Latin America's secret slave trade

Oliver Balch reports from the triple frontier of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, where humans have become the most sought-after contraband.

Wednesday December 20, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

Sit by the swimming pool of the exclusive Iguazú Jungle hotel and you can watch the "contrabandistas" emerging from the undergrowth.

All day, an army of smugglers can be seen passing along the mountainous path that separates Argentina from Brazil. Locals know it as the "pique". It is just one of a dozen or more unofficial crossing points on the so-called triple frontier, the name given to the porous border area where Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil meet.

Everything from fake branded clothing to Class A drugs are ferried back and forth along these clandestine routes. The list of contraband goods now also extends to human beings.
The human-trafficking business is estimated to be worth over £10bn a year, making it the world's third most profitable criminal activity after drug-smuggling and gun-running.

Many of those trafficked through the triple frontier are destined for the illegal labour market in Brazil or Argentina. The trade in babies for adoption is also widely reported. But a large proportion end up as sex workers. Many end up in brothels across the region, although a high number are destined for the triple frontier's own thriving sex industry.

Children are particularly vulnerable to human traffickers. Charities working with at-risk children in the border region estimate that as many as 3,500 young people could be involved.

"Many girls are trafficked via the pique. It's all highly organised", explains Marcelina Antunez, director of Luz de Infancia, a children's care centre in the Argentine town of Puerto Iguazú.

Driving the trade is the flood of foreign tourists who come to visit the world famous Iguazú waterfalls. Much of the demand for prostitution is casual. Yet the region also attracts a hardened group of sex tourists.

The region's reputation for prostitution is not new. In the late 1970s, around 40,000 workers flooded into the triple frontier to help build the colossal Itaipú hydroelectric dam. Around 97% of the new workforce were men. As the dam went up, so too did the demand for paid-for sex.

"The triple frontera is the Bangkok of Latin America...after the tsunami, many sex tourists started coming here instead of Asia," notes Cynthia Bendlin, director of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) for the triple frontier area.

IOM runs a number of awareness programmes to highlight the dangers of the trafficking trade. But it is an uphill struggle. Many of the children most at risk either live on the street or come from very impoverished families, Ms Bendlin explains.

In some cases of extreme destitution, children are even contracted out by their parents. There is a blind beggar in Puerto Igazú, for example, who walks the streets hand-in-hand with a seven year-old girl. He makes his living by renting her out for sex. She is his neighbour's daughter.

The situation is complicated further by the "recruiters". Often known to the victims, they promise the opportunity of work across the border. When the fictitious jobs never materialise, the victims finds themselves trapped and unable to return home.

IOM also works with local government agencies and the police in an attempt to develop coordinated strategies to stop the traffickers. Again, prgress is slow. In Argentina alone, there are at least five separate security agencies operating in the border zone. Between the three countries, the problem of coordination becomes triply complicated, Ms Bendlin admits.

At a national level, there are some signs of encouragement. This week, Argentina's lower house is scheduled to discuss a bill that would officially recognise underage human trafficking in the criminal code.

Victim organisations welcome such measures, but remain sceptical about how much difference they will make on the ground. Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay all have separate laws and legal processes. Add to that the variety of municipal, provincial and national legislation and you have a complex legal web to navigate.

It is a journey that many victims would rather not undertake. In addition to the psychological and financial implications of pursuing a court case, many fear the threat of reprisals.

"Although we know about more than 700 cases of child trafficking, we have only reported 40 in the last three years", confesses Benigno Cáceres, a lawyer with CEAPRA, a children's charity in the Paraguayan border town of Ciudad del Este.

Only one of these complaints resulted in a guilty verdict.

The relative impunity for sex-related crimes is in keeping with cultural attitudes in the triple frontier. The region's strong culture of machismo holds that sex with underage girls is safer and a sign of male virility, says Norma Pereira, a child psychologist in Ciudad del Este.

In addition, the mothers of trafficked children are frequently themselves the victims of abuse or involved in prostitution, she explains: "Families often refuse to recognise the problem. It's as if this new form of slavery has become natural."

· Oliver Balch is a freelance journalist based in Argentina.

o_balch@hotmail.com

Clandestine military teams clash with CIA, allies

By Greg Miller
Times Staff Writer

7:41 PM PST, December 17, 2006

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Special Forces teams sent overseas on secret spying missions have clashed with the CIA and carried out operations in countries that are staunch U.S. allies, prompting a new effort by the agency and the Pentagon to tighten the rules for military units engaged in espionage, according to senior U.S. intelligence and military officials.

The spy missions are part of a highly classified program that officials say has better positioned the United States to track terrorist networks and capture or kill enemy operatives in regions such as the Horn of Africa, where weak governments are unable to respond to emerging threats.

But the initiative has also led to several embarrassing incidents for the United States, including a shootout in Paraguay and the exposure of a sensitive intelligence operation in East Africa, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter. And to date, the Special Forces espionage effort has not led to the capture of a significant terrorism suspect.

Some intelligence officials have complained that Special Forces teams have sometimes launched missions without informing the CIA, duplicating or even jeopardizing existing operations. And they questioned deploying military teams in friendly nations -- including in Europe -- at a time when combat units are in short supply in war zones.

The program was approved in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, and is expected to get close scrutiny by his successor, Robert M. Gates, who takes over Monday and has been critical of the expansion of the military's intelligence operations.

Senior officials at the CIA and the Pentagon defended the program and said they would urge Gates to support it. But they acknowledged risks for the United States in its growing reliance on Special Forces troops and other military units for espionage.

"We are at war out there and frankly we need all the help that we can get," said Marine Maj. Gen. Michael E. Ennis, who since February has served as a senior CIA official in charge of coordinating human intelligence operations with the military. "But at the same time we have to be very careful that we don't disrupt established relationships with other governments, with their liaison services, or [do] anything that would embarrass the United States."

Ennis acknowledged "really egregious mistakes" in the program, but said collaboration has improved between the CIA and the military.

"What we are seeing now, primarily, are coordination problems," Ennis said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. "And really, they are fewer and fewer."

The issue underscores the sensitivity of using elite combat forces for espionage missions that have traditionally been the domain of the CIA.

After Sept. 11, the Bush administration gave expanded authority to the Special Operations Command, which oversees the Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and other elite units, in the fight against terrorism. At the same time, Rumsfeld, who lacked confidence in the CIA, directed a major expansion of the military's involvement in intelligence gathering to make the Pentagon less dependent on the agency.

Officials said this led to the secret deployment of small teams of Special Forces troops, known as military liaison elements, or MLEs, to American embassies to serve as intelligence operatives. Members of the teams undergo special training in espionage at Ft. Bragg and other facilities, according to officials familiar with the program.

The troops typically work in civilian clothes and function much like CIA case officers, cultivating sources in other governments or Islamic organizations. One objective, officials said, is to generate information that could be used to plan clandestine operations such as capturing or killing terrorism suspects.

In a written response to questions from the Times, a spokesman for the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., described MLEs as "individuals or small teams that deploy in support of (regional military commanders) in select countries, and always with the U.S. ambassador and country team's concurrence and support."

But critics point to a series of incidents in recent years that have caused diplomatic problems for the United States.

In 2004, members of an MLE team operating in Paraguay shot and killed an armed assailant who tried to rob them outside a bar, said former intelligence officials familiar with the incident. U.S. officials removed the members of the team from the country, the officials said.

In another incident, members of a team in East Africa were arrested by the local government after their espionage activity was discovered.

"It was a compromised surveillance activity," said a former senior CIA official familiar with the incident. The official said members of the unit "got rolled up by locals and we got them out." The former official declined to name the country or provide other details.

He said it was an isolated example of an operation that was exposed, but that coordination problems were frequent.

"They're pretty freewheeling," the former CIA official said of the military teams. It was not uncommon, he said, for CIA station chiefs to learn of military intelligence operations only after they were underway, and that many conflicted with existing operations being carried out by the CIA or the foreign country's intelligence service.

Such problems "really are quite costly," said John Brennan, who was director of the National Counterterrorism Center before retiring from government last year. "It can cost peoples' lives, can cost sensitive programs and can set back foreign policy interests."

Brennan declined to comment on specific incidents.

There have also been questions about where teams have been sent. Although conceived to bolster the U.S. presence in global trouble spots, the units have carried out operations in friendly nations in Europe and Southeast Asia where it is more difficult to justify, officials said.

On at least one occasion, a team tracked an Islamic militant in Europe. "They were trying to acquire certain information about a certain individual," said a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The official declined to name the country, but said it was a NATO ally and that the host government was unaware of the mission.

Critics said such operations risk angering U.S. allies with a dubious prospect for payoff. In some countries where MLE teams are located, "There's not a chance ... we're going to send somebody in there to snatch somebody unilaterally," said a government official familiar with the program.

At a time when the military is stretched thin, the official questioned the priority of using Special Forces for espionage, noting that the MLE program has not produced a significant success in terms of disrupting a plot or capturing a terrorist suspect.

"These are a highly trained, short-supply resource of the U.S. government," the official said. "What ... are they doing there instead of Pakistan or Afghanistan?"

Gates, the former director of the CIA poised to run the Pentagon, has voiced concern over the military's encroachment on CIA missions. In an opinion piece published this year, Gates said that "more than a few CIA veterans, including me, are unhappy about the dominance of the Defense Dept. in the intelligence arena and the decline in the CIA's central role."

In response to such conflicts, the administration previously designated the CIA director as the head of all U.S. human-spying operations overseas, with CIA station chiefs serving as coordinators in specific countries.

Ennis, whose position at the CIA was created last year, said the agency and the Pentagon are developing a more rigorous system for screening proposed military intelligence operations.

"Like a pilot with a checklist," CIA station chiefs will be required to sign off on all aspects of a proposed military intelligence operation before it is allowed to proceed, Ennis said. The CIA station chief, he added, "would look at the risk in terms of embarrassment to the government. Do they have the right level of training to do what they claim that they want to do, and is this already being done somewhere else?"

Col. Samuel Taylor, director of public affairs for the Special Operations Command, dismissed the suggestion of coordination problems with other agencies, saying, "We have an excellent, effective and productive working relationship with the CIA."