Betty Philips is my Canadian sister-in-law and Board Chair of the Organization for Responsible Tourism. She’s how I got involved in the movement to stop human trafficking in Belize. It was her relationship with El Cazador, the Hunter that got all of this started.
Originally from Orillia Ontario, she was educated at the University of Toronto and University of Waterloo where she earned degrees, respectively, in English and computer sciences. Right now, she’s living in Vancouver, British Columbia.
She’d rather be in Honduras but it’s too dangerous for her now in Central America. For many years it was her home. She’s a modest person, consistent with the Canadian national trait, and does not like to be in the limelight, but has consented to my telling her story to further people’s understanding of Belize human trafficking. And, maybe getting more people involved with the campaign to stop Belize continuing unimpeded as the Central American human trafficking superhighway.
She met Richard in Copan, Honduras four years ago and they began living together. They married two years later. Soon after meeting, he told her the story of how he had become involved in hunting and recovering trafficked women and bringing them back to their families. The name El Cazador, the Hunter, was given to him by a Honduran woman who runs a safe house for recovered human trafficking victims.
Richard told her about the young woman, Elena, he found in a parking lot, a trafficking victim so badly beaten by a “client” that her captors just left her to die. No doctor would come to treat her. No ambulance would accept her. Trafficked women forced into prostitution have no status and no recourse. He found medical help for her and got her back to her family in Panama. She was the first one. Like most of them, she had been transited through Belize. There are about 125 more hunt and recover stories now.
You can imagine what dangerous work this is. Most of the women rescued were smuggled out of Belize. Some are “bought” in ficha bars by Richard and his friends and then re-smuggled back across the Guatemala border. For an account of a rescue see The Hunt for Charlie (link to story on Hunting website) get the idea of how the hunt and recover operation works.
Betty had a number of roles to play in recovering human trafficking victims. Sometimes she would drive a van of recovered victims from the Guatemala side of the border into Honduras. Sometimes she would sit in the safe houses and just listen to these lost women’s stories. Sometimes she would write endless petitions and letters to NGOs and governments, getting no help from them. Finally, she got us to assemble a team of people with IT skills to help mount an online campaign to address human trafficking in Belize.
We are not finished our work. We have made great inroads and have the attention of everyone from cruise lines docking in Belize to the Belize and American governments, which we have exhorted to work together to tighten immigration practices and monitor bribery at the borders. We also have the attention of the Belize tourism industry, and Belizeans and expats who want change. We maintain our offer to work in partnership with all of them to stop human trafficking in Belize.
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