Human Trafficking: The Gross Income of Beer
The link between the clandestine sale of beer and the trafficking of women in La Pampa, the biggest illegal gold mining camp in the Amazon. An account book seized by the police and included in the accusation file of a human trafficking case reveals surprising connections between human trafficking and one of the Peruvian flag companies: Backus & Johnston.
By, Gabriel Arriarán
It´s November the 29th, 2013. For nine years now, a gold rush has taken over Madre de Dios, in the Peruvian south eastern Amazon. In the Interoceanic Highway, between Puerto Maldonado and a town called Mazuko, a rosary of wooden huts painted with bright colors and striking figures of women in lingerie stand in the middle of nowhere: Miss Sagitario, California, Papillon, and, somewhat more modestly, The Embassy. They are part of a conglomerate of clandestine brothels in a placed named after the point in the highway they are all in: Km. 108.
That night, The Embassy sold 14 soft drinks, 12 bottles of water, 2 energy drinks (in the rudimentary account notebook are listed under the brand Power), twenty-eight chips (they call chips to the addition of all these drinks) and 329 bottles of beer. When the police and the prosecutors storm the place, The Embassy has made a total sale of S./3850, a bit more than one grand. (1US$=S./3.3). As the operation comes to an end, the Police rescues eleven sexually exploited women. LMQC, a minor, was among them.
Trafficking in persons. The girl refers to the police that she was making thirty soles a day (she actually earns something more: an average of S /. 42.1 a day, less than 50% of the minimum wage in Peru) to accompany customers to drink.
The cashier is confiscated 400 soles in his pockets.
Finally, SQ, a 30 years old woman, a native from Cusco, is intervened. The Police report is confusing about the role SQ played in The Embassy. They don’t quite understand whether SQ is the manager or if she owns the place. The officer that writes down SQ’s statement first describes her as the person in charge, then adds that she is the owner. In the end, she is filed as the owner. These mistakes in the prosecutors investigation will lead SQ to spend the next 18 months of her life in prison, without conviction. The document also abounds: SQ met the victim in Juliaca, a neigbouring city in the region of Puno. Later on, I found that the same trafficker (a woman called Soledad) brought both SQ and LMQC to La Pampa.
The rest of the officers collected statements from the rest of the girls. But, of the utmost importance, they seized a rudimentary business account notebook.
For the first time, this document opens to public scrutiny how corporations profit from human trafficking and sexual exploitation in the biggest illegal gold mining field in the Amazon basin.
SQ, victim and alleged victimizer
I met SQ at the Puerto Maldonado´s prison in March 2014, about five months after she was arrested. Luis Alberto Sanchez, her prosecutor, first filed for her nine months of preventive detention. Then, another nine months were imposed on her. Eighteen months in prison without a conviction, for, allegedly, being guilty of human traffcking.
It was a fortituous encounter like other several of those that, in the end, ended up engendering this investigation. Rosario Yori, a journalist pursuing a master’s degree at the University of New York had obtained a permission from the prison director to interview two inmates for human trafficking. And so we got in. The paint on the walls of the San Francisco prison peel because of the sun and the moisture of the tropical weather on the way out of Puerto Maldonado. A guard keeps the first entrance door. An empty space, something like an avenue, encloses the wall that separates the precinct from the street, and the entrance from from the complex where the cells are. To properly enter the prison it is necessary to go through something the customs of an airport, in this case, the customs of an African provincial airport. But it is not Africa. It is Peru. You have to show an ID, deliver the cell phone to a custodian. The X-ray machine is closed broken in a corner. A last guard, a man in my case, a woman in the case of Rosario, searched us. The only thing we could take with us is a notebook and a pen. The guards took us to Rosario and me to a small room.
If you expect to meet in those alleged human traffickers some horrible psychopaths, monsters that enslave and eat girls at night, in the San Francisco prison you will be hugely dissapointed. Because who came timidly before us, accompanied by a security guard, were two humble women. One looked happy. She had a few months left to go free, and she was excited to join her familiy again. Among the 37 female inmates for trafficking in persons in that jail, she was the only one that got a veridict. SQ, the other woman, was serving her first five months and she was still unaware that she still had to serve another thirteen, just to be released due to lack of evidence to convict her.
The Embassy´s Notebooks
The meeting with SQ resulted in a substantial key: her lawyer’s phone, the attorney that defended her in trial. Through her, a copy of SQ´s complete file. And in it, a small treasure: the Embassy’s account book. This notebook is the key to rebuild the human trafficking supply chain and to calculate its profitability.
For the last two years I have been turning over this handwritten account notebook to a spreadsheet. This is the first time that an investigation reveals human trafficking in the Peruvian Amazon for what it is: “an inhumane, despicable business but […] first and foremost a profitable commercial activity”, says researcher Wade Channell in his book: A Nasty Business.
Once the data was all digitalized, it was possible to determine exactly how much money The Embassy made during 16 days of fully operational human trafficking activity. A first simple analysis of The Embassy´s cash drawer shows a gross income of 49 9110 soles. (US$ 14 881.82). 74.22% of this total corresponded to the sale of beer (36 450 soles) while what the Embassy´s made by selling sexual services was only 7400 soles, the 15.07% of its total gross income.
The numbers point to a very clear direction: selling beer is the prime business for illegal brothels in La Pampa, such as The Embassy´s.
The Peruvian Beer Market
During 2013, when the police intervened and shutted down The Embassy, Union de Cervecerías Backus and Johnston controlled 96.5% of the beer market in Peru. Currently owned by Ambev, a Belgian multinational corporation, in 2013 Backus & Johnston reported a gross income of 3201.6 million dollars that represented 93.3% of the company’s total sales.
Backus & Johnston southern sales province, which comprises Madre de Dios, as well as Cusco, Arequipa, Tacna, Moquegua and Puno, accounts for 18% of their total sales.
Peru’s current president, Pedro Pablo Kuczynsky, for several years acted as director for Backus & Johnston. In 2013, Mr. Fernando Zavala, now Peru’s prime minister, was CEO in Backus, and before that, he acted as the Peruvian secretary of the Treasure.
How thousands of pints of beer that Backus produces annually ended up in The Embassy, and still come to La Pampa, sold by hundreds of sexually exploited women?
Stay tuned.
- Asociación Huarayo funded the research process for this story with a grant, in November 2016.
- The Gross Income of Beer was first published in Frontera Pirata’ original webpage: www.fronterapirata.com the 27th of January of 2018. In Spanish.
