In the South American nation of Venezuela, in both good times and bad, the trafficking of misled teenage girls into forced sexual exploitation in neighboring Trinidad and Tobago has been a lucrative organized crime racket since the early s. Now that the oil-rich socialist nation is suffering economic turmoil, and tens of thousands of people are migrating out of the country, the racket in exploited Venezuelan girls, allegedly with the cooperation of public officials, has turned deadly.
A boat called the Jhonnas Jose , ferrying 28 to 33 people, mainly girls corralled by racketeers to work as prostitutes, sank on April 23 in the Gulf of Paria after leaving the northeastern Venezuelan port city of Guiria on its way east to the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago, according to Agency Press-Franchise.
Rescuers recovered the body of a year-old girl and counted only nine survivors with as many as twenty missing. Then, on May 16, a small boat, the fishing vessel Ana Maria , with about 29 people packed aboard, mostly young women and children, went down almost without a trace. Its Venezuelan captain, identified in news reports as Alberto Abreu, was reportedly the sole survivor, found at sea clinging to wreckage. Abreu, who escaped to Granada supposedly for medical treatment, has a previous conviction for human trafficking.
Sex trafficking racketeers recruit Venezuelan girls, typically 15 to 16 years old, and lie to them about good-paying jobs available in Trinidad and Tobago. They transport them to Guira and force them to wait in hotels there. They are obliged to serve as prostitutes in the Caribbean region. Police arrested and then set free several hotel owners in Guira where some of the trafficked girls allegedly stayed.
The traffickers reportedly enlist trusted people, from schoolteachers to neighbors, to entice the girls with the lure of jobs and money to make the boat trip to Trinidad and Tobago, where they are compelled to join the sex trafficking rings.
