Belize Human Trafficking Victims तेल All

The first is Amelia’s story.

Amelia, a Guatemalan woman, came to San Pedro Ambergris Caye by way of Amigo’s bar, located in the center of town. She’d been trafficked and forced to drink with men and endure forced sex night after night.

She found some comfort in a man who was a dive master at Ramón's Village. He regularly went to ficha bars looking for women. He would also scout one out from time to time who he thought could look after his house and provide sex. In exchange, she had a room away from bar hell and had something of a home. She still had to work at Amigo’s.

Then one night Immigration officers were out just checking the bars, or taking a free drink with the San Pedro police. Amelia was working. found to be without papers, she was arrested and put in San Pedro Jail. All night long, she was sexual harassed by the police on duty. .

The Amigo’s bar owners had her documents, a common practice with trafficked women.
She hoped the bar owners would come for her. She hoped her lover from Ramón's Village would come to help her. No one came. She went to court, pleaded not guilty and was order to be held in Hattieville for three months because she could not post the $3,000 BZ bail required.

She pleaded with everyone, explaining she had papers that were held by the Amigo’s owners. No one cared. She went to Hattieville. Within days she found her only means of survival was to give in and sell herself to the guards and some of the other prisoners. That’s the way that prison works. It makes the ficha bars seem like a milder form of hell.

Ninety days later she was dumped on the streets of Belize and given two days to leave. No money, just the clothes on her back. No life. No exception. They are all treated that way.

Here’s how we found Amelia and others like her. Most had been convicted in San Pedro for the same type of crime, that is, immigration. We had a system where we paid Hattieville guards to keep track of non-Belizean women in the queue to be released.

We would find them just as they were being released and take them to a safe haven in Honduras where we would help them get the documents they needed to get back home to their families, like the one waiting for Amelia in Guatemala.

Here’s how the corrupt Belize system works. Send trafficked women to prison, with Hattieville getting money on a per-day basis. Hattieville kick s back money to the San Pedro police chief and the magistrate. Immigration gets a little cut and life goes on.

Hattieville Prison takes in over 400 human trafficking victims a year, netting this base institution over $400,000 (Belize) annually. They were paid $1,080 over 90 days to rob Amelia of her human rights. There is no price for Amelia’s story. We’re sending it out to our worldwide network free of charge.

For years, we’ve been in the business of hunting and rescuing women who are victims of human trafficking and who have been sent into slavery in Belize. We know their stories and are prepared to tell them now.

Over the last five years the organization has documented and interviewed hundred of women taken from Belize we are now going to tell their stories one every day for a hundred days.