This is the story about Charlie. She never had to consider herself a total whore like a lot of the girls. She had been trafficked from Nicaragua two years before we met her. We found her working in an Orange Walk ficha bar and because she was very tall and not so pretty by ficha bar standards she caught a break. She wasn’t as easily sold to the men as the some of the other girls. She was smart and a quick learner so they made her a bartender. She was really good at it and that made her valuable. She’d been sold to a couple of bar owners, who sold her each time at a profit because she knew how to make sure men drank and paid. She was good at keeping track of money, booze and what went on in a place. This mostly kept her out of the bar’s bathrooms and side rooms servicing men with sex like the others had to.
She also had a really big kind and loyal streak so, even though she was in a really bad situation herself, she was like the big sister to the girls she was trapped with. She was the one that patched the girls up as best she could after they were roughed up. She was very protective. It was her natural bent to look after people, but I think doing that gave her a reason to get up every day and keep going. She explained to us later that if you stop thinking about just yourself, it’s better somehow.
When we met her, we weren’t in the place to find her. We had targeted another girl called Vilma. Bad luck for Vilma, her looks made her perfect to sell to men at night in that place. She had to deal with at least 10 drunken men every night. Her family had asked us to find her and bring her home. We really wanted to get her out of there.
So there was the night we came to get Vilma. One of us, Roberto, arranged with the bar to have Vilma for the night, eight hours we paid for. Then the idea was to take her to a hotel, where three of us were waiting, and then get her out of Orange Walk, down the highway, cross the border to her hometown in Guatemala.
But Charlie, not knowing about our rescue caper, only saw Vilma being taken away to a hotel for hours. She’d seen too many girls come back beaten senseless or not come back at all. I told you she was protective. She followed them. And gave Roberto a really hard time about taking Vilma to the hotel. The problem was Roberto didn’t know anything about Charlie and though she seemed like she was really only interested in protecting Vilma, he couldn’t be sure if she was plotting something with the owners. Most trafficked girl bartenders are. Siding with the bosses is a way to survive in these places.
Charlie made such a scene she finally convinced Roberto to let her in the hotel with him and Velma. When Velma and Charlie see the four of us, with guns and handcuffs, they freak out and put up a fight. Naturally, they think we are traffickers stealing them from traffickers. After a lot panic and screaming we finally calm them down enough to get them to understand that we are there to take Vilma back home.
That’s when Charlie asks us to take her with us. We couldn’t do that. Too many complications. Too little time to get to the border before they found Velma missing and start looking for us. Plus, was Charlie on the level or in cahoots with the traffickers? Too much risk to take her.
After we got Velma back, Roberto was sort of haunted by Charlie. By now it was clear that she hadn’t ratted on us to the bar owner. I trust his instincts because they’re usually better than good. The more he thought about Charlie the more he couldn’t let go of the idea of getting her out of that Orange Walk dump. How many really brave people do you ever meet? Someone who still knows what’s right even though nothing right has ever happened to her.
So we went back for Charlie. One of us buys her pretending he needs an ace bartender. Of course, when Charlie finds out that she’s been “sold” again she’s just ready to go to the next hell trough to tend bar. Instead, we take her to the Nicaragua embassy to sort out her papers to get her he hell out of Belize and back to her family. Which is where she is now.
No matter what the trafficking system did they couldn’t take Charlie from Charlie. So many victims are not so blessed.
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