ISABEL WAS 25 when she left Medellín, in Colombia, for what she thought was a job at a nightclub in the Dominican Republic. The advert on Facebook had promised good pay and said recruiters would cover her flight. She saw it as a way to support her daughter and unemployed parents. But when she arrived, a man took her passport and said she owed $6,000 for the journey. The debt, he said, could be repaid only through sex. Night after night she was forced to work in brothels as her “debt” kept growing—expenses were added each day. She was never paid a cent.
Humans are trafficked for two main reasons: sexual exploitation, mostly of women and girls, and forced labour, which ensnares men in mines, farms and factories. Isabel is not alone. The number of people tricked or forced into work increased by 89% between 2018 and 2022 in the Latin American countries for which the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has up-to-date statistics, including Colombia, the Dominican Republic and Brazil. Across the Americas, the ILO reckons, 3.6m people are forced to work, generating around $52bn a year in illegal profit.
As Latin America’s drug gangs have expanded, and their operations grown more sophisticated, human trafficking has become an important part of their portfolios. The cocaine economy built the infrastructure—smuggling routes, money-laundering networks and corrupt officials—that now sustains a broader web of illicit business, says José Monteiro of the International Justice Mission, an American NGO, who works in Guatemala. The UN estimates that three-quarters of trafficking cases worldwide involve organised crime.
Illegal gold-mining is perhaps the most profitable way to deploy forced labour. Criminal groups recruit men with promises of well-paid work in the gold belts of Peru and Brazil. But when they arrive in remote jungle camps armed guards prevent them from leaving. In Brazil alone, traffickers are thought to be exploiting some 4,500 people in gold mines. Women and girls are also trafficked to mining zones, then trapped in brothels that serve those miners who have chosen to work there.
Meanwhile in tourist hubs like Medellín, Mexico City and Lima, gangs that peddle cocaine to tourists now also market women, says Jeremy McDermott of InSight Crime, an investigative outfit. Since the pandemic cheap flights and governments’ relaxed attitudes towards prostitution have helped sex tourism become a booming business. Medellín had 1.5m visitors in 2023—seven times more than a decade ago. In El Poblado, the main tourist district, sex work is impossible to ignore. At night foreign men haggle with young women outside bars and hotels, then disappear upstairs with them.
Prostitution is legal in much of Latin America, including Colombia. Some women see sex work as a way to escape poverty. Traffickers exploit this, says Betty Pedraza of Espacios de Mujer, a Colombian NGO. They offer sex workers better pay in other cities, promising to cover travel and housing. Once they arrive, gangsters seize their documents and move them through a circuit of brothels. Others, like Isabel, are forced into sex work for the first time in their lives. One victim described being forced to see up to 20 men a night.
The internet has made it much easier for gangs to run this kind of entrapment. The pandemic forced them to shift their efforts online, but they soon realised it was far more effective, says Ms Pedraza. Social media allowed them to reach more people with less effort, and to contact women directly, building trust and gathering personal details that could be used to control them. Isabel says her kidnappers knew about her daughter, whom they threatened to kill if she tried to escape.
The business has an even darker side. Some sex tourists are looking for children. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, commercial sexual exploitation of under-age girls across Central America and the Caribbean has soared since 2019. Girls now account for more than half of all detected trafficking victims in the region.
The US State Department calls Mexico and the Dominican Republic destinations for “perpetrators of extraterritorial commercial child sexual exploitation”. Last year Stefan Andrés Correa, a pharmacist from Miami, was sentenced to life in prison in the United States after making 45 trips to Medellín during which he abused more than 50 girls, some as young as ten. Local fixers supplied minors for 300,000 pesos ($73) a night. He is one of many. Arrests of foreigners for the commercial sexual exploitation of minors in Medellín rose 11-fold between 2023 and 2024, partly due to more active enforcement.
Traffickers have taken advantage of growing numbers of people made vulnerable by economic collapse and mass displacement, particularly Venezuelans. More than 7.5m have fled the oppressive and economically incompetent regime of Nicolás Maduro over the past decade, most into neighbouring countries, especially Colombia. Many arrive with nothing, and so are easy prey for traffickers.
In Colombian frontier cities such as Cúcuta, an illicit webcam industry flourishes. The pattern repeats itself: gangsters promise work to Venezuelan women who have just arrived, take their documents and lock them in “cam houses”, where they perform sex acts for online customers.
Human trafficking remains low on governments’ lists of priorities despite the suffering. “Compared with drug crime, it receives a fraction of the funding and attention,” says Mr Monteiro. Most victims are never found. By some estimates less than 1% of cases in Mexico are reported. Officially, Bolivia and Nicaragua identified zero trafficking victims in 2024, despite rampant exploitation in their mining regions.
Even when victims are identified, justice is rare. Judges and police often lack the training to recognise human trafficking or handle cases properly, says Mr Monteiro. Courts frequently demand proof of physical coercion, for instance, overlooking tactics that are more subtle but just as effective, like debt bondage. Migrants fare worst of all, treated as undocumented workers rather than victims of crime.
If governments pay little attention to forced sex work, they pay even less to other forms of forced labour, many of them rampant and growing. Colombia has not secured a conviction for labour trafficking since 2018. Brazil has had an anti-trafficking law since 2016, but has yet to issue a single final conviction. Cases that do come to the courts tend to be downgraded to labour violations and settled with fines.
The outlook is bleak. Record cocaine profits have enriched the gangs while funding for anti-trafficking NGOs has plummeted because of Donald Trump’s foreign-aid cuts. Isabel eventually escaped with the help of a Colombian NGO and the local police. But for every rescued victim, she warns, many more remain trapped. ■
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