AmbergrisCaye.com Home Forums Belize Life News Guatemalan woman charged with human trafficking

Police swoop arrest five in San Pedro

A police detachment from Belize on special assignment to San Pedro has arrested a 24-year-old Guatemalan woman and charged her with human trafficking.

Four other Guatemalan women, ranging in age from 19 to 23, have been arrested from three nightspots in San Pedro and charged with overstaying their allotted time in Belize.

Martha Julia Jimenez Estrada, 24, of Guatemala, was charged with human trafficking for having an under-age girl in her establishment and remanded to jail in Hattieville, along with her four girls.

Jimenez Estrada was granted bail by order of the Supreme Court, when her trial began in San Pedro this week. She is due back in court on October 19.

The other four Guatemalans: Wendy Martinez, 22, Kimberley Moraquin, 20, Nellie Gonzalez, 19, and Erlinda Moralez, 23, have been charged with over-staying their time in Belize. Immigration records show they all entered Belize through Benque Viejo del Carmen on a 3-day pass on July 10.

A police team from Belize City, commanded by Assistant Police Commissioner Miguel Segura, raided three nightclubs: Los Compadres Bar, the Thirsty Tiger and the Black & White Bar in San Pedro.

They detained also two Belizean girls, one 17, the other only 14 years old, and two other 17-year-olds, one of whom was Honduran.

Some 24 women and girls were detained in the initial raid. All except five have been released without charges.

The San Pedro police had no knowledge of the raid and were not invited to participate, to avoid the targeted establishments receiving an advance warning of the raid.

The Reporter

On the same essential subject ..... a news article from the internet today:


Tens of millions of 'missing' girls
September 5, 2010 10:28 a.m. EDT

Author: Stop abuse of women worldwide
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

* Sheryl WuDunn: Tens of millions of girls die young or aren't born due to discrimination
* Educating girls and giving them economic opportunity could transform the world, she says
* Girls who are educated have fewer children and educate them better, she says
* WuDunn: Those who have their material needs satisfied should aid women around the world



(CNN) -- Discrimination against women and girls takes a staggering toll around the world, says author Sheryl WuDunn. It leads to as many as 100 million fewer females than males in the world.

Ending the oppression of women is the great moral challenge of the 21st Century, a cause she compares to fighting slavery in the 19th century and totalitarianism in the 20th Century.

WuDunn, a former reporter for The New York Times who is now an investment banker, and her husband, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, wrote "Half the Sky," a book focusing on the role of women in the world.

She spoke about their findings at the TED Global conference in Oxford in July and in an interview with CNN.

Watch an interview with Sheryl WuDunn

During their time as correspondents in China, WuDunn and Kristof learned of the phenomenon of an estimated 30 million "missing" baby girls in the nation.

WuDunn says part of the gap could be attributed to infanticide by families who were determined to have a male child under China's one-child policy and in part to the development of the sonogram. That medical device can be used to determine the gender of a child before birth, prompting some parents to obtain abortions.

"One peasant in the southern part of China once told us, 'The sonogram's great, we don't need to have baby girls any more.' "

TED.com: Radical women embrace tradition

The problem is not limited to China; WuDunn says there are between 60 million and 100 million missing females in the world, even though women outnumber men in some more developed nations.

The solutions, she says, are education and economic opportunity. Overpopulation is one of the larger contributors to poverty, WuDunn said. "When you educate a girl, she has significantly fewer kids." Girls who go to school get married later in life and educate their children "in a more enlightened way."

WuDunn says her work is not just about helping reveal the plight of women and girls in many countries, it's also about helping provide the groundwork for a movement to solve the problem. In the Western world, where many people have all their material needs satisfied, it's an obligation to reach out and help others, she says.

WuDunn told the story of an American aid worker in Darfur who had seen great suffering but never broke down.

On a vacation back in the United States, she visited her grandmother and noticed a bird feeder in the backyard.

"She was in her grandmother's backyard and she basically broke down. And she realized that not only was she able to feed and clothe and house herself but also see that people in her country were able to feed wild birds so that they don't go hungry in the winter. She knew that with that luck and fortune also comes great responsibility."

Here are excerpts from "Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide" by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn:

"So let us be clear about this up front: We hope to recruit you to join an incipient movement to emancipate women and fight global poverty by unlocking women's power as economic catalysts. That is the process under way -- not a drama of victimization but of empowerment, the kind that transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen. This is a story of transformation. It is change that is already taking place, and change that can accelerate if you'll just open your heart and join in. ...

"The tide of history is turning women from beasts of burden and sexual playthings into full-fledged human beings. The economic advantages of empowering women are so vast as to persuade nations to move in that direction.

"Before long, we will consider sex slavery, honor killings and acid attacks as unfathomable as foot-binding. The question is how long that transformation will take and how many girls will be kidnapped into brothels before it is complete -- and whether each of us will be part of that historical movement, or a bystander."

It is important for all members of the Belize and San Pedro community to keep in mind that we must take a stand against child abuse and sexual exploitation. Everyone has a role to play either by reporting or simply making it clear to your peers, employees, and newly arriving friends that YOU do not accept the behavior.Also, consider the role of the houses where these girls work, do we want them on the island?

Sheryl WuDunn is a nut case.
Not on the same subject at all,'Police swoop arrest five in San Pedro' is a real story written by responsible journalist and this crap spread by WuDunn is hyper sensational garbage.
WuDunn is off her meds and doing harm to any cause she picks as a topic.
"30 million "missing" baby girls"
"WuDunn says there are between 60 million and 100 million missing females in the world"
WuDunn transforms bubbly teenage girls from brothel slaves into successful businesswomen if you'll send your donation today Visa or Master Card only.!

Amartya Sen?
http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/gender/Sen100M.html

The editorial team of The Economist?
http://www.economist.com/printediti...mages/20100306/20100306issuecovUS400.jpg

Thanks James.

What is more important to me is that all of us stay focused on the girls who are being sexually abused and exploited. These girls and young boys really need for all of us to keep the conversation about them.

Please correct me if I am wrong. It seems there are two different sets of problems under this genre. One is the underage girls from guatemala and other places who are recruited to come to the tourist areas to work. I suspect many were in that trade in their home country. Could you please tell me the age of consent in our neighboring countries to help shed some light on the depth of the problem. A recent poster on another board suggested the missing Maya children in the PG croc disaster were really kidnapped by human traffickers which I find most unlikely and not exactly good press. I dont see the traffickers going into the villages with a net to catch girls and smuggling them to Belize, I would imagine most are experienced and easy to recruit.
The second and worse (to me) set of problems is the sexual exploitation and molestation of Belize children by usually their own family members. Of course both sets of problems would have different solutions.
Please correct me where I am wrong. I want to understand this problem better.

Seems to me that this raid was not very successful and kinda shows the problem in the bars is not as bad as it is made out to be, with the exception of one 14 year old most were detained for immigration violations and not underage sex workers.

While a couple were 17 lets face it anywhere in the world 15,16 and 17 year olds try to get into bars when they can get away with it so kind a poor result especially when you consider its was an undercover op and SP police were not informed (Dont say much for Sp police when they are kept out the loop)

Anyway If its going on as many seem to think it is then its great to see that something is being done however I have not seen anything to confirm SP has a big problem in that area up till now although I do believe in famillys the case may be a lot higher.

What that raid may do is alert the owners that it could be a regular thing so clean up there establishments.

Anyway Im all for keeping kids out of bars and protecting them from predators.

Gaz

I am not sure that these establishments are known about town simply as bars. I have always understood that they were actually places where men bought women. They were raided for that reason.
Denial is an amazing thing.