- Energy Publisher: Human trafficking begins to eclipse drug trade in Mexico: “Unfortunately, [Mexico’s President] Calderón’s attack on drug cartels has left few resources to combat human trafficking. Mexico has tried to address the issue through legal changes to combat trafficking as recently as 2007, when ‘federal legislation to prohibit all forms of drug trafficking’ was passed. Nonetheless, according to the U.S. Department of State’s Trafficking of Persons Report 2010, ‘some local officials tolerate and are sometimes complicit in trafficking, impeding the implementation of anti-trafficking statutes.'”
Read about University of Michigan’s Law School opening a new legal clinic in Mexico.
- CTV: In Winnipeg, Canada, MP Honors Survivors of Human Trafficking: “Timea Nagy was the daughter of police officer in Budapest, Hungry. In 1998, she answered an ad to be a nanny in Toronto, but when she arrived the ‘agency’ that brought her to Canada made her work at a strip club and in the sex trade instead… ‘You don’t know who to trust and you don’t know anything about Canada or the Canadian people. The only thing you know is what they’re telling you in your own language, which is Canadians are going to take you and rape you and kill you,’ Nagy said. Nagy rescued herself after two and a half months by buying a dictionary to learn English and getting help from other employees at the strip club.”
Read about Canada launching a major human trafficking awareness campaign.
- The Nation: The Wall Comes Tumbling Down: “At a news conference on a farm outside of Immokalee in southwest Florida, Jon Esformes, operating partner of the fourth-generation, family-owned Pacific Tomato Growers—one of the five largest growers in the nation with more than 14,000 acres in the US and Mexico—declared, “In a free society, few are guilty, but all are responsible.” And with that he announced an agreement with the 4000-memberCoalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to implement a penny per pound pay raise—which stands to increase workers’ annual earnings from about $10,000 to as much as $17,000—and establish a code of conduct that includes an external complaint resolution system, shade and protective equipment in the fields, and a worker-to-worker education process on their rights under the new agreement.