in all of San
Diego, deputy sheriff Castro assures us. Since 1996,
Castro, of Mexican ancestry born in the U.S., has
followed the tracks of the Salazar brothers.
"When I came to work with the sheriff, I was
the only one who spoke Spanish, so at that time they
gave me the task of investigating cases of child
prostitution. The case had been open for two years,
but no movement was made because none of the
officers spoke Spanish," recalls Castro, 39,
who today is the primary source of information for
the FBI. He spent months tracking Tomas and Luciano
Salazar. He photographed the houses in Vista where
minors were prostituted; he patrolled the highways,
tracking trucks full of clients going to the
exploitation camps, and he received testimony from
neighbors.
Three
years later, working with the INS and armed with a
court's search warrant, Castro entered the
prostitution houses located near Kelly's Bar on
North Santa Fe Avenue. He found dozens of women,
among them girls between 12 and 16 years old,
victims of commercial sexual exploitation.
"When
we went in we found record books tracking the number
of clients served by each woman and stopwatches to
limit their service to clients to ten minutes. We
confiscated dozens of empty boxes of condoms, each
box having held a thousand condoms. We were able to
calculate how many clients the house had and how
much money it generated. We also found refrigerators
full of beer, shelves full of alcoholic beverages
and handguns."
Deputy
Castro recalls that when they interrogated the
minors, the girls stated that they were older, 19 or
20 years old, "but their bodies and their eyes
reflected a much lower age." That's how deputy
Castro met Paola. The older women refused to testify
in court, but in exchange they did supply officers
with the addresses of other houses held by the
Salazars, and police were able to shut down 25 such
locations.
How
they get their victims
Nobody
knows how many people are in the Salazar
organization, but investigations by the authorities
reveal that this is an organized crime gang made up
of various components: the procurers, who locate
victims; the traffickers, who take them to the U.S.;
and the "big daddy's" (pimps) who conduct
the sex trade with their victims.
The
adolescent girls trafficked by the Salazar brothers
are poor in every sense of the word. They don't have
money, they don't have a future and they don't know
how to read or write.
The
Salazar brothers have various ways of procuring
their victims: they build an emotional relationship
with them; they convince the minor girl and her
family to let her be taken to the U.S. to work; or
they kidnap them. Many of the girls have children,
either by one of the three brothers or by other men.
These children are snatched from their mothers and
are kept as hostages. When a girl tries to escape,
she is told that her child will be killed.
To
transport these minor girls to the U.S., the
exploiters pay coyotes up to $1,500 each, deputy
Castro tells us. Usually, they are taken across the
U.S. border at Tijuana and Tecate. The main members
of the gang are: Miguel Hernández or "Tonatiuh",
Edmundo Zitlapopoca, and Arturo and Pedro López,
both from Atlixco, in Puebla [state].
The
three Salazars
The
Salazar brothers came to San Diego without a penny.
They began a "business" prostituting their
wives. Now their legacy is one of tales of the
cruel exploitation of children, the wads of dollars
that they take from the exploitation camps, and the
hellish punishment that anyone who tries to escape
them awaits.
Once,
in one of the Salazar brother's houses in Vista,
Julia, 17 years old, refused to work. Tomas, who
exploited her, closed the business and in front of
everyone else beat her with a hook until he ripped
flesh from her arms, legs and back. Tomas was
imprisoned for domestic violence and is serving a 20
year sentence, made easier by the thousands of
dollars that he continues to make every week from
exploiting women, even while behind bars.
Luciano
was detained at the end of last December [2002] when
he came to a wake with three of the prostituted
women. So far, he has only been jailed for being
undocumented, but according to prosecutor Tenorio
and deputy Castro, authorities have successfully
obtained evidence allowing Luciano to be charged
with exploiting minors, thus unmasking the network.
Julio
who is 37 years old, is the oldest brother and the
leader of the organization. He is the only legal
[U.S.] immigrant and has his own tow truck business,
which, it is rumored is used to transport drugs.
Deputy Castro notes that Julio is still free, and
that he is the worst one of them all.
Part
II of III
TRAFFICKING
AND SEXUAL EXPLOITATION
*
A sociologist relates one of the most dramatic
stories of prostitution. Reyna, after falling into
drug use and alcohol, later recovers her lost son. *
El
Universal (The Universal Newspaper)
Friday,
January 10, 2003
Nation,
Page 20
SAN
DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - The first time that Marissa
Ugarte saw Reyna was at the end of 2001, at the San
Diego Police Department. The 15 year old girl,
who looked 30, with her split lip and a eye swollen
shut from the beating that she had just received,
remained strong, in the pose of a fatalistic woman.
It was then that she began to reveal the past that
had worn her down, allowing a wounded child to shine
again.
Marissa,
the granddaughter of Salvador Ugarte, founder and
former owner of the commercial bank Bancomer, never
imagined when she came to live in this city five
years ago that she would be a witness to such a
criminal tale, without a happy ending, and would
spend hours listening to the most profound grief
that she had ever heard.
Who
would imagine that San Diego, a paradise for
thousands of children who year after year visit Sea
World, Wild Animal Park and the San Diego Zoo can,
for some children, turn into hell. This is the
dirty secret of this city, as the non-governmental
organizations call it, a secret that Reyna lived
through during seven months. Reyna was one of
the victims of the child sex trafficking and
exploitation gang that operates in San Diego, lead
by three Mexican men: Julio, Tomas and Luciano
Salazar-Juarez.
Marissa
began to hear rumors about the trafficking of
children, fake adoptions and the sale of children
when she worked in the DIF (Desarrollo Integral de
la Familia-The State System for the Full Development
of the Family) in Tijuana in 1997. She
heard that these children where being taken to San
Diego to be exploited to make pornography.
That
was until 2000, when she began her work as a
sociologist with EYE, an agency aiding children in
crisis in San Diego, where she began to be certain
about what was happening here. In this county,
from Escondido to Point Loma to Balboa Park, in the
heart of the city, all forms of illegal sexual
exploitation exist: child pornography; trafficking
in mostly underage male and female sex workers; and
high risk homeless children who prostitute
themselves to survive. This is due, says
Marissa, to the fact that this is one of the most
important military communities in the United States,
in addition to the fact that there is a strong
market for sexual services from farm laborers.
We
began to hear that an American 'corridor' for the
trafficking of children utilized for commercial
sexual exploitation existed, and, together with the
University of San Diego, Children's Hospital and the
legal counsel's office for San Diego County, we
created the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition for
the Prevention of the Commercial Sexual Exploitation
of Minors, which is now composed of 35 Mexican
and American organizations. Marissa is the
organization's Executive Director.
In
2001 the commission informed the Mexican consulate
about what was occurring in the farm labor camps.
Mexican girls and adolescents were being sexually
exploited by their own fellow countrymen.
"They ignored me, believing that the story
wasn't true, and that it was exaggerated. I
decided to go to UNICEF in Mexico to denounce the
abuses that were occurring. I was later called
by the Mexican consulate and they asked me for a
formal complaint supported by concrete
evidence." The consular official
contacted Rick Castro of the San Diego Sheriff's
Department, who had been investigating the Salazar
brother's gang during the past three years.
The Mexican Consulate made its formal complaint
directly to the U.S. Government, and demanded an
investigation.
"Three
weeks later, we got our first case," recalls
Marissa.
We
were called by a child protection network in San
Diego. We were informed that the network had a
girl who did not fit within the criteria used by the
Polinsky Children's Center, because the case
involved a girl who was a sex trafficking victim,
and they didn't know where to send her.
Marissa
contacted deputy sheriff Castro because the case was
from the neighborhood of Vista. The local
police department had received an emergency call
reporting that a young girl had escaped from
prostitution in the farm labor camps and had been
beaten by her pimp, Arturo Lopez, who worked for the
Salazar brothers.
When
the police found her she had a split lip, and she
was bruised and scared. "She wore a tiny
miniskirt and a jacket, and was so over-painted that
you almost couldn't recognize her real face.
She looked to be between ten and fifteen years older
than her real age. Her hair was short and dyed
brown, her mouth was small, she had the eyes of a
dreamer and a very seductive attitude.
"When
we began to interview her she broke down and out
came an agonized human being drowning in pain."
She was sent to a shelter for battered women.
The
Mexican consulate contacted the local U.S. federal
prosecutor and Reyna agreed to make a formal
criminal complaint. Starting at that point,
little by little, Reyna began revealing her story.
She was from Puebla, Mexico. She had barely finished
second grade. Her mother died when she was
seven years old. Reyna was then supported by
her grandmother, who also died. After that, her
father was left in charge of her. One day,
when she was 11, her own father gave her as a gift
to a local police chief who raped her without end.
After having been so neglected, and with a baby now
in her arms, Reyna met Arturo Lopez, from the town
of Atlixco in the state of Puebla. Arturo,
after pretending to fall in love with her, convinced
Reyna to work as a servant in the United States, for
which Arturo recommended that she leave her baby
with some of his relatives. Reyna had no other
options, so she accepted the offer.
Reyna
was taken to Tijuana, and while she waited to be
crossed over the border, she was forced, with
threats that her baby would be killed, to prostitute
herself in the red zone known as "la Coahuila."
She was finally transported across the U.S. border
by a coyote, Alonso Sapien, also known as "El
Chivero."
In
San Diego, Reyna came to live in a neighborhood in
Vista where she found other girls like her. A
week later she found herself in the sexual
exploitation camps for farm workers.
"The
real horror is in the sheer number of men that, at
the age of 15, Reyna was forced to serve as a
prostitute. In one hour she had to serve 20
men, and they made her work from 8 AM until 2 in the
afternoon. We are not talking about just
prostitution, but also about slavery, about the
violation of all of Reyna's human rights,"
noted Marissa.
Reyna
began to become physically sick. One should
understand that for any person who is forced to
submit themselves to being a victim of sexual
exploitation, the physical, emotional and spiritual
deterioration is profound. Reyna, to cope and
survive in that world, began to use drugs and
alcohol.
One
day, during the judicial process, Reyna became tired
of telling her story again and again to the
authorities, because each time she had to relate the
story she was forced to relive what had happened to
her.
"It
was a terrible re-victimization. What I did
was to stay with her two or three hours at a time,
but that wasn't enough. When she came to the
shelter she was drowning in her own pain, and then
the post-trauma began, as she recalled the tragedy
of her life from the time of her young
childhood," noted Marissa, who accompanied the
girl throughout the entire process. She still
remembers Reyna banging her head against the wall.
"One
day she came and asked me 'how is my makeup.' She
didn't have a drop of makeup on. That's when
she stopped being Reyna and returned to being the
little girl that she was. It took over nine
months for her to accept her real name. The
child could not take any more. The judicial
process stopped and the only thing that Reyna asked
for was that her child be returned to her.
During the middle of 2002, the Mexican consulate
began to search for her child.
In
Oceanside Arturo Lopez' brother Pedro was detained,
and he convinced his brother to turn Reyna's son
over to the Mexican DIF in Puebla. After
passing through numerous legal hurdles, the DIF
returned the child to Reyna.
At
the beginning of May, 2002, Adrian Martinez, a
Mexican consular official in charge of human rights
protection, traveled with Reyna to Tlaxcala to
recover her child.
"The
baby was now three months old, and actually didn't
recognize his mother. His first reaction was
to cry, but thirty minutes later he didn't want to
leave his mother."
While
Reyna was recovering her child, Marissa lost her own
child to a fatal cerebral tumor.
Today,
Reyna has obtained a "T" visa for victims
of trafficking, and she participates in a special
program for child victims of exploitation in
Phoenix, Arizona. Arturo Lopez Rojas, the man
who exploited Reyna, escaped to Puebla. It was
said that he would be charged but to this day
nothing has happened. The PGR (Attorney
General of the Republic) is investigating the case
in Mexico.
©
2003 Copyright El Universal-El Universal Online
Part
III of III
MINORS
ARE PROSTITUTED IN FARM LABOR CAMPS IN SAN DIEGO
El
Universal (The Universal Newspaper)
Anabel
Hernández (Third and final part of a series)
January
11, 2003
SAN
DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - Thirty five minutes outside of
San Diego is the suburb of Oceanside, which is
popular for it's splendid residential zone and its
commercial fields of strawberries bordered by fields
of golden reeds. This is where the nickname of
"the reed beds" (Los Carrizales) came
from. Here is where the "fields of love"
are located. That is what the Mexican criminal
gang of Julio, Tomas and Luciano Salazar-Juarez,
traffickers and exploiters of Mexican girls and
teens, called the exploitation camps where their
victims where taken to provide sexual services for
between 100 to 300 farm workers at a time. For
all of these "clients" there is service
every day, at every hour. We're taking about
prostitution in the open, without walls, nor
windows, nor beds nor sheets. There, on the
ground in "caves" made of reeds, is where
the only taste left in the mouths of these girls is
dirt, alcohol and the sweat of their
"clients."
"The
first time I went to the camps I didn't vomit only
because I had an empty stomach. It was truly
grotesque and unimaginable," recalls Patricia,
our fictitious name for a medical doctor who works
with government supplied resources, and who for the
last five years has been in contact with the Salazar
brothers, working to prevent HIV/AIDS and other
venereal diseases in these exploited minor girls.
"If
I wanted to help these girls I had to develop a
relationship with the pimps. I learned that in
the city of Guadalajara, where I worked for many
years. I had to convert myself into someone
who doesn't judge, who doesn't express opinions, but
only listens. At one point one of the Salazar
brothers took me to the girls in Los Carrizales
because the girls didn't come out of the fields to
meet me that time."
If
ones travels along North River Avenue, at first
there are only enormous houses valued at around
$300,000 dollars each. California-style
houses. Red tile roofs, painted from cream to
orange, with flowers in their gardens. Just behind
these houses are the fields of Japanese farmer
Victor Sang.
"To
get to the "fields of love" one has to
pass by the Super 7 and the CIT 60 gas station on
North River Avenue, at the corner of College
Boulevard.
A
few meters from the gas station, by the sidewalk of
a Baptist church, you find a sign marking the
location of an oil pipeline, which has a towel
wrapped around it. Beyond that are the fields
and a passageway.
It
is an area of fields of reeds so thick that you
can't see who is next to you. Once you enter
these fields, a kilometer from the street, the reeds
become thicker and you have to bend over to walk.
In
these dense reeds you will find around eight
"caves" made within the reed thickets, one
right next to the other. Pieces of plastic
bags are tied to the reeds. These are used by
the minors to throw condoms and the toilet paper
that they use to clean up with after each encounter
with a 'client.' After the bags are filled they are
disposed-of so as not to leave any evidence behind.
Within
the caves, on the ground, you find empty beer
bottles, boxes of liquor bottles, shreds of cloth,
pieces of blankets, plastic junk, hats, tee-shirts.
All deaf witnesses to hours of horror.
All
of this junk is mixed in with open condom packets
and dozens of used condoms that leak semen into the
ground. The musky smell floods the air, making
your stomach turn. This is hell... virtual
fields on fire. "When I came here, in one
hour I counted that one little girl had been with 35
men, one after the other. She just lifted her
skirt. It is just vaginal masturbation,"
notes Patricia. "Generally they do this
to the girls who are no longer virgins. They
spend six months being transported back and forth
through the various camps."
"The
girls that I saw that time [in the fields] were very
young, they were not over 14 years old. they had
been sold a lot to 'los gringos' (American
men)." "This area is full of red
necks, they are far right-wing white American men to
whom they sell the virginity of little girls"
notes Patricia.
I
was present many times when these gringos called
Julio [Salazar] asking to be sent a "cherry
girl" (a virgin).
It
is here, in one of the five corners of San Diego,
where the Salazar brothers have extended their
network.
This
is where Paola, Reyna and dozens of other young
girls were brought. All of them innocent "Eréndiras,"
[a character in a novel by Nobel laureate author]
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose deflowering was
motivated by greed.
The
ages of the girls that are brought here become
younger as time goes on, now starting at nine and
ten years old. "I once saw a seven year
old girl. What was a seven year old girl doing in a
place of prostitution? She wasn't anyone's
daughter, they were using her," recalls the
doctor in her desperation.
We
are talking about defenseless persons, who have
tragic life histories behind them. They live
in a condition of post-traumatic stress syndrome,
and in that condition they cede all authority to
their victimizers.
The
escape of Julio Salazar
It
was exactly here, in Los Carrizales, where one year
ago the gang of the Salazar brothers was almost
detained.
In
December of 2001, in an operation coordinated by the
U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS),
more than 100 INS and FBI agents and sheriff's
officers conducted a raid.
The
agents didn't dare to enter the reed fields for fear
of being ambushed, so they waited for the subjects
to come out of the fields.
More
than 50 people were apprehended. They included
five minor girls who were prostituted in the fields,
clients, and Julio Salazar, leader of the gang, who
during the confusion managed to evade the officers
and escape.
"A
lot of money is involved in this business, thousands
and thousands of dollars. I have seen myself
how U.S. INS agents have sex with these minor girls
for free, in exchange for protection. These
agents even enter the houses of prostitution in
uniform. May a lightning-bolt split me in half
if I am lying!" exclaimed the social worker
[Patricia].
The
minor girls were placed in U.S. INS detention, where
they were interrogated without the assistance of
psychiatrists who could have intervened in the
crisis. What the agents wanted was a formal
complaint against the Salazar brothers, allowing
them to be charged, but the girls declined to
cooperate. The girls were deported, and all of
the persons detained were freed.
"I
fought a lot with the U.S. government and they told
me that I shouldn't do anything, that I had signed a
federal agreement of confidentiality and that I
could not form a complaint from anything that I had
been told [in this case]."
I
understood that I could not stand up in face-to-face
confrontation like Samson, concluded Patricia.
The
deaths in Carlsbad
At
another location similar to Los Carrizales, in [the
San Diego neighborhood of] Carlsbad, during the last
two years the bodies of minor Mexican girls, with
signs of torture and abuse, have begun to appear,
San Diego deputy sheriff Rick Castro tells us.
Nobody
knows who these murder victims are. Nobody
even claims their bodies because it is presumed that
they are undocumented. They could be girls
trafficked by the Salazar brothers. Castro
assures us that he knows nothing about the case of
the murder of [hundreds of] women and girls in
Cuidad Juarez [Juarez City], Mexico, but given the
common pattern of the abuse of victims in both
cases, the modus operandi appear to be similar.
(c)
2003 Copyright El Universal-El Universal Online, México.
back
to Resources
