On camera, Brenda wonders who will be the next victim in a series of murders of migrants recruited by a sex trafficking network in Mexico.
Her testimony, along with those of other women, is part of a documentary series called “Deadly Web: The Victims of Zona Divas” (“El Portal”), which will air this week on the Netflix platform.
An Argentinian national, Brenda is one of hundreds of women, mostly South Americans, who have arrived in Mexico in recent years, attracted by fictitious job offers circulated by a gang.
Once in Mexico, these women were sequestered and reduced to slavery by this mafia which confiscated their passports and sold their “escort” services on the Zona Divas website, the four-part docu-series recounts.
The tragedy experienced by these women was exacerbated when four Venezuelans and an Argentinian woman, caught in the trap of the pimping network, were murdered in 2017 and 2018.
“We wanted to revisit the stories of these women, what led them to this. They all come from very precarious backgrounds (…) and emigrated to Mexico in search of a better future,” Laura Woldenberg, executive producer of the series, told AFP.
Woldenberg says “Deadly Web: The Victims of Zona Divas” is not about pointing fingers, but rather about preventing the abuse from happening again and giving clients of prostitutes pause.
Fleeing violence and poverty, hundreds of thousands of migrants cross Mexico each year to reach the United States. Many remain in Mexico long enough to raise the money needed to finance their dangerous journey – particularly to pay the traffickers, known as “coyotes.”
– Doubly vulnerable –
Production managers Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez traveled to Argentina, Venezuela and the United States to talk to women who managed to escape the network, as well as the families of the young women who were murdered.
“As they are part of a minority, no one is interested. We say to ourselves: ‘Ah, another girl has died!'”, Brenda regrets in the documentary.
“What makes them doubly vulnerable, in addition to being migrants, is sex work. And of course, there is a lack of trust in Mexican authorities,” Rondero says.
In Mexico, where around ten women are murdered every day, activists deplore the almost total impunity for the murderers.
“After much effort, those who escaped managed to regain control of their bodies and their own work,” explains Ms. Valadez.
According to local media, around 20 people have been investigated or arrested for their links to the Zona Divas website, which was active between 2001 and 2018.
Among them, Ignacio Santoyo Cervantes, nicknamed “El Sony”, was arrested in 2007 for pimping and trafficking in illegal resources. However, he was released due to lack of evidence and is currently in Cuba, according to the local press and NGOs.
According to the same sources, the network is linked to criminal groups that control drug trafficking in Mexico.
Nearly one in 100,000 people worldwide are victims of human trafficking and more than half of those are victims of sexual exploitation, according to a 2023 UN report.
In a case that echoes the series, Interpol said in July that Colombia and Mexico had dismantled a trafficking ring that forced young South American women into prostitution in bars in Mexican tourist cities.
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