An
alarming rise in people trafficking has emerged in
Pacific Island states, often linked to transnational
crime groups also involved in narcotics and other
major crimes.
The
islands have also become a transit point for other
people trafficking operations as crime groups take
advantage of weak laws, corruption, and inadequate
border controls and documentation, a new report from
the Australian Institute of Criminology warns.
It
says crime groups are using natural disasters, poverty
and migration to boost their operations, and are
importing and entrapping workers from outside the
region to work in industries from logging and mining
to tourism.
Young
women are used as currency in sex-for-fish trading
deals and prostitution is on the increase, with an
increasing risk of exposure to people smugglers, the
institute's report, Vulnerabilities to Trafficking in
the Pacific, said.
The
report's authors, institute researchers Jade Lindley
and Laura Beacroft, said that in the six years to 2009
Fiji, Guam, Marshall Islands, New Caledonia, Northern
Mariana Islands, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga
and Vanuatu reported their belief that people had been
trafficked into their countries.
The
report said people trafficking targeted both legal
industries and illegal operations run by organised
crime in the region.
"Some
members of Asian crime syndicates have migrated to the
Pacific, gained citizenship and set up legitimate
businesses to act as a cover for illegal activities,
such as money laundering and large-scale drug
transshipments," it said.
"Gambling
and prostitution have been highlighted as forming part
of a larger, more organised, syndicate of criminal
activity in the Pacific region."
In
one case the Australian Federal Police's Pacific
Transnational Crime Co-ordination Centre was involved
in the investigation of an incident of trafficking of
persons from China into the Pacific for sex work and
the use of fishing vessels to transport them.
In
February last year a joint police and immigration raid
in Fiji found nine Chinese nationals in breach of
their visas, seven of whom were vulnerable women
engaging in prostitution.
Transnational
syndicates are not the only organised crime groups
operating in the Pacific.
The
report described the rise of local "cottage
industry" groups, small-time operators at times
linked to larger criminal syndicates based outside the
region, creating chains that complicate the task of
investigators and prosecutors.
The
region is also being used as temporary transit points
for people smuggling and a range of other organised
transnational criminal activities, such as drug
smuggling and exploitation of resources through
illegal fishing and logging.
And
the increasing movement of people into and out of the
Pacific - in part driven by the need to find work
abroad - adds to the dangers of both people
trafficking and the vulnerability of migrants in their
new countries.
The
departure of Islanders also potentially increases the
risk of people being trafficked into their former
homes for work already increasing in fishing,
yachting, cruise and cargo shipping, logging, mining
and non-traditional agriculture such as coffee, and in
tourism.
"Demand
for workers in these industries is high and
exploitative work environments are common, such as
those identified by Fiji's United Nations Development
Fund for Women, which then presents risks for labour
trafficking," the report said.
"For
example, Fijian authorities became aware of employers
in sugar mills seizing passports and other
documentation belonging to migrant workers to prevent
them from leaving the mills, while exposing the
workers to harsh treatment."
And
while small, cohesive communities can help counter
traffickers, they can also offer them opportunities.
The
report said patriarchal social systems dominated by
male attitudes could allow "unchecked" abuse
against women and girls, increasing their
vulnerability to other harm, including trafficking.
Combined with poverty, this hit education and
employment prospects for women, contributing to an
observed rise in prostitution.
"All
of the factors described here may be contributing to
the reported exposure of young women to a system where
sex is traded for fish and fresh produce," the
report said. "Such a system has been identified
as widespread in the Pacific among local and
international fishing trawlers."
The
report also warned that natural disasters raised
further dangers.
Rape,
sexual abuse, kidnapping and people trafficking
followed the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, with similar
concerns reported after the October 2009 earthquake
that devastated Samoa, American Samoa and Tonga.
TRADE
IN BLOOD, SWEAT AND TEARS
How
the traffickers operate:
*
The case of 15 Indian families came to light in 2006.
They had sold their land to pay between A$20,000
($26,290) and A$38,000 for work and entitlement to New
Zealand citizenship after five years. Instead, they
spent five years in Niue, their passports were
confiscated by their employers and they were forced to
work for low wages and repay the costs of their travel
from India.
*
Also in 2006, seven Filipina and nine Chinese women
were allegedly trafficked into Palau by four Chinese
nationals. The Filipinas paid US$900 ($1210) for
waitress work that would supposedly pay US$250 a
month, and the Chinese women US$5000 for an expected
US$2000-a-month job. Instead they were handed packets
of condoms, their passports were confiscated and they
were forced into prostitution, working seven days a
week.
*
In 2009, 13 Indians were lured to non-existent jobs in
Fiji, allegedly by Indian and Fijian nationals aided
by corrupt immigration officials.
*
Last year an Indian national was convicted and
sentenced to six years in jail for deceiving seven
Indian nationals about work in New Zealand and taking
them to Fiji instead. An immigration official
identified them as possible victims of trafficking. NZ
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Several
of the 513 Mexican migrants dehydrated after
travelling for hours in dangerously crowded conditions
Police
in Mexico's southern Chiapas state have found 513
migrants inside two trailer trucks bound for the US,
and said they had been transported in dangerously
crowded conditions.
Some
of the immigrants were suffering from dehydration
after travelling for hours clinging to cargo ropes
strung inside the containers to keep them upright
and to allow more migrants to be more crammed in on
the floor.
The
trucks had air holes punched in the tops of the
containers, but migrants interviewed at the state
prosecutors' office said they lacked air and water.
The trucks were bound for the central city of Puebla,
where the migrants said they had been told they
would be loaded onto a second set of vehicles for
the trip to the US border.
"We
were suffering, it was very hot and we were clinging
to the ropes," said Mario, a 23-year-old
Honduran migrant who identified himself only by his
first name. Mexico's national human rights
commission says thousands of undocumented migrants
are kidnapped and held for ransom by drug gangs in
Mexico each year.
None
of the migrants would say whether any drug gangs had
been involved in the mass smuggling scheme broken up
early Tuesday when Chiapas state police discovered
the migrants while using x-ray equipment on the
trucks at a checkpoint in the outskirts of city of
Tuxtla Gutiérrez.
The
migrants said the smugglers were charging them about
$7,000 (£4,303) apiece to get them into the US. A
Guatemalan migrant who identified himself as Juan
said remaining in his hometown in Guatemala was not
an option. "A lot of us are Indians, and we
can't stay in our homes. There is no work, and
there's nothing to eat," he said.
An
agent for the national immigration institute said it
was the largest shipment of migrants detained in
Mexico in recent years.
Police
also arrested four people accused of smuggling the
migrants, who are from Central and South America and
Asia, Chiapas state prosecutors said in a statement.
The
alleged smugglers tried to escape police but were
chased down and captured, prosecutors said.
The
immigration institute said in a statement that 410
of the migrants were from Guatemala, 47 from El
Salvador, 32 from Ecuador, 12 from India, six from
Nepal, three from China and one each from Japan, the
Dominican Republic and Honduras. There were 32 women
and four children among them.
In
January, Chiapas state authorities discovered 219
migrants squeezed into a trailer truck.
Most
of those migrants were from Central America but six
were from Sri Lanka and four from Nepal. Guardian
