INQUIRER.net FILE PHOTO
ZAMBOANGA CITY, Philippines—Police rescued 13 would-be victims of human trafficking in an operation last Monday in which they also arrested a former Marine sergeant and three accomplices as they were preparing the ship the women supposedly to Lebanon via Malaysia.
Chief Inspector Alex Lorenzo, head of the Philippine Center for Transnational Crime in Western Mindanao, identified the suspects as Olivia Abo Abo, and Eulalia Francis Richards of Cebu City; and former Marine Sergeant Luis Solano and his wife Marilyn of this city.
Abo Abo and Richards allegedly recruited the victims through Merco Recruitment Agency while the Solano couple was said to have functioned as facilitators here.
Lorenzo said the anti-human trafficking operation started Sunday afternoon when the authorities received information about the arrival of some 20 female passengers at the Zamboanga International Airport from various parts of the country.
He said the authorities immediately suspected that something was not right and that some of the victims might be being trafficked through this city.
Lorenzo said shortly after a tight watch of the city’s seaport was made, five women were taken into custody and questioned by personnel of the Passenger Assistance Center after they registered as passengers bound for Tawi-Tawi.
Upon further questioning, Lorenzo said, the women claimed they were bound for Malaysia but they failed to present any employment documents.
The statements provided by the five women led the authorities to a safehouse in Barangay (village) Labangan here, where eight more women were found in the company of the four suspected human traffickers, Lorenzo said.
Lorenzo said based on the statements that they got from the 13 women, who were in their 20s, they were to be sent to Lebanon via Malaysia.
The four suspects face charges of violating the Anti-Human Trafficking Law passed in 2003.
Earlier in Davao City, lawyer Barbara Mae Flores, prosecutor in the Department of Justice in Southern Mindanao, said the government’s effort against human trafficking was becoming successful, mainly due to the rising level of awareness of the evils the global problem that has led some 27 million people worldwide into forced labor, sexual exploitation and other involuntary services.
In Southern Mindanao alone, she said, 63 cases have been filed since the law was passed and out of these, nine cases have resulted in convictions.
Asked about the apparently low conviction rate, Flores said pressures such as being scared, stigma, lack of financial means of the victims and a long tedious process to pursue a case against aggressors were often the stumbling blocks.
“Sometimes victims will just have to desist from filing a case,” Flores added.
Of the 63 cases filed since 2003, she admitted that 11 had been dismissed, some due to fear among the victims, and 12 others archived.
But the good news, she said, was that 30 cases remain active in court, which means that many victims were willing to help prosecute the traffickers.
Flores assistance was now widely available for victims.
“There is a so called Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking (Iacat) and partner non-government organizations that can readily extend assistance to the victims,” Flores said. “We also say to victims that our DOJ office can give legal service for free.”
Just how bad human trafficking is can be summed up this way: “As bad as drug trafficking,” Rolando Lopez, a former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said on the sidelines of an anti-human trafficking forum held in Davao City in June.
“The money that is made in illegal drugs is the same in human trafficking,” he told the Inquirer.
Amy Muranko-Gahan, founding director of the anti-human trafficking group Global Impact, said the number of people being trafficked was “massive” as there were 27 million people “living in some kind of slavery” worldwide.
“It’s more than any time in history that we have slaves,” she said.
Exploitation takes place when certain people take advantage of vulnerable individuals for financial gain or turn them into some form of slaves for their benefit, Muranko-Gahan told the Inquirer.
She said poverty was not always a factor in the problem as there have been cases of young girls in affluent countries in Europe and in the West who were preyed upon and turned into sex slaves by organized crime groups.
“It’s not just a poverty issue, but it is also a deception issue,” she said.
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