Cocks in the Kitchen, Chickens in the Streets
How does human trafficking, sexual exploitation and the clandestine trafficking of beer work altogether in Peru´s illegal gold mining fields in the Amazon.
By, Gabriel Arriarán
Four years ago, Frontera Pirata started an investigation that bounced on an account book that the police seized in The Embassy, a clandestine brothel in La Pampa, Peru’s largest illegal gold mining field.
The analysis of this accounting revealed the connections between the clandestine sale of beer, and human trafficking and sexual exploitation in the Amazonian capital of these crimes: Km. 108 of the Interoceanic Highway, in the Madre de Dios region.
Afterwards, an interview with this brothel´s star lady, resulted in an exhaustive description of its business organization, and in addition, a key fact: the name of the middleman with a foot in formality and another one in crime.
This is the fourth installment of The Embassy´s Notebook, the series of reports on the micro economy of human trafficking in the largest illegal gold mining field in the Amazon basin.
The Organizational Chart of a Criminal Enterprise
Although it was a clandestine bar, The Embassy had a classic business organization chart: a president or a director orchestrating the business; and a partner and general manager below him, executing his orders.
Domingo Ramos Mamani, the capitalist partner, was the director. He lived in Ilo, a city at the south of Peru, close to Chile. He´s currently a justice runaway, probably hidden in Bolivia.
Ildefonso Mamani Mamani, his partner, served as general manager of this clandestine company. He did not live at The Embassy. His girlfriend, Nerida Tincco Farfan ((died in a traffic accident months after the intervention) and him, stayed in the surrounding hostels, alternating between them to avoid an intervention, such as the one that ended this business.
Two women were responsible for scouting and hiring new personnel, or what is the same, feeding The Embassy with fresh human trafficking victims for sexual exploitation.
A financial manager (in this case, JALL, cashier and waiter); and a human resources manager (SQ, the cook, who was in charge of supervising and feeding the girls), completed Embassy´s payroll. Their names have been coded to protect their safety.
Below them, between 10 and 17 girls, depending on the day, were sexually exploited in the sale bottles of beer bottles to workers in the illegal gold mining camps. Not all of them were exactly the same. Some were sexually exploited but since they’ve earned the partners´ trust, they could come and go and they were not forced to live at The Embassy. Ten women composed the permanent staff. Eight of them were human trafficking victims, like LMQC herself, to whom fines, the cut of their freedom to move, and the deprivation of her payments had placed in a forced labor kind of situation.
The Star at the Embassy
There were signs that identified her at a distance: long black curls, a freshly washed and perfumed hair, that fell wildly on her shoulders. A mascara on her eyelids, carmine on her mouth, an alcoholic breath that a shower and a nap could not dissipate. A tight top to the torso delineated generous breasts and leaved her navel in the air. Her belly was perfectly flat. Dressed in tight jeans, tied to her hips, and a pair of high heels to walk on sand, garbage and filth. She looked like a teenager who just got out of an after party and prepares for the next spree. Only that, in her case, spree is the same as work, or at least part of it. The other part consists in producing a body indoctrinated for the night. She is the embodiment of the Amazonian gold rush in Madre de Dios: a beautiful territory, a few years of excesses, and then nothing.
EVC was born in Puerto Maldonado, a single mother to a two year old kid. A morning in September 2013 she appeared at the doors of The Embassy with her baby. In the months that followed, the brothel was to her a boarding house, a nursery and a job, and she will become the brothel´s most demanded girl.
As it is recorded in the Embassy´s account book, EVC received an advance of S/5160, and the owners still owed her 956 soles in sale commissions for the selling of beer and other beverages, and for the selling of sexual services. After three months of work, she made S/6566. With a dollar trading at November 2013 at an average of S/.2.8, this makes a monthly average remuneration of S/.2188.6 (US$761.64).
According to the National Statistics Institution, in 2012 the average monthly income in Peru was of S/.1141. In Madre de Dios, the richest Peruvian region in strictly monetary terms, due to the gold rush, that amount ascended to S/.1821.9. EVC´s income, then, was almost three times the legal minimum wage, which in 2013 was 750 soles, and more than doubled the average monthly income in Peru. Her earnings at The Embassy surpassed to, the average income in Madre de Dios. Not bad for a teenager that didn’t finish school.
Working as a prostitute in the clandestine bars and brothels that surround the illegal gold mines of Madre de Dios may force a teenager to a situation of brutal exploitation and slavery, but also, as is the case of EVC, can pay, and by Peruvian standards, pay well.
If EVC’s monthly income was almost three times the minimum monthly salary, that of LMQC-the teenager for whom SQ had ended up in jail-was half: 380 soles per month.
Negligence, Lack of Funding, Lack of Guts, What is going on with the General Attorney in Madre de Dios?
Much of the information contained here was found in a file in the Public Prosecutor´s Office in Puerto Maldonado. Attorney Luis Alberto Sanchez was in charge of this case. Sanchez, then, identified The Embassy beneficial owners, Ildefonso Mamani and Domingo Ramos. But he requested a preventive detention for the cook, while these two fled away from justice.
Preventive detention of victims and the proletarians of crime, is not an exception. In the San Francisco prison in Puerto Maldonado it is possible to find cashiers, cooks, prostitutes, even victims of human trafficking, that are arrested and sentenced, ironically, for human trafficking too.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of the Interior and its branch in civil society (CHS-Alternativo) had tools and resources more than enough to track the human trafficking money and find those who are really profiting from this crime.
With more more than 10 years of specialization in the subject, and millions of dollars flowing into their bank accounts from international aid agencies, it never occurred to them to follow the money. Instead, they were jailing cooks, waiters and cashiers in illegal bars.
Is it that, when it comes to a cook, they are roosters in the kitchen, but when it comes to a corporation, they are chickens on the street?
The conversation with EVC left a fundamental fact: the name of a middle man at La Pampa. The track by which it is possible to trace millions of human trafficking dirtied dollars up to Ambev´s Backus & Johnson: Candia.
