Mexican docuseries spotlights victims of migrant sex trafficking

They were promised modeling jobs but were enslaved by a gang that confiscated their passports and offered their services as sex workers in Mexico City through a website called Zona Divas. The case took an even more tragic turn with the murders in 2017 and 2018 of four Venezuelan and one Argentine trafficking victims under murky circumstances. Their stories are told in the four-episode series “Caught in the Web: The Murders Behind Zona Divas” (“El Portal” for the Spanish-language version), premiering worldwide on Thursday. “They are all women who come from extremely precarious backgrounds,” executive producer Laura Woldenberg said. “At that time, there was a shortage of food and medicine in Venezuela. These are women who migrated to Mexico in search of a better future,” she told AFP. The aim of the series is not to find perpetrators, but to prevent the abuse from happening again and to encourage clients of these types of services to reflect, Woldenberg said. ‘Nobody Cares’ The show’s directors, Astrid Rondero and Fernanda Valadez, traveled to Argentina, Venezuela and the United States to interview women who escaped trafficking, as well as relatives of the murder victims. One of them, an Argentine woman identified as Brenda, recalled wondering who would be killed next. “Nobody cares. They say, ‘Oh, another girl died!'” she says in the documentary. About 10 women or girls are murdered every day in Mexico, where activists denounce the widespread impunity for even serious crimes like femicide. The trafficking victims in the Zona Divas case were mostly South Americans without proper residency. “What made them doubly vulnerable as migrants was also the fact that they were doing sex work. And of course there was the distrust of the Mexican authorities,” Rondero said. Hundreds of thousands of migrants fleeing poverty and violence cross Mexico each year to the U.S. Many spend time in Mexico while they raise funds to continue their journey, including money to pay human traffickers. The series is also a survival story of women who managed to escape the sex trade and turn their lives around. “After much effort, they managed to take control of their bodies and their own work,” Valadez said. Scandal According to local media, about 20 people have been investigated or arrested for their ties to Zona Divas, which operated between 2001 and 2018. Ignacio Santoyo Cervantes was arrested in 2007 on charges of pimping and trafficking in illicit funds, but he was released due to a lack of evidence and is believed to be in Cuba. Civil society groups say the gang is believed to have ties to criminal groups that control the drug trade in Mexico City. According to the most recent United Nations report on the issue, nearly one in every 100,000 people worldwide was a victim of human trafficking in 2019, with more than half of those cases involving sexual exploitation. In a case reminiscent of the Zona Divas scandal, Interpol said in July that Colombia and Mexico had dismantled a human trafficking ring that forced young women from the South American country to do sex work in bars. Women from poor backgrounds were promised jobs as waitresses and hostesses in Mexican tourist cities, but fell victim to a criminal group that confiscated their passports, Interpol said.