Outside of the Pino Suarez metro station in Mexico City's Historic Center, Karla Jacinto, a self-confessed tomboy, was waiting one day for some friends to go skateboarding when an older boy approached her and asked her to go for an ice cream.
There's nothing wrong if we have an ice cream," Jacinto recalled recently in a downtown coffee shop, a scant thirty minute walk from where she met her future pimp.
Growing up in poverty in Mexico City, Karla suffered both sexual and physical abuse from the age of five. The day she accepted that invitation, it seemed like she'd met someone who understood her. The young man, who Jacinto still refrains from naming, immediately invited her to go to the state of Puebla, east of the capital, but she insisted her parents wouldn't let her. They exchanged phone numbers, and eventually he convinced her to go to Puebla the following week.
She lied to her parents, and went. There, she was greeted by the young man's cousins. Then I started getting a little scared. Karla Jacinto, now 22, spent four years under the control of a pimp not much older than her in the state of Tlaxcala, Mexico. Before long, Karla Jacinto was stuck in a cycle of violence, abuse, and sex work ordered by the boy who picked her up — now, he was her pimp. Tlaxcala, Mexico's smallest state, has gained a well-earned reputation as the human trafficking hub of the country, where it is been widely reported that in small towns along the highway connecting the cities of Tlaxcala and Puebla, human-trafficking rings involving entire families operate in the open.
The pimps of Tlaxcala prey on young, uneducated girls in other states in Mexico. The traffickers take them there, where the girls are raped and abused, before forcing them into sex work in other Mexican states, or moving them north to the US, authorities say.
