Going Nowhere Fast: Globalizing War on Women

I spent December and January in an immigration prison in israel. I was the only person there who was a political activist. In fact, none of the other 120 women in my prison had been arrested for any crime, other than not having a passport or visa. In israel, they are all lumped together under the designation “foreign workers,” a benign sounding phrase. Some of them had come to work under official programs like the old “bracero” program, which imported Mexicans to work semi-legally in U.S. agriculture. At least half of the women I was incarcerated with, probably more like three-quarters, were part of the huge and growing category of “trafficked humans.”

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary doesn’t have a definition for trafficking, but does have “traffic” as “the business of barter, buying and selling,” which is straightforward enough but doesn’t necessarily sound like you’d be talking about people. Trafficking, as in the movie, “Traffic,” has traditionally referred to criminal conspiracies to move drugs, weapons or stolen goods, especially cars. But in the new world of global capitalism, entire economies are based on the movement of people, internally or externally, by “threat or use of force or coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability….” This is the definition provided in the U.N. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children. The “especially Women and Children” is important, because out of an estimated 5 million people trafficked every year, by (probably low) UN estimates, 75-90% are female, and as many as 50% are under 18.

Trafficking comprises a wide variety of practices. About half of my fellow inmates had come to israel on planes, with valid work or tourist visas. The other half hiked through the Egyptian desert in groups of women led by Bedouin guides. Either way, they pay someone thousands of dollars for the visa (if they have one) and the arrangement of travel and work, money they borrowed from friends at home. Tsong from China, said it costs $9,200 to come with a visa and $8,400 without, a small savings for enormous added risk. In addition to the landmines they have to dodge on their way across the border, many women have reported being beaten and raped by the guides, and this is usually only the first of many abuses they will suffer once they start to work. In many cases, according to Nomi Levinkron of the israeli Human Rights Hotline for Migrant Workers, in China it is common for an entire village to pool their money to send one person abroad, based on the promises of huge salaries – commonly $800 or $1,000 a month, most of which they will send home to enrich their communities where the average earnings might be $3 a month.

Those who could not raise the money, or who come from countries where the operations are run differently, such as Uzbekistan, Madagascar and Moldova, can expect a period of indentured servitude, during which the “agency” which recruited theme takes all or nearly all of their earnings to repay the costs of their trip and arrangements, plus a fee and interest, and of course room and board. Someone who is arrested when her three-month visa is up, like Cristina from Bolivia, or who gets sick and cannot work, like Melanie from Madagascar, will go home owing thousands of dollars, which will not be forgotten by the traffickers, who know where she lives and her most vulnerable family members. Their employers, or the agency that hires them out, will keep their passports, if they have them, to ensure they do not escape before their debt is paid, or their contract is up, or until the employer decides they know too much about their rights and have picked up too much Hebrew to be good workers any more and they want someone new. Then the immigration police will show up at the woman’s house, with their passports in hand. This is what happened to two Thai women in my cellblock, conveniently at the exact time that they had been told they would actually start to get paid.

Most of the women became domestic workers, so legally they are not considered trafficked by israel, which covers only prostitution and other forms of overt sexual exploitation under its anti-trafficking laws.

u.s. Government to the Rescue?

I should back up and say that five years ago, israel had no law against trafficking at all. Following the fall of the USSR, israel jumped to the top of the list of destinations for trafficked women. Its strategic location makes it a prime transit point for women from Eastern Europe and Asia headed for the Gulf States. But israel also has a thriving sex trade of its own, estimated by an israeli study on the subject at 1,000,000 (one million) visits to brothels every month. Nearly all the women in these brothels, an estimated 3,000, are immigrants, and most of them are slaves. (“Women As Commodities: Trafficking In Women In israel 2003”) According to Levinkron, they are actually sold at auctions, and men who cannot afford a whole woman might team up to buy pieces of one.

In May 2000, Amnesty International issued a stinging report charging israel with doing almost nothing to stop trafficking. In response, israel quickly adopted a law imposing a maximum sentence of 16 years for sex trafficking, but according to a report by the Human Rights Hotline, “Enforcement of the law was minimal.” Presumably pressured by Amnesty’s findings, the U.S. State Department, which “is required by law to submit a report each year to the Congress on foreign government efforts to eliminate severe forms of trafficking in persons” (2004 Trafficking In Persons Report), bumped israel down to “Tier 3” in its 2001 report.

The annual trafficking report lists foreign governments in four categories: those which are doing well in controlling trafficking, those which are doing something, those which are doing almost nothing, and those which are doing nothing or might be trafficking themselves. Those aren’t the formal designations, which are Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 2 Watch List and Tier 3. Currently, a high number of Tier 3 countries (of which there are few) are on the u.s. government’s “enemies list,” (Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela) as compared with Tier 1, which includes all of western Europe except Switzerland and Greece. And of course, no one is rating the u.s.’s performance in discouraging trafficking within its own borders, which the government itself acknowledges is a huge problem, though not as huge as organizations like San Francisco’s Asian Anti-Trafficking Collaborative (AATC) find that it is.

A Tier 3 rating carries a possibility of penalties, including loss of u.s. aid. On the other hand, by initiating certain programs to fight trafficking, israel, as I’m sure you all know, already by far the largest recipient of u.s. aid, qualified for a special grant of $500,000, which helped them hire 500 new immigration police, build three new prisons to house immigrants pending their deportation, and convert Nazareth’s massive hilltop Renaissance Hotel, which was built to capitalize on the Millennium but sitting empty because of the Intifada, to a locked facility for trafficking victims.

Catch the drift? Like most u.s. government policies, the cure is often worse than the disease. In the u.s., federal anti-trafficking programs require trafficked people to cooperate with law enforcement in order to get services. According to israeli human rights organizations, “The women are still viewed in most cases as criminals rather than victims: there are still cases in which women who have chosen to testify against the traffickers are incarcerated.” My friend Anya, a 21-year-old from Uzbekistan, started out cooperating with the police and then decided she didn’t want to testify. After two months in prison, her israeli boyfriend came to visit her on the last visiting day before she was deported. The police at the prison tried to say that she was not allowed to have visitors because she had come into the country from Egypt, a made-up rule to punish her for not working with them. We encouraged her boyfriend to call the hotline, and after his six-hour hitchhiking trek from the north, they were allowed to see each other for five minutes, even though normal visits on visiting day were 20 minutes.

The state department’s 2004 report commends foreign governments for “a number of innovative anti-trafficking efforts.” One of these came from the United Arab Emirates, which in order to counter a trafficking racket using fake parents to smuggle Bangladeshi and Pakistani children into the country, performed DNA tests on 446 children, “and exposed 65 false claims off parenthood.” So that means that several hundred parents and children who were not engaged in any illegal activity had to undergo DNA testing because of their nationalities. Incidentally, the UAE, which is ranked Tier 2, is one of the prime importers of women from Asia. In one of the most egregious cases, Sarah Belakangon, who killed the man who raped her, only escaped death by stoning because of an intense international campaign.

Shortly after I returned to the States, I went to a presentation on trafficking in israel. Nomi Levinkron was there speaking, and most of the audience were liberal Jews who, I suspect, take some sort of sadomasochistic pleasure in hearing stories of israeli atrocities. We heard plenty, and of course people were shocked, but not nearly as shocked as they were by the speaker from the AATC. When she said, “I can tell you that someone is being trafficked into San Francisco tonight,” I heard a gasp go around the room.

She started with a story of a young Malaysian man who was recruited to work in a restaurant, promised a salary of $1,000 a month, only to learn after he got to San Francisco that $800 of that was taken to cover room and board and $150 to pay back his flight, leaving him $50 for himself and to send home. He was imprisoned in the back of the restaurant and beaten when he tried to run away. She said that she used that story as her case study, because the media only covers high-profile sexploitation cases like the discovery of preteen slaves held by Balireddy Lackireddy, owner of the popular restaurant Pasand in Berkeley, which is inexplicably still thriving five years later.

The u.s. government “estimates that over half of all victims trafficked internationally are trafficked for sexual exploitation,” which means the new israeli law is covering at most half of the cases of “21st century slavery” in that country. GABRIELA Network works against trafficking in the Philippines, where in the last ten years people, and especially women, have become the nation’s leading export. The government depends on the “remittances” these “foreign contract workers” send home to pay its huge debt to the IMF and World Bank. Nora, a Filipina friend in jail, told me that the government sold fertile banana growing land to israel for cultivation, in exchange for the exclusive right to export women to work as "metaplot," officially caregivers for elderly people but often expected to do a range of domestic chores as well. Two years ago, before israel started its massive deportation effort, there were 60,000 Filipinas officially working in israel.

GABRIELA considers all trafficking of women sex trafficking, whether it is for “sex work” or for domestic work, because it is all based on the increasing commodification of women and women’s bodies. Moreover, says Levinkron, women working as maids or in child care or elder care are often raped by their employers and even by their employers’ friends, their lack of documents leaving them extremely vulnerable to threats or overt force. Women and children are transported for a range of activities from sweatshop labor to stripping to panhandling – a group of deaf Mexican women was trafficked to the u.s. to panhandle on subways.

A University of California study published in 2003 “identified 57 forced labor operations in ... California … involving more than 500 individuals from 18 countries.” Most of the workers were from Thailand, Mexico and Russia, but 5% were u.s. citizens.

Femicide in Mexico: An Unnatural Disaster

The problem with the u.s. government’s approach to trafficking, as with its approach to almost everything, is that it is viewed as an individual “criminal justice” problem of the type you would see on “Law and Order.” “In addition to the individual misery wrought by this human rights abuse, its connection to organized crime and grave security threats such as drug and weapons trafficking is becoming clearer.” (State Department TIP Report 2004) Its report lists the causes of trafficking as “criminal elements, economic hardship, corrupt governments, social disruption, political instability, natural disasters, and armed conflict,” and says that “the 21st century slave trade feeds a global demand for cheap and vulnerable labor.”

So who exactly is it who demands “cheap and vulnerable labor”? Is “economic hardship” a naturally occurring phenomenon, like aphids or something? And who is the main perpetrator of "armed conflict" tbese days from Sudan to Iraq? It doesn’t mention the global corporations who prowl the globe looking for new sources of even lower waged workers, destroy native pigs to replace them with ones that will only eat Monsanto corn, thus wiping out the ability of communities to sustain themselves, or the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programs which force the prices of formerly lucrative crops such as coffee to nothing while demanding that countries like Vietnam promote “tourism” (read “sex tourism”) in order to qualify for loans.

They certainly do not mention the backlash against women in every sector of the u.s. and the institutions it controls.

Chihuahua State in northern Mexico has had between 500 and 5,000 women disappear in the ten years since NAFTA went into effect. The higher number actually comes from a government source, according to a speaker at a recent event featuring Patricia Cervantes, whose daughter, Neyra, was one of 400 women found raped and murdered in Chihuahua. The Mexican government has for the last five years refused to seriously investigate the deaths and the disappearances. Instead, they have looked for individual men to blame for specific murders, including Neyra’s cousin, David, who confessed under torture. Many of the disappeared women are believed to be trafficked to the u.s. or other destinations. Patricia explained how the destruction of the Mexican economy by NAFTA created the conditions under which Neyra and the other women have been murdered.

The neoliberal economic policies imposed by NAFTA and enforced by institutions like the World Bank and IMF are destroying the traditional sources of income in the Mexican countryside. NAFTA forbade the Mexican government to protect the price of rice, while the u.s. government can offer massive subsidies to u.s. rice producers. So the traditional financial base is wiped out, and women as well as men must go to the cities to find work in factories, where they are much more vulnerable to abuse. 70% of the workforce in Ciudad Juarez, just across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas, are women, mostly young and the principal supporters of their families, because of multinational corporations’ preferences for a docile workforce. Under NAFTA, the southern state of Chiapas has lost 30,000 workers a year to the u.s., a total of 300,000, almost 10% of its population. Corn, which has been the center not only of Mayan economy but also of its culture, has been devastated, and that in turn undermines women, who have been traditionally the keepers of the culture. In the Philippines, ancient rice fields have been converted to golf courses or production of cut flowers.

The u.s. military does not condone prostitution but demands that prostitutes outside its bases in the Philippines be tested every other week for STDs and prevents soldiers who rape Filipinas from being prosecuted by that country. While the state department takes such a strong anti-trafficking stance in other countries, the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act of 2003 (IMBRA) provides a 90-day return policy for mail order brides in the u.s.

People inundated with “Sex and the City,” where lawyers and journalists only care if they have enough shoes and big enough breasts, may not see the tragedy in women from the former Soviet Union with advanced degrees in economics or biochemistry going to israel or the u.s. to work as maids and strippers.

Women Are Organizing

Women are organizing around the world to demand serious action by their own governments and by the global powers which often control their governments and their economies.

-- The Association of Mothers in Juarez and Chihuahua, of which Patricia Cervantes is a member, is campaigning to pressure both their own government and the u.s. government to stop the rash of femicides and disappearances. They point out that there is a bilateral commission to investigate trafficking of stolen cars, but not one to investigate the trafficking in women. To learn more about the femicides and disappearances in Juarez and Chihuahua, and how you can help, see http://www.mexicosolidarity.org/Juarez%20and%20Chihuahua/, http://www.backspace.com/notes/2003/11/04/x.html.

-- Stop CAFTA! The Central American Free Trade Agreement, patterned on the ever-so-successful (at devastating local economies) NAFTA, is being pushed through the Central American governments right now. See what you can do to stop it: http://www.stopcafta.org.

-- GABRIELA Network mobilizes to support women’s autonomous organizing in the Philippines and around the world. To get involved, schedule a speaker or get information, see http://www.gabnet.org.

For more information about trafficking in israel, see http://www.adva.org/WomenasCommoditiesEngPR.htm. For more on trafficking in California, see http://www.hrcberkeley.org/download/freedomdenied.pdf.

From UltraViolet, newsletter of LAGAI-Queer Insurrection (April 2005), http://www.lagai.org

Photo: foreign women in Israeli jail