| Young Women Lured into Trafficking by
Job Ads. [Argentina] The
ads read: "presentable young ladies", "no
qualifications or experience required", "easy work," "good
conditions," and "hours by arrangement". They often offer salaries of over
2,000 dollars. It sounds like a dream to thousands of poor, unemployed teenagers and young
women in Argentina. But
the advertisement is
the gateway to a nightmare: the trafficking
and sexual exploitation of women. The same newspapers that publish employment
"opportunities" for young women, advertise their "services for men and
women." In a society where more than 40 percent of the population lives in poverty,
the ads are tempting. Police in the northwestern province of Jujuy have received more than
50 reports of missing young women since September 2005. All of them had gone to see about
a "job" and have not been heard of since. Ads offering sexual services take a
different tone: "Daring university student", "wild graduates",
"erotic little doll" are likely to tempt clients looking for young, or even
under-age, women. "Hot Paraguayans", "blonde Brazilians", "new
bunny fresh from the countryside", or "just in from the south" allude to
their places of origin. With increasing frequency, the Argentine justice system is
breaking up trafficking rings that kidnap women and reduce them to servitude, turning them
into merchandise that can be shipped from one place to another without leaving a trail.
These gangs tend to act with the connivance of police, the justice system, and sometimes
politicians. |
| Pro-Life
Nation. [El Salvador]
More than a dozen
countries have liberalized their abortion laws
in recent years, including South Africa,
Switzerland, Cambodia and
Chad. In a handful of
others, including Russia and
the United States (or parts of it), the movement has been
toward criminalizing more and different types of abortions. In
South Dakota, the governor
recently signed the most restrictive abortion bill since the Supreme Court ruled in 1973,
in Roe v. Wade, that state laws prohibiting abortion were unconstitutional. The South
Dakota law, which its backers acknowledge is designed to test Roe v. Wade in the courts,
forbids abortion, including those cases in which the pregnancy is a result of rape or
incest. Only if an abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother is the procedure
permitted. A similar though less restrictive bill is now making its way through the
Mississippi Legislature. In this new movement toward
criminalization, El Salvador
is in
the vanguard. The array of exceptions that tend to exist even in countries where abortion
is circumscribed - rape, incest, fetal malformation, life of the mother - don't apply in
El Salvador. They were rejected in the late 1990's, in a period after the country's long
civil war ended. The country's penal system was revamped and its constitution was amended.
Abortion is now absolutely forbidden in every possible circumstance. No exceptions. There
are other countries in the world that, like El Salvador, completely ban abortion,
including Malta, Chile
and
Colombia.
El Salvador, however,
has not only a total ban on
abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus - the police, investigators, medical
spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor's office
responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women, a unit charged with capturing, trying and
incarcerating an unusual kind of criminal. Like the woman I was waiting to meet. |
Femicide On the Rise. [Latin America] On
the eve of International Women's Day 2006, a delegation of Latin American women made a
historic journey to Washington, DC. Rather than celebrating the gains women have made
through their many struggles, the group arrived at the headquarters of the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) of the Organization of American States with an alarming
message: femicide, the murder of women, is spreading. “(Femicide) is not only present
in Ciudad Juarez and most of Mexico, it's a regional problem,” warns Marimar Monroy,
a representative of the non-governmental Mexican Commission for the Defense and Promotion
of Human Rights and one of the delegates to the IACHR. Joined by grassroots delegates from
Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, and other nations, Monroy presented a report to
the IACHR
commissioners that sketched widespread violence against women from multiple causes,
rampant failures in the procurement of justice for victims and relatives, the prevalence
of impunity, and the absence of standard statistical gathering and record-keeping methods
to document gender violence. Monroy and her Latin American colleagues delivered their
femicide report as one piece of a campaign aimed at making “the problem more visible
in the region.” Incomplete murder rates cited in the NGO report mention 373 murders
of women in Bolivia from 2003
to 2004, 143 in Peru during 2003,
and more than 2,000 in Guatemala
.
In Colombia,
a woman is reportedly killed e
very 6 days by her partner or ex-partner. Ciudad
Juarez and Chihuahua City,
Mexico, two
cities where the femicide trend was first widely
noticed, have suffered the murder of more than 500 women from multiple causes since 1993,
according to press and other sources. Dozens more remain missing. Latin American women's
organizations contend that member nations of the Organization of American States are in
widespread violation of international treaties and declarations that protect the rights of
women , including the American Convention on Human Rights, the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, the Belem do Para Convention, and others. Appealing to the IACHR to
follow-up on previous recommendations the human rights institution has made about
eradicating femicide, delegation representatives considered the Washington
hearing a
positive step. |