Tag Archives: forced prostitution

Mining and Child Prostitution

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Years ago, education officials in the remote mining town, Mahdia Guyana, installed metal bars on the windows of the high school’s dormitory partly to keep girls and boys from being preyed upon in a town known for parties, nightclubs and brothels frequented by local gold miners.

But the grates and padlocked doors meant to protect students instead helped seal their fate as fire tore through the girls facility one night in late May 2023, killing 20, mostly indigenous girls from far-flung hamlets served by the school. Their bodies were so badly incinerated that authorities in this impoverished South American nation had to send DNA samples to New York to identify the victims. The tragedy rocked the small, South American country where poverty and child sexual exploitation remain entrenched in its lawless mining regions…

For decades, the gold deposits around Mahdia have drawn members of indigenous communities, young men from Guyana’s Atlantic coast, as well as Brazilian and Venezuelan wildcat miners who pay indigenous councils a 10% cut of their haul, according to Cornel Edwards, a 70-year-old toshao, or local chieftain. Some of those men have long flocked to Mahdia for booze and sex after toiling in mud pits hunting for gold, local government and residents say…

Children being lured into dangerous mining work and child prostitution in lawless mining regions are common in other countries in South America, including Ecuador and Colombia, according to a U.S. Labor Department report from 2021. In 2017, Unicef published a tool kit for industrial mining firms, offering guidelines on how to train workers at large-scale as well as smaller companies that buy gold from individual miners on the risks of children forced into sex work in mining areas.

Excerpts from Kejal Vya, Deadly School Fire Casts Light on Sexual Exploitation in Guyana Mining Town, WSJ, July 23, 2023

Sterilized Prostitutes

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Pope Francis on Janurary 19, 2018 criticized sterilization campaigns that have targeted indigenous people during a speech to Amazonian communities in Peru.  It’s a topic likely to strike a chord in a country where more than 300,000 women were sterilized during the 1990-2000 government of former President Alberto Fujimori. ..The pontiff decried organizations that promote “reproductive policies favoring infertility” and said some continue to advocate for the sterilization of women — even without consent.  Many of the women sterilized during Fujimori’s administration were illiterate and came from poor, indigenous communities. More than 2,000 later came forward to complain that they had been forcibly sterilized…In 1996 there were, according to official statistics, 81,762 tubal ligations performed on women, with a peak being reached the following year, with 109,689 ligatures, then only 25,995 in 1998 (bbc).

Pope Francis denounced sexual enslavement of women in the Amazon who are trafficked and forced into prostitution, saying the “machismo” culture cannot stand. …It is painful how “so many women are devalued, denigrated and exposed to endless violence.”  Many women work as prostitutes in the region’s bars, servicing clients who often work in gold mines and other extraction industries….

Excerpts from The Latest: Pope decries sterilization campaigns in Peru, Associated Press, Jan. 19, 2018

Case: In 1996, Peruvian public health officials threatened Maria Mamerita Mestanza Chávez with criminal sanctions if she did not undergo a sterilization surgery. Her partner ultimately agreed to the surgery. She was never examined prior to the procedure. After complications ensued, she was refused medical treatment and died at home nine days later. After domestic remedies failed, the Latin American and Caribbean Committee for the Defense of Women’s Rights (CLADEM) and two other Peruvian human rights group filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in 1999 and were later joined by the Center and the Center for Justice and International Law (CEJIL). In 2002, the Peruvian government agreed in principle to settle the case. An agreement was signed in 2003 in which the government acknowledged international legal responsibility, agreed to compensate Mestanza’s surviving husband and children, and agreed to modify and implement recommendations made by Peru’s Human Rights Ombudsman concerning sterilization procedures in Peru’s government facilities.  (see center for reproductive rights)