NewsChild draggers: how do trafficking networks use minors as...

Child draggers: how do trafficking networks use minors as bait?

That morning, Daniela got up at six, like any day, although her movements were quieter than normal. Pedro , his father, noticed him and approached the room. He watched her get ready under the light of the cell phone, because they had no electricity. Minutes later, the 13-year-old girl said goodbye to go to school and he replied: “God keep you, daughter, judge.”

A few hours after that May 4, 2022, some nieces informed Pedro that Daniela had disappeared. He recalled that three days earlier, a 16-year-old girl had visited Daniela at her home, in the Bolívar municipality, Táchira state, Venezuela, bordering the Norte de Santander Department, Colombia.

For this reason, she sensed that Daniela had left with that young woman who visited her a lot. She thought that if she did not turn on the alerts her daughter would not know where she was going and she ran towards the nearest trails or trails to ask, with a photograph, if they had seen her pass (the names of Daniela and her father have been changed at the request of the family).

According to estimates by the UN Refugee Agency, there is a high migratory flow of children from Venezuela to Colombia for which there are no precise data. By 2020, Migration Colombia reported that some 25,000 children and adolescents had left Venezuela without the accompaniment of an adult.

In October 2021, the Secretary of Borders and Migratory Affairs of the Government of Norte de Santander, Víctor Bautista, assured that 45% of the migratory flow from Venezuela is of children under 14 years of age. Most travel alone and without documentation.

of Diario de Los Andes and reveals that this migratory phenomenon hides another face of the tragedy that Venezuelans live and that it is little investigated: boys, girls and adolescents are captured by draggers , that is, other minors, to be taken to Colombia and delivered to human trafficking networks for the purpose of sexual or labor exploitation.

They travel along the illegal paths of a border that has been closed since August 19, 2015 and that could be opened as soon as the elected president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, assumes power, according to the announcements he has made in this regard.

This situation has been alerted by authorities, NGOs and university centers with migratory observatories on the border, which provided some figures for this journalistic investigation. Thus, from 2020 to 2021, the Council for the Protection of Children and Adolescents of the Bolívar municipality, Venezuela, received nine repatriated minors, victims of sexual exploitation, captured by other minors.

The former mayor of that municipality, William Gómez, counts two frustrated cases of adolescents who tried to pass four minors through the Simón Bolívar International Bridge; Thanks to an early warning, they were detained by the authorities.

What the organizations know is that the draggers locate others their own age to convince them to leave home, without notifying their families, offering them high-end phones, money, a well-paid job and the opportunity to help their children. families.

During their encounters they take photographs of their faces and documents, and send them to trafficking networks. They generally reach out to those living in poverty. Most of the draggers know these other children, since they look for them in spaces where they have lived or have been in another occasion, to generate trust.

Venezuelan institutions do not give figures on this matter. The Autonomous Institute National Council for the Rights of Children and Adolescents (Idenna), based in Táchira, alleges that, if they did, they would be . “We would be violating the confidentiality of the cases,” says Mariana Acosta, regional director of Idenna.

The Organic Law for the Protection of Children and Adolescents, however, does not prevent figures from being given; its restriction is directed, rather, to expose the identity of the minor.

A source from the Gender Violence Observatory of Norte de Santander, Colombia, who asked not to be identified for security reasons, believes that the draggers could also be victims of trafficking. He also thinks they are being watched. “These children have also gone through a whole series of victimizations of this crime, and they were put to fulfill this function. Are they being victims of these trafficking networks?” he asks.

NGOs and universities assure that in the government institutions of Colombia and Venezuela there are sub-registers that reflect the trafficking of migrant minors on a small scale, but they do not describe the draggers within them.

A crime that goes unreported

Pedro feared that his daughter was in the hands of a trafficking ring. Desperate to find her, he crossed to the Norte de Santander Department and asked for help from three police officers who were in the vicinity of the Immigration headquarters.

As he was not treated, he was transferred to the Cúcuta Terminal. He boarded the buses that lead to Bucaramanga and Ocaña and entered the Immediate Attention Command of the Colombian National Police, within the same land port. He got no support. He also went to the Prosecutor’s Office and to the headquarters of the Police for Children and Adolescents, where they did not receive the complaint either. They claimed that he should do it in Venezuela.

When reviewing Facebook and Instagram, her relatives found Daniela ‘s common contacts with her alleged friend. They discovered that the latter belonged to the network of a woman who is called “La Patrona”, owner of brothels in Colombia. Pedro shared this information with police officials, who established telephone contact with the criminals. From there they discovered that this teenager was a dragger who called herself Tathiana and who worked at Bar 10, in the department of Cesar, Colombia.

Pedro received a call from Daniela , who in an oversight of her captor asked for a borrowed phone. “He told me: ‘Dad, they have me in Bucaramanga.’ I told her: ‘Go somewhere where they can help you, start yelling, start doing something, daughter.’ And he said: ‘no, dad, they have threatened me, that they are going to kill my family, that she moves a lot of people, and here goes another lady with us’.

The biggest obstacle to knowing how many minors are used to capture other children and adolescents on the Colombian-Venezuelan border is that disappearances are not reported to the security agencies in either country, despite the fact that there are care routes. When a family member of the victim tries to do so, they encounter impediments from the authorities.

A source from the Gender Violence Observatory of Norte de Santander, who requests not to be exposed, explains that Daniela ‘s case “shows very well the negligent character that the path of care and prevention of human trafficking still has.” In addition, it assures that police officials threaten the victims of Venezuelan origin with being denounced in Migración Colombia so that they deport them; therefore, they do not see in the institutions an ally for their protection and rescue, but rather an entity that worsens their condition.

In the Fundación Redes (Fundaredes) they have detected that, when the representatives of a disappeared minor go to the Corps of Scientific, Penal and Criminalistic Investigations (Cicpc), they are coerced so that they do not formalize the complaint.

“It’s a pattern on the part of Cicpc officials: family members go to report and immediately tell them ‘don’t report, stay calm’; then, in some way, they try to threaten, intimidate, to tell them that they will have consequences if they denounce these disappearances,” says Clara Ramírez, director of documentation and human rights at Fundaredes.

According to her, officials often allege that infants and adolescents leave due to family problems or, if they are girls, that they are with their boyfriend.

In the case of Daniela , the Police for Children and Adolescents in Cúcuta formalized the disappearance report only after the parents showed evidence that their daughter was with a trafficking network. The minor’s call allowed them to trace the owner of the phone and the driver of the vehicle. Thus they achieved their rescue.

When checking the tow truck’s phone, the officials discovered that the young woman had received 280 dollars (one million Colombian pesos) for Daniela , and that she had taken four more children. However, because she was a minor, she was sent to the protection of an ICBF group home.

Daniela does not want to go back to school, because she is afraid after being cheated on by her 16-year-old friend. His father describes that the family also feels fear, mistrust and anguish, especially because they live in a situation of scarcity and poverty. Pedro wants to move from El Palotal, but he does not have the economic conditions to do so.

“I would like to leave there, I don’t see a future for my children. I believed in Venezuela, but we have already gone through a lot of the economic situation, the electricity, the medicines,” he says, while affirming that the whole family needs psychological attention, because they were marked by the action of the dragging adolescent.

If you are interested in learning more about the phenomenon of ‘dragging’ minors on the Colombian-Venezuelan border, you can .

This work was carried out by Mariana Duque for and with the support of the Initiative for Investigative Journalism in the Americas.

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