Thread: Captive Daughters

Children Forced into Prostitution in San Diego Agricultural Camps

En Español

Girls and adolescents are kidnapped and taken to San Diego, where they are obliged to prostitute themselves in agricultural camps



El Universal (The Universal Newspaper)

Thursday, January 9, 2003



Anabel Hernández GarcÃ*a (translated by Chuck Goolsby)

Courtesy of El Universal newspaper from Mexico City



Part I of III



SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - When Rick Castro, a deputy sheriff for San Diego County burst in to the house in Vista, a lower middle class neighborhood to the north of San Diego, the first thing that he saw was the destitute brown eyes of a slight girl no older than fourteen, whose hair hung to the middle of her back, dressed in a short black miniskirt and a white tee shirt with the red and blue letters "USA" on it.



The officer was moved by her beauty, but was moved even more by the look of terror in her eyes. Paola had just arrived a few weeks ago at this house of prostitution, dragged there from Morelos, Mexico by the Salazar brothers. Julio, Tomás y Luciano Salazar-Juárez are the dons of the largest local network trafficking and sexual exploiting Mexican girls and adolescents, who have operated for over ten years in the agricultural camps and suburbs of San Diego.



The three men from the Mexican state of Oaxaca had found in the land of opportunity the perfect place to build their empire, trafficking from southern Mexico to the U.S. border with their human merchandise. In their path, they kidnap, extort, corrupt and violate our national laws and those of the United States, with nobody to stop them.



This is the first of three parts of an investigation conducted by El Universal, during which we received testimonies, data, documents and physical evidence showing the methods used by this criminal organization, that according to our information has extended its reach to Fresno, Nevada and New York.



Christopher Tenorio, U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor for the Southern District of California, and San Diego deputy sheriff Rick Castro revealed for our newspaper the details of how this gang operates. At the end of 2001 the FBI began a formal investigation against the Salizar brothers, whom were also presumed to be involved in drug trafficking.



Hundreds of girls, from 12 to 18 years old, originating in Oaxaca, Michoacan, Morelos and Veracruz, have been kidnapped or duped into being stripped of all of their human rights and converted into sexual slaves in local farm labor camps. The locations in San Diego where this network operates are: Vista; Las Casitas de Escondido; Las Antenas, Carlsbad; Carrizales, Oceanside; Del Mar, and Los Gatos, in Valley Center.



Paola, the "USA" girl, having been filed away in the gang's "system" was handled by Tomas Salazar. During her few days in the American union she had been passed through all of the exploitation camps. Because of her beauty, she became preferred merchandise, and day and night had to service long lines of men, indoors and out. Of the 20 dollars that each "client" paid, she never saw one dollar. Tomas keep all of the money.



The houses of prostitution



This is the largest prostitution outfit in all of San Diego, deputy sheriff Castro assures us. Since 1996, Castro, of Mexican ancestry born in the U.S., has followed the tracks of the Salazar brothers. "When I came to work with the sheriff, I was the only one who spoke Spanish, so at that time they gave me the task of investigating cases of child prostitution. The case had been open for two years, but no movement was made because none of the officers spoke Spanish," recalls Castro, 39, who today is the primary source of information for the FBI. He spent months tracking Tomas and Luciano Salazar. He photographed the houses in Vista where minors were prostituted; he patrolled the highways, tracking trucks full of clients going to the exploitation camps, and he received testimony from neighbors.



Three years later, working with the INS and armed with a court's search warrant, Castro entered the prostitution houses located near Kelly's Bar on North Santa Fe Avenue. He found dozens of women, among them girls between 12 and 16 years old, victims of commercial sexual exploitation.



"When we went in we found record books tracking the number of clients served by each woman and stopwatches to limit their service to clients to ten minutes. We confiscated dozens of empty boxes of condoms, each box having held a thousand condoms. We were able to calculate how many clients the house had and how much money it generated. We also found refrigerators full of beer, shelves full of alcoholic beverages and handguns."



Deputy Castro recalls that when they interrogated the minors, the girls stated that they were older, 19 or 20 years old, "but their bodies and their eyes reflected a much lower age." That's how deputy Castro met Paola. The older women refused to testify in court, but in exchange they did supply officers with the addresses of other houses held by the Salazars, and police were able to shut down 25 such locations.



How they get their victims



Nobody knows how many people are in the Salazar organization, but investigations by the authorities reveal that this is an organized crime gang made up of various components: the procurers, who locate victims; the traffickers, who take them to the U.S.; and the "big daddy's" (pimps) who conduct the sex trade with their victims.



The adolescent girls trafficked by the Salazar brothers are poor in every sense of the word. They don't have money, they don't have a future and they don't know how to read or write.



The Salazar brothers have various ways of procuring their victims: they build an emotional relationship with them; they convince the minor girl and her family to let her be taken to the U.S. to work; or they kidnap them. Many of the girls have children, either by one of the three brothers or by other men. These children are snatched from their mothers and are kept as hostages. When a girl tries to escape, she is told that her child will be killed.



To transport these minor girls to the U.S., the exploiters pay coyotes up to $1,500 each, deputy Castro tells us. Usually, they are taken across the U.S. border at Tijuana and Tecate. The main members of the gang are: Miguel Hernández or "Tonatiuh", Edmundo Zitlapopoca, and Arturo and Pedro López, both from Atlixco, in Puebla [state].



The three Salazars



The Salazar brothers came to San Diego without a penny. They began a "business" prostituting their wives. Now their legacy is one of tales of the cruel exploitation of children, the wads of dollars that they take from the exploitation camps, and the hellish punishment that anyone who tries to escape them awaits.



Once, in one of the Salazar brother's houses in Vista, Julia, 17 years old, refused to work. Tomas, who exploited her, closed the business and in front of everyone else beat her with a hook until he ripped flesh from her arms, legs and back. Tomas was imprisoned for domestic violence and is serving a 20 year sentence, made easier by the thousands of dollars that he continues to make every week from exploiting women, even while behind bars.



Luciano was detained at the end of last December [2002] when he came to a wake with three of the prostituted women. So far, he has only been jailed for being undocumented, but according to prosecutor Tenorio and deputy Castro, authorities have successfully obtained evidence allowing Luciano to be charged with exploiting minors, thus unmasking the network.



Julio who is 37 years old, is the oldest brother and the leader of the organization. He is the only legal [U.S.] immigrant and has his own tow truck business, which, it is rumored is used to transport drugs. Deputy Castro notes that Julio is still free, and that he is the worst one of them all.





Part II of III



TRAFFICKING AND SEXUAL EXPLOITATION



* A sociologist relates one of the most dramatic stories of prostitution. Reyna, after falling into drug use and alcohol, later recovers her lost son. *



El Universal (The Universal Newspaper)

Friday, January 10, 2003

Nation, Page 20





SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - The first time that Marissa Ugarte saw Reyna was at the end of 2001, at the San Diego Police Department. The 15 year old girl, who looked 30, with her split lip and a eye swollen shut from the beating that she had just received, remained strong, in the pose of a fatalistic woman. It was then that she began to reveal the past that had worn her down, allowing a wounded child to shine again.



Marissa, the granddaughter of Salvador Ugarte, founder and former owner of the commercial bank Bancomer, never imagined when she came to live in this city five years ago that she would be a witness to such a criminal tale, without a happy ending, and would spend hours listening to the most profound grief that she had ever heard.



Who would imagine that San Diego, a paradise for thousands of children who year after year visit Sea World, Wild Animal Park and the San Diego Zoo can, for some children, turn into hell. This is the dirty secret of this city, as the non-governmental organizations call it, a secret that Reyna lived through during seven months. Reyna was one of the victims of the child sex trafficking and exploitation gang that operates in San Diego, lead by three Mexican men: Julio, Tomas and Luciano Salazar-Juarez.



Marissa began to hear rumors about the trafficking of children, fake adoptions and the sale of children when she worked in the DIF (Desarrollo Integral de la Familia-The State System for the Full Development of the Family) in Tijuana in 1997. She heard that these children where being taken to San Diego to be exploited to make pornography.



That was until 2000, when she began her work as a sociologist with EYE, an agency aiding children in crisis in San Diego, where she began to be certain about what was happening here. In this county, from Escondido to Point Loma to Balboa Park, in the heart of the city, all forms of illegal sexual exploitation exist: child pornography; trafficking in mostly underage male and female sex workers; and high risk homeless children who prostitute themselves to survive. This is due, says Marissa, to the fact that this is one of the most important military communities in the United States, in addition to the fact that there is a strong market for sexual services from farm laborers.



We began to hear that an American 'corridor' for the trafficking of children utilized for commercial sexual exploitation existed, and, together with the University of San Diego, Children's Hospital and the legal counsel's office for San Diego County, we created the Bilateral Safety Corridor Coalition for the Prevention of the Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Minors, which is now composed of 35 Mexican and American organizations. Marissa is the organization's Executive Director.



In 2001 the commission informed the Mexican consulate about what was occurring in the farm labor camps. Mexican girls and adolescents were being sexually exploited by their own fellow countrymen. "They ignored me, believing that the story wasn't true, and that it was exaggerated. I decided to go to UNICEF in Mexico to denounce the abuses that were occurring. I was later called by the Mexican consulate and they asked me for a formal complaint supported by concrete evidence." The consular official contacted Rick Castro of the San Diego Sheriff's Department, who had been investigating the Salazar brother's gang during the past three years. The Mexican Consulate made its formal complaint directly to the U.S. Government, and demanded an investigation.



"Three weeks later, we got our first case," recalls Marissa.



We were called by a child protection network in San Diego. We were informed that the network had a girl who did not fit within the criteria used by the Polinsky Children's Center, because the case involved a girl who was a sex trafficking victim, and they didn't know where to send her.



Marissa contacted deputy sheriff Castro because the case was from the neighborhood of Vista. The local police department had received an emergency call reporting that a young girl had escaped from prostitution in the farm labor camps and had been beaten by her pimp, Arturo Lopez, who worked for the Salazar brothers.



When the police found her she had a split lip, and she was bruised and scared. "She wore a tiny miniskirt and a jacket, and was so over-painted that you almost couldn't recognize her real face. She looked to be between ten and fifteen years older than her real age. Her hair was short and dyed brown, her mouth was small, she had the eyes of a dreamer and a very seductive attitude.



"When we began to interview her she broke down and out came an agonized human being drowning in pain." She was sent to a shelter for battered women.



The Mexican consulate contacted the local U.S. federal prosecutor and Reyna agreed to make a formal criminal complaint. Starting at that point, little by little, Reyna began revealing her story. She was from Puebla, Mexico. She had barely finished second grade. Her mother died when she was seven years old. Reyna was then supported by her grandmother, who also died. After that, her father was left in charge of her. One day, when she was 11, her own father gave her as a gift to a local police chief who raped her without end. After having been so neglected, and with a baby now in her arms, Reyna met Arturo Lopez, from the town of Atlixco in the state of Puebla. Arturo, after pretending to fall in love with her, convinced Reyna to work as a servant in the United States, for which Arturo recommended that she leave her baby with some of his relatives. Reyna had no other options, so she accepted the offer.



Reyna was taken to Tijuana, and while she waited to be crossed over the border, she was forced, with threats that her baby would be killed, to prostitute herself in the red zone known as "la Coahuila." She was finally transported across the U.S. border by a coyote, Alonso Sapien, also known as "El Chivero."



In San Diego, Reyna came to live in a neighborhood in Vista where she found other girls like her. A week later she found herself in the sexual exploitation camps for farm workers.



"The real horror is in the sheer number of men that, at the age of 15, Reyna was forced to serve as a prostitute. In one hour she had to serve 20 men, and they made her work from 8 AM until 2 in the afternoon. We are not talking about just prostitution, but also about slavery, about the violation of all of Reyna's human rights," noted Marissa.



Reyna began to become physically sick. One should understand that for any person who is forced to submit themselves to being a victim of sexual exploitation, the physical, emotional and spiritual deterioration is profound. Reyna, to cope and survive in that world, began to use drugs and alcohol.



One day, during the judicial process, Reyna became tired of telling her story again and again to the authorities, because each time she had to relate the story she was forced to relive what had happened to her.



"It was a terrible re-victimization. What I did was to stay with her two or three hours at a time, but that wasn't enough. When she came to the shelter she was drowning in her own pain, and then the post-trauma began, as she recalled the tragedy of her life from the time of her young childhood," noted Marissa, who accompanied the girl throughout the entire process. She still remembers Reyna banging her head against the wall.



"One day she came and asked me 'how is my makeup.' She didn't have a drop of makeup on. That's when she stopped being Reyna and returned to being the little girl that she was. It took over nine months for her to accept her real name. The child could not take any more. The judicial process stopped and the only thing that Reyna asked for was that her child be returned to her. During the middle of 2002, the Mexican consulate began to search for her child.



In Oceanside Arturo Lopez' brother Pedro was detained, and he convinced his brother to turn Reyna's son over to the Mexican DIF in Puebla. After passing through numerous legal hurdles, the DIF returned the child to Reyna.



At the beginning of May, 2002, Adrian Martinez, a Mexican consular official in charge of human rights protection, traveled with Reyna to Tlaxcala to recover her child.



"The baby was now three months old, and actually didn't recognize his mother. His first reaction was to cry, but thirty minutes later he didn't want to leave his mother."



While Reyna was recovering her child, Marissa lost her own child to a fatal cerebral tumor.



Today, Reyna has obtained a "T" visa for victims of trafficking, and she participates in a special program for child victims of exploitation in Phoenix, Arizona. Arturo Lopez Rojas, the man who exploited Reyna, escaped to Puebla. It was said that he would be charged but to this day nothing has happened. The PGR (Attorney General of the Republic) is investigating the case in Mexico.





© 2003 Copyright El Universal-El Universal Online

Part III of III

MINORS ARE PROSTITUTED IN FARM LABOR CAMPS IN SAN DIEGO



El Universal (The Universal Newspaper)

Anabel Hernández (Third and final part of a series)

January 11, 2003





SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA - Thirty five minutes outside of San Diego is the suburb of Oceanside, which is popular for it's splendid residential zone and its commercial fields of strawberries bordered by fields of golden reeds. This is where the nickname of "the reed beds" (Los Carrizales) came from. Here is where the "fields of love" are located. That is what the Mexican criminal gang of Julio, Tomas and Luciano Salazar-Juarez, traffickers and exploiters of Mexican girls and teens, called the exploitation camps where their victims where taken to provide sexual services for between 100 to 300 farm workers at a time. For all of these "clients" there is service every day, at every hour. We're taking about prostitution in the open, without walls, nor windows, nor beds nor sheets. There, on the ground in "caves" made of reeds, is where the only taste left in the mouths of these girls is dirt, alcohol and the sweat of their "clients."



"The first time I went to the camps I didn't vomit only because I had an empty stomach. It was truly grotesque and unimaginable," recalls Patricia, our fictitious name for a medical doctor who works with government supplied resources, and who for the last five years has been in contact with the Salazar brothers, working to prevent HIV/AIDS and other venereal diseases in these exploited minor girls.



"If I wanted to help these girls I had to develop a relationship with the pimps. I learned that in the city of Guadalajara, where I worked for many years. I had to convert myself into someone who doesn't judge, who doesn't express opinions, but only listens. At one point one of the Salazar brothers took me to the girls in Los Carrizales because the girls didn't come out of the fields to meet me that time."



If ones travels along North River Avenue, at first there are only enormous houses valued at around $300,000 dollars each. California-style houses. Red tile roofs, painted from cream to orange, with flowers in their gardens. Just behind these houses are the fields of Japanese farmer Victor Sang.



"To get to the "fields of love" one has to pass by the Super 7 and the CIT 60 gas station on North River Avenue, at the corner of College Boulevard.



A few meters from the gas station, by the sidewalk of a Baptist church, you find a sign marking the location of an oil pipeline, which has a towel wrapped around it. Beyond that are the fields and a passageway.



It is an area of fields of reeds so thick that you can't see who is next to you. Once you enter these fields, a kilometer from the street, the reeds become thicker and you have to bend over to walk.



In these dense reeds you will find around eight "caves" made within the reed thickets, one right next to the other. Pieces of plastic bags are tied to the reeds. These are used by the minors to throw condoms and the toilet paper that they use to clean up with after each encounter with a 'client.' After the bags are filled they are disposed-of so as not to leave any evidence behind.



Within the caves, on the ground, you find empty beer bottles, boxes of liquor bottles, shreds of cloth, pieces of blankets, plastic junk, hats, tee-shirts. All deaf witnesses to hours of horror.



All of this junk is mixed in with open condom packets and dozens of used condoms that leak semen into the ground. The musky smell floods the air, making your stomach turn. This is hell... virtual fields on fire. "When I came here, in one hour I counted that one little girl had been with 35 men, one after the other. She just lifted her skirt. It is just vaginal masturbation," notes Patricia. "Generally they do this to the girls who are no longer virgins. They spend six months being transported back and forth through the various camps."



"The girls that I saw that time [in the fields] were very young, they were not over 14 years old. they had been sold a lot to 'los gringos' (American men)." "This area is full of red necks, they are far right-wing white American men to whom they sell the virginity of little girls" notes Patricia.



I was present many times when these gringos called Julio [Salazar] asking to be sent a "cherry girl" (a virgin).



It is here, in one of the five corners of San Diego, where the Salazar brothers have extended their network.



This is where Paola, Reyna and dozens of other young girls were brought. All of them innocent "Eréndiras," [a character in a novel by Nobel laureate author] Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose deflowering was motivated by greed.



The ages of the girls that are brought here become younger as time goes on, now starting at nine and ten years old. "I once saw a seven year old girl. What was a seven year old girl doing in a place of prostitution? She wasn't anyone's daughter, they were using her," recalls the doctor in her desperation.



We are talking about defenseless persons, who have tragic life histories behind them. They live in a condition of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and in that condition they cede all authority to their victimizers.





The escape of Julio Salazar



It was exactly here, in Los Carrizales, where one year ago the gang of the Salazar brothers was almost detained.



In December of 2001, in an operation coordinated by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), more than 100 INS and FBI agents and sheriff's officers conducted a raid.



The agents didn't dare to enter the reed fields for fear of being ambushed, so they waited for the subjects to come out of the fields.



More than 50 people were apprehended. They included five minor girls who were prostituted in the fields, clients, and Julio Salazar, leader of the gang, who during the confusion managed to evade the officers and escape.



"A lot of money is involved in this business, thousands and thousands of dollars. I have seen myself how U.S. INS agents have sex with these minor girls for free, in exchange for protection. These agents even enter the houses of prostitution in uniform. May a lightning-bolt split me in half if I am lying!" exclaimed the social worker [Patricia].



The minor girls were placed in U.S. INS detention, where they were interrogated without the assistance of psychiatrists who could have intervened in the crisis. What the agents wanted was a formal complaint against the Salazar brothers, allowing them to be charged, but the girls declined to cooperate. The girls were deported, and all of the persons detained were freed.



"I fought a lot with the U.S. government and they told me that I shouldn't do anything, that I had signed a federal agreement of confidentiality and that I could not form a complaint from anything that I had been told [in this case]."



I understood that I could not stand up in face-to-face confrontation like Samson, concluded Patricia.





The deaths in Carlsbad



At another location similar to Los Carrizales, in [the San Diego neighborhood of] Carlsbad, during the last two years the bodies of minor Mexican girls, with signs of torture and abuse, have begun to appear, San Diego deputy sheriff Rick Castro tells us.



Nobody knows who these murder victims are. Nobody even claims their bodies because it is presumed that they are undocumented. They could be girls trafficked by the Salazar brothers. Castro assures us that he knows nothing about the case of the murder of [hundreds of] women and girls in Cuidad Juarez [Juarez City], Mexico, but given the common pattern of the abuse of victims in both cases, the modus operandi appear to be similar.

http://www.captivedaughters.org/sandiego-english.htm

So when the NAU is implemented, does the establishment really expect us to put up with this..this added crime into our society? Why is Mexico so uncapable of resolving it's own problems..becuase they don't want to, they would rather have some sympathetic country do it for them.

These Salizar brothers are a crosscut of the criminal element in Mexico that their government either won't or can't control. Those poor girls need to be freed and sent home. The crime ridden labor camps in our country are a result of no immigration enforcement and no border security. This is as bad as the human slaughtering that takes place in Africa and we are far too civilized as a nation to turn our heads the other way on this as our government has been doing for too long. Build the damn fence NOW!

Speaking of captive daughters,I have spoke about a guy who works with me whose ex is living with a illegal alien.His ex has a 14 year old daughter(my freind has a 9 year old daughter with ex who lives with him) from previous relationship.A mutual freind of ours told me last night that the 14 year old is pregnant by a 22 year old illegal that also had moved in with them.Apparently my freinds ex has let the 22 year old live in the same bedroom as the 14 year old in exchange for rent and you can guess the rest.I believe under NORTH CAROLINA law this is statuatory rape and the mother can also be in trouble not only for allowing it ,but making profit from it.I have not spoke with my freind about it yet but I am afraid he would not report her because for some strange reason he still loves his ex(he has covered for her writing bad checks signing his name).I would like some ideas from you out there -This is sick for mother to allow 14 year old daughter to allow any man legal or illegal to live and stay in bed and inpregnate her daughter

Wow.....what a disturbing way to start the day. These poor girls.......I know they have found rings here with Asian girls. They do the business via the internet and keep the girls in a house or apartment. This is just horrid. Makes me literally sick.

Times I read something like this I feel like a middle-east type mentality with a sick twist.....girls have gone through enough pain and punishment.....time to lop it off if the guys can't get a grip on thier urges. I just don't see how someone can do this to another human being........