The economic crisis in Venezuela ignited a humanitarian crisis throughout South America. We believe every major South American city has been affected by the sex trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation crisis stemming from the Venezuelan migration crisis.
Venezuela is experiencing the largest migration crisis in history. With 7.1 million Venezuelans having fled violence, starvation, political oppression, kidnappings, and sex trafficking there are Venezuelan migrants and refugees settling in almost all Latin American countries, the US and Spain. The desperation of the women and children makes them extremely vulnerable to sex traffickers.
The 2021 Trafficking in Persons (TIP) report from the US Department of State states that “non-state armed groups grew through the recruitment of child soldiers and engaged in sex trafficking and forced labor. They lured children in vulnerable conditions and dire economic circumstances with gifts and promises of basic sustenance for themselves and their families to later recruit them into their ranks” and that “Venezuela has the highest rate in Latin America of people exploited in human trafficking”
According to the 2022 Trafficking in Persons report (TIP), women, children, refugees and migrants are among the most at risk for sex trafficking in Ecuador while Venezuelan migrants are particularly vulnerable. Sex trafficking is most prevalent in the costal regions where there are large populations of Afro-Ecuadorians and Venezuelan migrants.
The TIP report states that “Traffickers lure vulnerable, displaced Venezuelans with fraudulent employment opportunities, particularly those in irregular status, and later exploit them into sex trafficking. Since the COVID-19 pandemic we have seen an increased amount of Ecuadorians being commercially sexually exploited.
The 2022 Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) states that displaced Venezuelans (particularly women and children), Afro-Colombians and the indigenous are most at risk of sex trafficking. There are more Colombian women and children victims of sex trafficking in tourist and large extractive areas. While Illegal armed groups often recruit youth and later exploit them in sex trafficking, eighty percent of the sex trafficking cases were impoverished women and children that were specifically targeted by traffickers.
Colombia has been disproportionately affected by the Venezuelan migration crisis, about 2.47 million Venezuelans have settled in Colombia. This has put an economic strain on the Colombian government resulting in more vulnerable women and children. In more recent years Colombia is experiencing civil unrest groups protesting inequality, lack of access to basic necessities and education and lack of addressing corruption within the government.
Mexico is suffering from a unique phenomenon of a record number of enforced disappearances. According to the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) there are 100,000 recorded missing and disappeared people. A quarter of these are women and girls, 16,000 are minors and of those minors over half are girls. About 70 percent of those missing were in the last ten years.
The majority have family members that have been the sole investigators searching for them, attributing to the collective assumption that the majority are victims of human trafficking. While this crisis is multilayered there is overwhelming evidence of impunity in the majority of the cases.
In 2021 WOLA published the article For Disappearances to End Justice Must Begin where they outlined the agonizing process families of the disappeared endure in search of justice; and their loved ones remains. Families are rarely supported by government officials and rely on support from NGOs.
.png)
.svg)
%201.svg)
