Captive Daughters Fundraiser

Protect The Sex Trafficking of Children in San Diego

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

El Universal (The Universal Newspaper)
Thursday, January 9, 2003

Anabel Hernández García (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 condooms 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.

(c) 2003 Copyright El Universal-El Universal Online, México.