Human trafficking in Mexico
[3][4][5] Mexican women, girls, and boys are subjected to sexual servitude within the United States and Mexico, lured by false job offers from poor rural regions to urban, border, and tourist areas.
[3][6][7] Mexican trafficking victims were also subjected to conditions of forced labor in domestic servitude, street begging, and construction in both the United States and Mexico.
[13] Governmental ineffectiveness and rampant corruption have corroded trust in the Mexican government, which is evident in the declining rate of crime reporting in border regions of Mexico.
[12] Mexico is one of the global centers of the child prostitution trade and a source and transit country for large numbers of migrants moving northward from Central America.
However, trafficking victims from South America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa are also found in Mexico, and some transit the country en route to the United States.
Unaccompanied Central American minors, traveling through Mexico to meet family members in the United States, fall victim to human traffickers, particularly near the Guatemalan border.
Child sex tourism continues to grow in Mexico, especially in tourist areas such as Acapulco and Cancún, and northern border cities like Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez.
[6] In addition, victims often accept their positions because they feel that this is the only way that they may send some remittances to their family and their present situations may in some cases still be better than their original impoverished and desperate state.
[16] During the Central American civil wars throughout the 1980s, widespread sexual assaults of indigenous women were carried out, contributing greatly to the creation of the Mexican sex trafficking industry.
[14] Both police and army personnel raped and assaulted several thousand poor, generally rural women during the El Salvadorean and Nicaraguan civil wars.
[1][2] Mexico has publicly endorsed the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's Blue Heart Campaign against Human Trafficking, becoming the first country in Latin America to do so.
The rising costs of smuggling, as a result of increased border security and enforcement, have made it far more common for migrants to become heavily indebted to smugglers.
[8] Smugglers sometimes pretend to offer reduced fees to women and child migrants and then sexually assault or rape them as a form of substitute "payment".
[14][31] Human traffickers masquerading as coyotes often use false promises of guaranteed jobs to lure migrants, and will sometimes kidnap women and children along the journey, either for ransom from their families or to be sold in the US into servitude or prostitution.
