Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, August 19History of Human Trafficking Crimes in the United States
Xinhua News Agency reporter Liu Si Yurong
The US State Department recently announced the so-called annual “Human Trafficking Report”, blaming other countries, slandering and discrediting other countries, downplaying its own serious problems, and passing it all over, and it listed itself as one of the world‘s “best performing” countries, letting the world witness again This “double standard big country” thief shouts and catches the thief’s routine.
In fact, the United States, which started from a long-term bloody and brutal slave-trafficking business, has still not changed its “dark tradition” and has continued to indulge the “dirtiest criminal act” of human trafficking for many years. A large number of cases, data, and complaints tell the world that the United States is a country of origin, transit, and destination for victims of forced labor and slavery. It can be called a notorious human trafficker and criminal against humanity.
Bloody slave trade history
[Statement]:
-The transatlantic slave trade is the largest long-distance forced population movement in history. In 1619, the first recorded black Africans were transported to Jamestown in North America, opening the blood and tears of the slaughter of blacks in this “New World“. For a long time, slavery prevailed in the colonies of North America. Regarding what happened to African slaves after they came ashore, an article on the website of National Geographic magazine described: “Men and women are separated, naked, and tightly tied together…There are also a large number of children.” Black slaves were forced to work since childhood. As an adult, he would engage in high-intensity labor in harsh environments, and even suffer cruel abuse by slave owners. There was no human rights at all.
-When the United States became independent in 1776, slavery was legal. Many founding fathers such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were slave owners. The “Declaration of Independence” declared that “all people are created equal,” but those who enjoy this so-called “equal right” do not include slaves and African Americans. The earliest constitution of the United States also acquiesced in the existence of black slaves. It was not until the end of the Civil War in 1865 that the United States promulgated the 13th Amendment to the Constitution announcing the abolition of slavery. However, nearly a century later, many southern states of the United States have promulgated a series of laws that impose racial segregation or other discriminatory policies on blacks, namely “Jim Crofa”. These laws were not abolished one after another until the black civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.
——In the history of the black slave trade in the United States, the “Clotilda” sailing ship has iconic significance. This ship is considered to be the last recorded slave ship in the United States. The United States has banned the transportation of slaves from Africa since 1808, but the booming cotton industry has a huge demand for slave labor. Therefore, some planters in the United States continue to trade slaves from Africa regardless of the law. According to the US “Smithsonian Institute Magazine” website, in July 1860, the “Clotilda” carried more than 100 “captured Africans” into Mobile Bay at night, and then flowed upstream along the Mobile River. Then, hand over the slaves to some local slave owners. Captain William Foster then ordered the ship to be driven upstream, burned and sank into the river to destroy evidence of the crime. In recent years, investigations into the wreckage of the ship showed that during the six-week voyage, the black slaves were almost always squeezed in low cargo holds that could not stand normally, and suffered both physical and mental torture.
[Say by number]:
12.5 million-According to statistics from the “Transatlantic Slave Trade Database”, in the history of the slave trade, there were at least 36,000 “slavery expeditions” between 1514 and 1866, and more than 12.5 million Africans were trafficked to the “New World.” This does not include the many people who died during the journey.
3.95 million-According to statistics from the German Statis Research Company, there were nearly 700,000 black slaves in the United States in 1790. In 1860, there were more than 3.95 million black slaves in the United States, while the number of free African Americans in the United States was less than 490,000. This means that nearly 90% of African Americans at the time were slaves.
600-American historian Henry Wincek disclosed in the book “Lord of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves” that Jefferson, the drafter of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 in his lifetime Slaves, at his Monticello estate in Virginia, there are at least about 100 slaves at all times.
80%-According to the official website of the fourth president of the United States, James Madison’s Montpellier, the slavery economy was once the main engine driving the US economy. The slavery economy was not limited to the South, and even those states with a small slave population benefited from slave labor. From tobacco farming in Virginia to shipbuilding in Rhode Island, everything is related to the slavery economy. In 1850, 80% of American exports were produced by slaves.
【tell】:
——2019 marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first recorded black Africans in North America. The New York Times Magazine in the United States once commented that this incident in 1619 was the beginning of American history and that America’s prosperity was based on blacks. Based on the extraction of labor, “generations of blacks have played an important but neglected role in American history”, but they have lived an extremely miserable life.
——Lonnie Bunch, secretary general of the Smithsonian Institution, said that the story of the “Clotilda” shows how common the slave trade was until the early days of the American Civil War.
——Mary Elliott, an expert at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, said: “There are many examples of this today, such as the Tulsa Massacre in 1921. Some people say it never happened. Now, because of archaeology, archive research, and the collective memory of ethnic groups, these historical facts can no longer be refuted.”
Illegal Trafficking for Profit
[Statement]:
——In 2014, Guatemalan snakehead Aroldo Castillo told the Alberto family that their children can go to the United States to study, work and live a good life by paying only $15,000. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t spend so much money at the time. It’s never too late to get money in the United States. However, these Guatemalans with the “American Dream” were sold to farms shortly after arriving in the United States and were squeezed like slaves.
—— In July 2017, a van in San Antonio, Texas, USA was found to be packed with nearly 40 people, of which 9 were suffocated alive, and the others were dehydrated and heatstroke. Many were in critical condition. The city’s police chief William McMannerstein said that this was a “horrible human trafficking case” and such incidents occurred from time to time.
——In the United States, women account for a large proportion of human trafficking cases, and many of them are victims of “sex trafficking” and eventually fall victim to the porn industry. According to a report by the Huffington Post website in December 2019, 12 major US hotel chains, including Hilton, were accused of turning a blind eye to the criminal activities of women becoming sex slaves and even providing conveniences to profit from them.
[Say by number]:
11,500-The US State Department publicly admitted in 2004 that the number of people trafficked to the United States is between 14,500 and 17,500. According to the US non-profit organization “Polaris Project”, in 2015, the US “National Human Trafficking Hotline” handled more than 5,700 human trafficking cases. By 2019, this number has reached 11,500, which is double the number in 2015.
98%-The Federal Human Trafficking Report 2020 released by the United States Human Trafficking Institute shows that 30% of the “sex trafficking” cases that have been investigated in the United States from 2000 to 2020 were reported on the Internet. Deceive. The report shows that 98% of human trafficking cases involve female victims, and 91% of them are from the United States.
15,000 to 50,000-A report released by the US Anti-Human Trafficking Organization “Delivery Foundation” in 2020 shows that 15,000 to 50,000 women and children are forced to become sex slaves in the United States each year.
【tell】:
——Lewis DeBaka, former head of the Office of Monitoring and Combating Human Trafficking in the U.S. Department of State, said: “This is not a problem that needs to be dealt with by a single rotten apple, but a whole basket of apples. For many years, the hotel industry in the United States has known. ‘Sex trafficking’-especially children’s’sex trafficking’ activities take place in their business premises, but they have not been stopped.”
—— Jeff Rogers, co-founder of the American Anti-Human Trafficking Research Association, said: “The United States is the world‘s number one sex consumer. We as a society have pushed up demand… These human traffickers use supply to fill this demand. But. The demand in the United States is so great that they use our own children to fill it.”
Abuse of illegal immigrants
[Statement]:
——In March of this year, Elmer Maldonado from Honduras was detained by the U.S. immigration department while crossing the border between Mexico and Texas in the southern United States with his 1-year-old son. At first, the father and son could only sleep shiveringly outdoors, before being transferred to a crowded detention center, where they awaited fate. This is a microcosm of the tragic experience of thousands of illegal immigrants in the United States. According to US media reports, many illegal immigrant children who are not accompanied by their parents are sent to federal asylums, which are overcrowded and in poor conditions. A group of photos from the U.S.-Mexico Border Temporary Detention Center exposed by the US news website Axios showed that the children were separated by plastic panels, covered with emergency blankets made of aluminum foil, lying crowded on the floor mats, and the scene was shocking.
——In the process of detention, women are often subjected to cruel treatment. In the second half of 2020, dozens of female immigrants from Latin America and Caribbean countries filed a class-action lawsuit in the Georgia courts of the United States, accusing doctors in the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Center to conduct the proceedings for them without their consent. Unnecessary gynecological operations, and even forced removal of the uterus, caused serious damage to their physical and mental health.
——After the outbreak of the new crown, detainees are easily infected due to poor epidemic prevention conditions in many detention centers. In July 2020, three months after being sent to a detention center for illegal immigrants in Arizona, the 38-year-old Guatemalan, Heraldo Marenbres, contracted the new crown virus. “High fever, body pain, vomiting what to eat, no sense of taste. I felt terrible, like I was committing suicide.” Marlen Blaise recalled. After a period of treatment, he gradually recovered. The 57-year-old Salvadoran Carlos Escobar was not so lucky. He spent 4 months in an illegal immigration detention center in the United States and eventually died of contracting the new crown virus.
[Say by number]:
850,000-The U.S. government violently treated illegal immigrants and implemented a large-scale separation policy against them, which clearly violated international human rights law and humanitarianism. In 2019, a total of about 850,000 illegal immigrants were arrested in the southern border area of the United States. Most of them were subjected to rough treatment and wanton violations of their human rights. From July 2017 to July 2020, the U.S. immigration department forcibly separated more than 5,400 children from their parents who were refugees or illegal immigrants in the southern border area. Many children died in custody.
Double-CNN reported in September 2020 that a total of 21 people died in illegal immigration detention centers in the United States in fiscal year 2020, more than twice the number of deaths in fiscal year 2019, and the highest value since 2005.
100 days-The American “Los Angeles Times” website reported in October 2020 that a large number of illegal immigrant children have been detained for a long time. Statistics show that of the 266,000 illegal immigrant children detained by the U.S. government in recent years, more than 25,000 have been detained for more than 100 days. Nearly 1,000 have spent more than a year in shelters, and some have even been detained. Detained for more than 5 years.
【tell】:
—— U.S. Democratic Congressman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez disclosed through social media in 2019 that the U.S. border patrol station “treats immigrants as animals”, which constitutes “systemic abuse”. She witnessed that the detained women had no water to drink, and the management asked them to “drink water from the toilet.” She wrote: “I squeezed into a cell where women were held and started talking to them. One of them called the way border guards treated them as a’psychological warfare’…not just children, everyone. People drink in the toilet. The water, and the border guards laughed in front of members of Congress.”
——According to a report on the website of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in July 2019, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet was deeply shocked by the overcrowded heart and poor medical conditions in detention in the United States and pointed out the children detained there. May be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment prohibited by international law.
Forced labor is widespread
[Statement]:
——An example from a 2015 article on the Vox website in the United States: A person in Mexico or the Philippines discovered that he could get a nurse job and a green card in the United States by paying thousands of dollars. When she “immigrated” to the United States, she discovered that these were lies. She was not given a green card, but a restrictive temporary work visa. She cannot be a nurse, but can only be a domestic servant. Her passport and other documents are locked, and she cannot go out. The expenses for board and lodging are deducted from her salary… The article says that such incidents are very common in the United States, but no one is sure. Know how many victims there are. Researchers estimate that tens of thousands of people are forced to work in agriculture alone. Forced labor is also common in other industries, including housekeeping, construction, catering, and hotels. The victims may come from all over the world, and some even have master’s or doctoral degrees.
——According to a 2014 research report by the American Urban Research Institute and Northeastern University, American law enforcement agencies often do not help victims of forced labor, and sometimes even stand on the side of human traffickers. For example, in one case, a farmer shot a forced labor farm worker who tried to escape, and when the police arrived, he arrested the farm worker for illegal immigration. Often, victims are unable to sue human traffickers, and most lawyers are unwilling to take the time to help them, resulting in them often not getting paid or compensation for abuse.
——The Washington Post reported in 2007 that Rory Maybury, an American who had worked on the construction site of the new US embassy in Iraq, confirmed that the contractor had asked him to lead 51 Filipino workers to Baghdad via Kuwait. , But the tickets of these people show that the destination is Dubai, UAE. Mayberry said the company manager asked him not to tell the workers that their real destination was Baghdad, and the company had confiscated the workers’ passports. U.S. Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman, who is in charge of investigating the matter, said: “The main contractor is suspected of forcing labor in the embassy construction project, violating the anti-human trafficking law, and conveying to Iraq and the world that the United States respects the United States. Misinformation on human rights.” The Pentagon also admitted at the time that there is a relatively common problem of forced labor among American project contractors in Iraq.
[Say by number]:
500,000-“Legal slavery” in the United States ended in 1865, but the problem of forced labor has continued to this day. According to statistics from some industry associations, there are still about 500,000 child laborers engaged in agricultural work in the United States. Many children start working from the age of 8 and work up to 72 hours a week. Child labor deaths occur frequently.
100,000-In the past five years, as many as 100,000 people were trafficked to the United States for forced labor each year, and half of them were trafficked to “sweatshops” or subjected to domestic servitude.
71%-A 2014 report by the Urban Institute of the United States and Northeastern University of the United States showed that 71% of forced labor victims had legal visas when they arrived in the United States, and more than one-third of the victims were domestic servants. It is the most common kind of job. These foreign servants usually live with their employers, which means that they are easily controlled by their employers and even cut off from the outside world.
【tell】:
——Chrissy Barkley, a scholar at the University of Denver in the United States, said that the phenomenon of forced labor in the United States is difficult to ban, on the one hand, because of the high profits, on the other hand, due to the ineffective legislation and inefficient law enforcement in the United States, the risk of perpetrators being prosecuted is very high. Small. The most common areas of forced labor are housekeeping, agriculture, industry, and pornography. There is a high demand for cheap labor, and US law rarely requires or does not require supervision of working conditions in these areas.
-“Anti-Slavery International” described farm workers as “the lowest-paid and most exploited workers in the American economy.” These people lack the rights enjoyed by other American workers. They often work without medical insurance, sick leave, pension or job security, and this is the “fertile soil that leads to forced labor in the American fields”.
—— Laurel Fletcher, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said: “The public generally believes that the United States has solved the problem of modern slavery a long time ago, but in fact, modern slavery still exists and is widespread. It just appeared in a new form.”
Wanton arrest and imprisonment
[Statement]:
——On April 14, 2013, at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, United States, Frederick Pierucci, an executive of Alstom in France, was arrested by FBI agents as soon as he got off the plane. Subsequently, the US Department of Justice accused Pierucci of violating the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and participating in a 2003 Indonesian corruption case related to Alstom. Threats of up to 125 years of imprisonment, sky-high attorney fees, high bail, and being held with death row prisoners and felons… The US judicial department uses various methods of extreme pressure to force them to confess guilt. Pierucci said that the purpose of the U.S. side is “to send a clear signal to Alstom’s CEO: If you continue to fail to cooperate, you will be the next person to go to jail.” In the end, Pierucci was imprisoned in the United States for more than 25 months, of which 14 months was in a high-security prison. Alstom dismissed it under pressure from the United States and was fined $772 million by the United States. Its power business was also acquired by its rival, General Electric.
-Al Jazeera’s website reported in May this year that the White House decided to release three prisoners who had been held in Guantanamo, Cuba for nearly 20 years. They were arrested and transferred to Guantanamo Prison between 2001 and 2003, but were not charged with any charges. This includes the 73-year-old Pakistani Saifra Paracha, who is the oldest of the detainees. The U.S. Southern Command said in a statement in early April this year that the prisoners in Guantánamo Prison’s most secretive cell “No. 7” had been “safely transferred to cell No. 5,” but the military did not disclose when the transfer took place. , And how many prisoners were transferred. The Associated Press reported that “Prison 7” was opened in December 2006 and was used by the CIA for secret detention and torture interrogation. In 2017, a prisoner in “Prison No. 7” disclosed that the people detained there are subjected to psychological torture every day.
[Say by number]:
14 billion-The United States wantonly arrested executives of foreign companies like Pierucci for economic reasons. In an interview with Xinhua News Agency in 2019, Pierucci said that the U.S. Department of Justice often uses the FCPA to attack European companies. Of the 29 companies that paid more than $100 million in fines under this law, 15 were European companies. There are only six American companies. Since 2010, French companies alone have paid nearly US$14 billion in fines to the US government for violating US extraterritorial laws.
800 people-Guantanamo Prison was opened in 2002. At first it was used to detain members of Al Qaeda and the accomplices of the perpetrators of the “9.11” incident, but since then many prisoners who have been secretly arrested by the United States or transferred from other places are in the future. While being prosecuted, he was detained here for a long time and suffered abuse. According to data from the American Civil Rights Union, a total of nearly 800 people have been detained here, and about 40 people are still in detention. The prison remains an indelible stain on Washington’s human rights issues.
【tell】:
——Pieruzzi said in the book “American Trap” published in 2019 that the so-called Alstom corruption case “is a complete blackmail.” The incident showed people how the United States abused domestic laws and used them as economic weapons to launch “secret economic wars” against other countries. According to the “Foreign Corruption Act” revised by the United States in 1998, the U.S. government “can arrest almost any employee of a foreign company at will, and even throw him into prison and sentence him to heavy sentences.”
—— Many UN human rights experts stated in February this year that many detainees in the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo are now very old, due to the “endless deprivation of liberty and related physical and mental torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or Punishment”, their physical and mental health was damaged. “It is vital now that those who have been subjected to arbitrary detention, torture and deprived of their basic rights under international law, including the right to a fair trial, must receive adequate remedies and compensation.”
Human trafficking, forced labor, slavery and abuse are modern slavery against humanity and a plague in the contemporary world. And in this, the United States has played a very disgraceful role. In its own right, these evil deeds were originally the original sin of the United States. The original sin in the United States is far more than that. Those “Floyds” who cannot breathe freely under the weight of white supremacy, those minorities living in the shadow of racial hatred crimes, those refugees and immigrants who have been brutally treated and in miserable circumstances, those who have been beaten by the US military Foreign civilians who are illegally killed and cruelly tortured under the banner of anti-terrorism are always accusing the United States of all kinds of crimes against humanity.
In the face of human justice and conscience, in the face of facts and truths, there is no way out for shirking blame and diverting attention, and will only hit the head and blood. For the United States, it is the right way in the world to take self-examination, rein in the precipice, and face up to and solve its own problems. (Reporters involved: Liu Jian, Song Ying)
【Editor in charge: Fu Wenjia】