It all started with a sweet. That day Karla Jacinto was planted by her friends, whom she expected to go skating. She was barely 12 years old and her refuge from family problems was skating on the street. She did not have friends, she only met with two young people and that day they did not arrive.
A boy with a box approached him and gave him a sweet that an admirer had sent him. Three months later, hell began.
"I was abused from a very young age, I lived in an environment of beatings and abuse. He [the handler] came up to me and invited me to eat and have an ice cream. I was not sociable and I had never told anyone what was happening at home, "Karla recalls.
The young man, 10 years older than her, gained his trust, told him that he was a victim, that at home they beat him and Karla for the first time opened up to a person. "I began to tell him everything he had inside. I took everything with him and he was the first person to know everything I was going through and we started crying, he told me he understood me, he knew what I felt and I thought: 'wow!' ".
A week passed and they met again. He offered to go to Puebla, because he told him he was a merchant. He called her "princess." He arrived at the second appointment with roses and chocolates. Karla soon convinced her father to let her go to Puebla.
"We went to Puebla and Tlaxcala. He spoke to his brother and he arrived in a car that fascinated me when I saw him. We went around and met his cousins and they knew everything about me and told me that he loved me, that he wanted something serious with me. My greatest wish whenever I went out and saw families walking was to have something like that. That they told me that were things that filled me with hope, that made me feel butterflies in my belly. "
Karla returned home at dawn and after an argument with her mother they ran her. "I chose the door that opened for me. There was someone who offered me respect, affection, understanding ", narrates.
The first three months were perfect, full of love, talks, clothes, shoes. But something in that building in Tlaxcala was strange.
Women went in and out every week and their partner assured him that they were merchants like their whole family, but later he began to speak truthfully. "He told me that his cousins were pimps and I asked him to explain why I did not know. He told me that they took care of girls who were engaged in prostitution and asked me: 'what would happen if you worked on that?' I constantly joked with those things. Then he told me that I had to work and I imagined washing dishes, cleaning houses, but no, he began to explain what I was going to work, how long it had to take, what I had to do in the room and he sent me to Puebla with another woman "
In Puebla he saw for the first time a "catwalk"; There were several women behind the red curtain. "I felt scared, I was scared."
They did not let her work because she was 12 years old and for that they got her a fake ID. His first time was in Guadalajara.
"When I was with another man for the first time I wondered why the boy who said he loved me hurt me, why he let other people touch me if he said he wanted a family with me."
They were 30 to 40 clients per day, men and women. His body supported work hours of 12 hours and weekends were longer. I needed painkillers to put up with it. "From the first time you stay dead in life, different men touch you and girls under age are fresh meat. They insulted me, they beat, they spat, they did not respect me and that's how they spent days, weeks, months ... until they became four years, "says Karla.
In those four years he traveled from Guadalajara to Irapuato and then to Puebla. She was beaten by her partner with cables, chains, nails. On one occasion they burned it with an iron. In a first pregnancy, she miscarried twins. At 14 she had a second pregnancy and at 15 she received her daughter, from whom they separated her for a year.
"The authorities who had to help us also took care of us, they took out the clients and they got in with us; Federals in uniform took care of us. They are supposed to support us and help us and not, they also treated us as one thing ".
She did not think of escaping because they threatened her with killing her family, with dragging her mother and brothers and giving them a bullet in the head; Then they told him that his daughter would pay the consequences.
One of her clients, the only one who treated her as a person, helped her escape. He gave her money to convince her trafficker to allow her to see her daughter and go home. She earned permission by paying in cash and doing what she always feared: she had to teach another child to do what she did. "He gave me the girl and my client helped me get to a taxi, they took me to the central office and I returned to Mexico City."
It was a long process, but at the Camino a Casa Foundation they taught her to be a mother, to trust her and to get ahead.
Excellent post!