In 2002, Marita Verón disappeared. She was 23-years old at the time, and it is strongly suspected that she was abducted by women traffickers, and subsequently forced into prostitution. Her mother, Susana Trimarco, has been instrumental in raising awareness of the case, as well as the issue of trafficking of women.

Almost ten years later, the trial is underway in Tucumán. The case has brought the issue of female trafficking back into the public sphere, and has shed light on some of the realities of the problem highlighting corruption among the police force, politicians and within the judicial system.

How aware are Argentines of female trafficking and the networks that operate within the country? To what extent do they think that the police are complicit in the issue? What do they think needs to be done to stop female trafficking? The Argentina Independent hit the streets of Buenos Aires to find out.

Photos by Allison Kate Cherkis

Cecilia Maitland, 25, Environmental Engineer, Belgrano

I think there is a network that is a lot bigger than people suspect, and that they are doing a lot more than people know about. In other countries in Latin America, it’s clearer that these problems exist, so they give them more importance, but here it’s not as obvious. My opinion is that it’s all connected with drugs and the mafia, but it’s not something I have a lot of contact with – we don’t see a lot about it in newspapers, I don’t see it as something that they give a lot of importance to. To change things, we need to educate women more on the matter, it’s basic: education and for there to be more publicity, bigger campaigns, because I think there’s a problem of ignorance, that the people simply don’t know a lot about it. We should also be made aware of certain situations to avoid as women.

Ines Hernandez, 60, Teacher, Quilmes

Part of my family lives in Tucumán, where Marita Verón comes from. Her mother is working to fight against this issue. But I don’t think she has done a lot for raising awareness in the whole country, and neither has the government. The government should be doing absolutely everything that they can, in any way possible, to raise awareness of the issue, as well as to find Marita. She is either alive or dead. Unfortunately I don’t think she’s alive, but it’s not impossible. In Argentina, girls want to be rich, or to have everything, very quickly. I think girls have lost that sense of sacrifice doing things as they should be done, legally and by working at them. They are then misled; they [the traffickers] tell them that they’re going to Buenos Aires, to work. It’s very common in the north of Argentina, in Tucuman, Salta, Jujuy, Catamarca, that these people tell them that they’ll be staying with a rich family in Buenos Aires, and work as a nanny. They promise them a good job, but it’s a lie. They take them and put them in brothels. There are some unbelievable stories that I’ve heard of. This is a country where the citizens are never protected. There is certainly a connection with drugs. The people that take the girls are paid with drugs. I’m absolutely sure.

Federico Foieri, 35, Physicist, Almagro

I know about it from what I hear on the TV. I know that it exists, and that there is a lot of complicity with the police and the authorities. In my opinion, they receive money to not check certain things, or to look the other way, pay less attention. I don’t know exactly how they do it. I think they just receive money to stay quiet. I’m not so sure about the judicial system’s role, I think more than anything it’s the police, but then again I’m not a specialist in the judicial system. I think most of the time it works well. I think the thing is in lots of places in the provinces, many girls prostitute themselves, and the most important thing to remember is that something’s failing, it may the judicial system, but it seems to us that it’s the police.

Lucia Raffen Templi, 19, Student, San Martin

I think there’s a link between the police and trafficking of women. There’s a load of things that they let pass and don’t do anything about, or they pretend not to have seen. I know that there’s a lot of things going on, a lot of networks that trafficking of women, but it’s not something that people think about a lot here. There are so many cases that don’t get talked about, and people only really think about what’s reported in the news, and they don’t report everything – good or bad news. It’s not something that comes up constantly. I don’t think people are aware of the networks either; I’m not. It’s something that I try to keep very up to date with. I think we as women live in a gender dictatorship, we go out with fear about what could happen to us every day, which doesn’t happen to men. I mean, they may fear getting robbed or whatever, but we go out with the fear that we just might not come back; it’s a constant threat.

Santiago Lopez, 26, Student, Belgrano

They should be doing more to stop this, informing people more, controlling the borders more vigilantly, increasing the punishments for those caught, make them life sentences. There are networks everywhere, I’ve heard it’s especially bad in Missiones and that part, but it’s everywhere, also here in Buenos Aires. The question of prostitution here is contradictory, because people fight against it, but more and more people also pay to see prostitutes. The more people are paying for it as a service, the more they’re enforcing the way these people are treated. I think there’s a lot of corruption among the police, without a doubt. They have a lot to do with this, to me it seems they play a fundamental role. If the police weren’t at the centre of these business dealings, it wouldn’t be how it is at the moment. Police should be doing the job that they’re supposed to do, and should not be complicit in this business.

Oscar Flores, 55, Chef, Retiro

I watch the news, so I’m conscious of the Marita Veron case. I see that the mother is still fighting for her daughter, fighting to find her. I think the case has definitely done a lot to raise awareness about women trafficking here in Argentina. Because it hurts the Argentina that we believe ourselves to live in, it shows that there is corruption. This type of thing doesn’t have to happen, and it hurts more that it involves young women and girls. There should be real examples to show that there is a real and correct judicial system. This case should be used to clarify that, to help stop this happening. I don’t know anything about the actual networks that operate, but I think that a lot of the traffickers are very involved with drugs. Day by day, this aspect must be eliminated before the situation can get better, there are kids who are killing themselves by using drugs. With respect to prostitution, it has always, always existed, it’s another issue. But I think generally the government are doing enough in the fight against trafficking of women, they are concerned with it.

When Susana Trimarco’s 23-year-old daughter, Marita Verón, disappeared on the 3rd April 2002, little did she imagine the scale of the quest she would embark upon. Trailing the insidious path of Marita’s kidnappers, Trimarco’s decade-long pursuit has led her undercover as a prostitute in La Rioja, and as far as northern Spain, in an attempt to infiltrate the opaque networks of the sex trade. Ten years later, the trial is finally underway in Tucumán, with 13 of the accused due to appear in court over the next few months. But Marita’s whereabouts are still unknown.

Marita is just one of thousands of women in Argentina who are subjected to forms of sexual exploitation and trafficked into hellish conditions at the hands of human trade mafias everyday.

“These girls have no one to protect them, the state makes no effort to find them,” Trimarco told The Argentina Independent. “And so I’m left pursuing the case of Marita, and those of thousands of girls in Marita’s shoes, alone.”

Trimarco’s high profile campaign has been instrumental in catapulting the issues of corruption and impunity at the heart of human trafficking networks into the public agenda, exposing an industry which had remained unlegislated and thus unaccountable for years.

Stolen Lives

In 2007, Susana Trimarco set up the María de los Angeles Foundation, an organisation aimed at combatting human trafficking and providing legal, psychological, and social assistance to its victims. Andrea Romero, the director of projects, explains how the victims are lured with false promises of work.

“The trafficking networks take advantage of women, mainly from economically vulnerable backgrounds, in such a way that they leave their house on their own accord.”

Once in the grasp of the mafia, a wide array of psychological and physical techniques are administered so as to desensitise their victims. The women are maltreated, ill fed, and frequently enchained.

Removing documentation is a crucial form of domination in the mechanics of the trade. If women are exported without papers or money, it follows that they have no logical means of escape. Moreover, by divesting these women of their identity, the mafia creates the illusion that they simply never existed.

At this stage, the women are repeatedly assaulted with a brutality endemic to the trade and threatened into submission.

“The only way they will be released from this subjection,” says Trimarco, “is if there are organisations set up to empower these women and inform them of their rights. They need to speak out if they are to reclaim their identity and denounce their perpetrators.”

According to a report conducted by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, no prosecutions or convictions were recorded for trafficking in persons in Argentina between 2003 and 2007.

In 2008 an anti-trafficking law was passed, making the abduction and sexual exploitation of persons a federal offence in Argentina.

The Rescue Office, established that year under the Ministry of Justice and Human Rights, oversees the prevention and investigation of human trafficking crimes and provides legal assistance to victims.

Since its implementation 2,774 victims have been rescued, with that number rising by 181% in the last year alone, according to statistics from the Rescue Office.

Fundacion Maria de los Angeles (Photo: Trillia Fidei-Bagwell)

In July 2011, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner passed a decree banning the publication of “adult service” advertisements in newspapers and magazines with “implicit or explicit reference to the solicitation of people for sex” (widely known as Rubro 59). The law marks a crucial step towards addressing the exploitation at the heart of the mainstream media, questioning the “normalisation” of such means of procurement.

“2011 has been a critical year for national measures,” says Viviana Caminos, the national coordinator of the Stop Traficking and Trade Network (RATT). “It was the first time that we began to see significant changes with the Ministry of Security denouncing police forces implicated in the trade.”

Initiatives have been set up to train security forces to detect trafficking networks and assist victims. The schemes will also promote the exchange of data thereby strengthening the capacity of state agencies to prevent and investigate trafficking.

“We are principally an exploitative country,” Carlos Garmendia, Marita’s attorney, explains. “And we are, by that logic, also a recruitment country.”

Whilst many victims are trafficked from Paraguay, Bolivia, and the Dominican Republic, “internal trafficking” remains an acute problem.

According to the Fiscal Unit of Kidnappings and Trafficking (UFASE), 39 sentences were apportioned in 2011. While the majority of victims are imported, over 70% of the traffickers convicted are Argentine.

The global human trafficking market now has an estimated turnover of US$32bn. If that figure is accurate, it makes the industry more lucrative than the narcotics trade. Because, unlike drugs, people can be used and abused on multiple occasions. The figures are startling not only because of the ubiquity and the pervasiveness of these ‘invisible’ networks, but because their presence remains integral to the everyday functioning of a country’s economy.

The countries most vulnerable to human trafficking are those that have undergone periods of economic or political crises, leaving a power vacuum to be exploited by criminal networks. Viviana Caminos recalls how the sex trade first became visible in Argentina in 1999, becoming fully conspicuous in 2000, just as the economy took a nosedive and the burden of debt began to take its toll. Women began to be bartered, sold and exploited as commodities in an unregulated marketplace.

The widespread cultural endorsement of prostitution in Argentina is the principal obstacle in infiltrating these opaque networks. Garmendia is categorical: where there is a demand, the supply chain will continue to flow unabated. Raising awareness of the consumption of prostitution is the only way to staunch the supply at its source.

Vicious Cycles: Debt and Dependency

Despite the groundwork achieved by the 2008 law, campaigners are still fervent that the legislation lacks several key amendments. Firstly, the law does not take into account victims over 18 years of age who allegedly consent to prostitution.

Secondly, the legislation does not address the regnant topic of enforced marriages, according to Inspector Claudia Flores, who has overseen a number of trafficking cases in Córdoba. Women from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Paraguay, without the immigration papers required to enter the country, are lured into formal marital arrangements. In such circumstances, the women have to provide a dowry and thereafter they are set an unattainable monthly quota to sustain their husbands, ensuring they remain in a perpetual state of dependency.

Not only are these women an extremely lucrative form of currency in themselves, but they are forced to consume and pay for an exorbitant amount of drugs and alcohol, and to sell these substances on to their clients.

“The women need to be sedated simply to entertain the unfathomable number of customers – often 20 to 30 in six hours – that they are subjected to each night,” Flores explains.

A recent high profile court case, overseen by Flores, is that of Victoria P. A mother of two, Victoria was trafficked into the the region known as ‘tolerance houses’ in Río Gallegos, where she was drugged, sedated and forced into prostitution.

Victoria’s tragic tale took a turn for the worse when she fell pregnant to a client. Her pimp subsequently forced her to undergo an abortion, but it failed and she remained pregnant. After giving birth, her child was shipped off to Paraguay and into the hands of the pimp’s boyfriend. Since the brothel counted members of the police and security forces among its clientele, immigration never presented an obstacle.

Andrea Romero, director of the Maria de los Angeles Foundation, speaks on their work to fight sex trafficking (Photo: Trillia Fidei-Bagwell)

According to Flores, politicians, prosecutors and the police are heavily implicated in this trade whose lucrativeness and very existence depends upon their complicity and consent. Even when the brothels are raided and perpetrators convicted, only 6% of the establishments remain closed; for the rest business continues as normal – and the chain remains unbroken.

The case of Lorena Martins, who publicly denounced her father, Raúl, last year, is emblematic. An ex-agent of the state intelligence unit (SIDE), Martins has allegedly been involved in the sex trade for 20 years.

Accused of more than 12 crimes in Argentina, he still has several brothels to his name in Buenos Aires, including The One and Maxim. His notorious Cancún establishment, The Mix, visited by Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri on his honeymoon, was closed in 2011.

According to Martins, such clubs function as covert sites for the exploitation of dozens of women who are forced into prostitution and delivered straight into the hands of leaders of drug cartels.

Relentlessly searching for evidence to incriminate her father, Lorena Martins discovered a series of documents which allude to a payment made to the former head of the Buenos Aires government agency as a contribution to the electoral campaign of Mauricio Macri.

Accusations of corruption are all too common in these cases, and seem to indicate that corruption is entrenched in the system. When there is suspicion that the mafia may be financing political campaigns and bribing the police, who, it may well be asked, is left to hold them to account?

Trimarco remains vehement that “the only way trafficking victims will be released from this subjection is if there are organisations set up to empower them and inform them of their rights. They need to speak out if they are to reclaim their identity and denounce their perpetrators.”

Find out how aware locals are of the issue of women’s trafficking here.

In Tucumán this morning, the mother of Marita Verón started the process of giving evidence for the last time on her daughter’s case.

The sex-trafficking trial was suspended last Tuesday when a defendant had to have an operation and wasn’t able to attend. The case started again this morning when Verón’s mother Susana Trimarco was cross-examined.

Verón was in her early 20s when she disappeared in 2002. Trimarco says a powerful sex-trafficking network operating in Tucumán kidnapped her daughter. There are currently 13 defendants standing on trial, accused of involvement in her disappearance.

As the main witness in the case, Trimarco started answering defense lawyers’ questions today. They want to prove that the young Véron left of her own volition and was not in fact kidnapped.

They are also trying to undermine Trimarco’s testimonies, highlighting contradictions in the accounts she has already given.

“A lot of years have gone by and there are details that I don’t remember, but everything I say, I say in good faith.” Trimarco said in court today.

The first of the lawyers to question her was Cergio Morfil, representing the brothers María Jesús and Victor Rivero. Morfil started the day by announcing that he had over 100 questions to ask Trimarco.

The courts are keen to finish with her testimony as soon as possible so they can start with more than 100 witnesses who are reportedly still to testify on the case.