“Rape Trees” Frame Arizona-Mexico Border: Grim Reminders of Human Trafficking
March 15, 2009
(ChattahBox)–A recent report from the Cronkite News Service, a student-run news service of Arizona State University, shed the national spotlight on a new immigration problem plaguing the desert border towns of Arizona: so called “rape trees,” trees on the U.S. side of the border littered with women’s undergarments. Mexican drug cartel members and the coyotes, who smuggle immigrants across the border, are believed to rape the women as soon as they enter U.S. territory to instill fear, intimidate and control them. When the coyote-rapists are finished, they hang the women’s panties from the trees as trophies to mark their brutal conquests.
These “rape trees” are becoming more common along the Arizona border counties of Pima and Cochise, as coyotes and drug cartel members find human trafficking more lucrative than drug smuggling. With the shrinking U.S. economy and high un-employment rate, fewer and fewer Mexican immigrants are crossing the borders for work. As the Mexican authorities push back against the drug cartels, it’s getting harder to smuggle drugs across the border. The result is the increased smuggling of young women, who are immediately forced into prostitution and slavery.
Arizona house members, Sen. Jonathan Paton and Rep. Kyrsten Sinema recently co-sponsored a bill addressing the increasing sex trafficking problems in their state, seeking to make the crime of human trafficking smuggling, a felony. State law enforcement officials appeared before the state Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Paton, to testify on the growing violence against women on the border. Law enforcement officials testified to the existence of the grim “rape trees” that are cropping up everywhere as human trafficking increases.
The “rape trees” are just one more horrific reminder of the growing violence across the border in Mexico as it spills out into the U.S. Astonishingly, Phoenix is now recognized as the number two kidnapping capital in the world, behind Mexico City. Coyote smugglers and violent drug cartel members are increasingly kidnapping U.S. citizens for ransom and are torturing, raping and oftentimes, murdering the hostages.
As Arizona seeks to put a stop to the growing violence along its border, let’s hope local enforcement officials do more to combat the violent rape of young Mexican women on U.S. soil and eliminate the appalling “rape trees.”
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