Q&A: Ecuadorian Anti-Trafficking Advocate Veronica Supliguicha Discusses Venezuela’s Humanitarian Crisis

Is there a profile of the type of person who’s more easily targeted by traffickers? 

The main vulnerability factors among girls and women who are trafficked are that they travel alone without documentation, have often previously experienced abuse or sexual violence, and do not have a long-term plan of what they’re going to do when they migrate.  

Where do these trafficked women and girls typically end up?  

There are a lot of brothels near the borders filled with Venezuelan women who have been trafficked. In these brothels, there are false walls and trafficked women are kept behind them. Customers are taken to different rooms, depending on whether or not they can be trusted to know about these women.  

In one instance, the Ministry of Interior supported us in coordinating a brothel raid. A trafficked woman who escaped made a drawing of where the false walls were and took it to the police. The police officers couldn’t find the wall, so they said she was lying. Then she accompanied them to check the walls and realized there was fresh cement. The owners had changed the structure after she fled, suspecting she might report them. She tried to persuade the police officers to believe her but they did not. As they were leaving, one officer took a final look at the place said loudly, “Since there is nobody here, let’s just knock down the walls.” At that moment, there were two women behind the wall who spoke up out of fear. These trafficked women were rescued, but even after all this, no one was prosecuted.  

 How do these brothels operate? 

Usually, the mechanism is that there is a group of sex workers in the brothel with better working conditions, and then there are the trafficked women. This helps create a facade to hide the trafficking.  

There are customers who seek trafficked women. The women tell me they need to be on drugs in order to be capable of providing sexual services. I think there’s a type of customer who gets pleasure from that power dynamic, and that’s what these brothels sell by offering trafficked women alongside the regular sex workers.

What are the challenges in rescuing the trafficked and prosecuting traffickers? 

Everywhere we work, at the north and south borders, the brothels are full of Venezuelan women. The conditions they are in are exploitative, but these women don’t speak out. They are fearful because they don’t have paperwork and don’t know how to navigate the system. They also don’t see it as a crime. Women often think of it as poor work conditions, but they don’t think of it as exploitation or trafficking.   

There have been police raids in Ecuadorian brothels and trafficking cases were found, but the owners have ties to the police, so the judicial system hasn’t been able to do anything. I spoke with a 19-year-old who fled from a brothel and was suicidal because of the abuse she experienced. The owner of the brothel gave police officers free services so the trafficked women felt they could never seek help. When this woman escaped, she was too fearful of police to take legal action.   

The big issue here is because they’re in transit, the victims don’t enter the judicial system. The judicial system is also very long and they don’t guarantee that victims will be protected.

Is this all a result of the humanitarian crisis? 

Human trafficking is a result of economic exclusion and gender-based violence. So if we’re going to prevent trafficking, we need to address economic issues. The solution is not just putting a few people in jail that have trafficked human beings. The problem is much larger.  

Trafficking has a deep connection with patriarchal systems that look at women as consumption. It’s also the result of a capitalistic system that trades human beings. In Ecuador, we’ve had several migration waves due to humanitarian crises. First, it was Colombian women, and brothels were filled with them, then it was Cuban and Haitian women, and now it’s Venezuelan woman that fill the brothels. Unfortunately, this shows we live in a society that exploits humanitarian situations in a horrific way. It’s not only the traffickers that exploit them, it’s society that allows this to happen and all the people who frequent brothels are part of the system. The exploitation that we see from human trafficking shows a much deeper social system that normalizes this exploitation and allows it to happen.  

Is there any hope the situation may improve? 

The good news is that as of last month, you no longer need a criminal record check to cross the border into Ecuador. When there are restrictions, people are more vulnerable and there may be transactional sex in order to cross borders, so it’s a good thing when movement is freer and borders are open.