Efforts to help thousands of trafficked children and adults in Peru are being undermined by a strong economy, enduring social and ethnic inequalities, and a lack of awareness, the head of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in the country has warned.

José Iván Dávalos, the IOM’s head of mission in Peru, said that despite increasing political will to tackle human trafficking, progress was being thwarted by the assumption that the upper-middle-income country – which had a GDP growth rate of 5.8% last year – no longer needs help from NGOs and international agencies.

“It’s a bit complicated in Peru because it seems surprising a country that has such high growth levels should still need assistance,” he said. “Faced with such growth, [agencies] are choosing to move out and go to Bolivia or Haiti. Peru has become a victim of its own success – but you need to know how to measure success. As Mark Twain said, ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics’.”

Dávalos – who has worked in Afghanistan, Angola, Croatia and Haiti among other countries – said economic averages simply did not give a complete picture of the challenges facing many of Peru’s 30.4 million inhabitants.

“Here in Lima you can find restaurants to rival Manhattan, but you can also find places that are more like Mogadishu,” he said. “There are places in Lima where the police won’t go but there are also places where you can eat the best piece of fish in the world. Often agencies look at Peru and say, ‘No. You don’t need anything.’”

Dávalos said people trafficking in Peru – which tends to involve a disproportionate number of indigenous girls and women – is concentrated in the south of the country in such areas as Cusco and Madre de Dios, which is home to thousands of illegal gold mines.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A necklace hangs around the neck on an indigenous person from the Peruvian Amazon. A disproportionately high number of indigenous girls and women are trafficked in the country. Photograph: Mariana Bazo/Reuters

“The girls and women who are trafficked are usually indigenous; their ethnicity makes them especially vulnerable,” he said. “If you’re a girl or a woman and you’re poor and indigenous, you’re far more likely to fall victim to trafficking.”

The Global Slavery Index 2014 estimated that there are 66,300 people in modern slavery in Peru – 0.2182% of the population. Peru comes sixth on the list of countries in the Americas where people are in slavery, behind Haiti, Suriname, Guyana, Mexico and Colombia.

According to Dávalos, the traffickers’ jobs are often made easier because many parents take it for granted that their children should be working.

“There are families that facilitate it,” he said. “Sometimes when agencies go out to find and rescue trafficked girls from exploitation they are stopped by the families themselves. Very often their mothers and fathers see it as their children’s contribution to the family; they can’t understand why people would want to take that income away from them.”

The organisation has used theatre groups and comic books to try to change attitudes by educating adults and children about the realities of people trafficking. Between May 2012 and September this year, it operated the Caravana de la vida (Life Caravan) project in Madre de Dios, an initiative under which a mobile health clinic takes medical teams into remote villages. As well as providing basic health services such as triage, dentistry and obstetrics, the initiative allowed the organisation to identify and help those who are trafficked into the region to work as labourers or in the sex trade. The IOM also worked with the regional government to develop a plan for combating people trafficking.

“The Life Caravan was a way of raising awareness,” said Dávalos. “It was designed with two simple aims: to protect people and to prevent trafficking. The programme allowed us to detect potential victims of human trafficking because you can’t just roll up in a truck that has ‘Fighting People Trafficking’ on the side. If you do that, you’re likely to get attacked and killed.”

What the IOM could not do, he added, was punish the perpetrators: “Prosecuting offenders is a matter for the police and the state, not us.”

While Dávalos praised the Peruvian government for the introduction of anti-trafficking legislation, he said more money needed to be spent tackling the issues.

“People trafficking is a very, very sensitive topic in Peru,” he said. “Although it’s a delicate subject, there are fortunately some ministries and other agencies who are working to combat it. [But] the government’s fund for fighting people trafficking is 0.00006% of the total budget allocation.”

He added that people trafficking is often not one of major concerns in a country where memories of terrorism and hyperinflation are still vivid. According to a recent crime survey, Peruvians are more worried about contract killings, corruption, extortion, kidnapping, bribery and drug trafficking than the trade in human beings.

But Dávalos said that inequality lay at the heart of everything. “People trafficking is rooted in poverty and a lack of opportunity,” he said. “It’s hard to admit it, but that’s the truth. That’s where the state comes in. There must be ways of distributing wealth equally and that means long-term national plans and more political will at higher levels.”

In the meantime, the IOM will continue trying to find and help victims of human trafficking despite the familiar economic obstacles.

“While some communities respond very well, there are others that hide their children away from visitors,” he said. “It’s a structural issue; some people say: ‘If the state can’t help me, I’ll have to put my family to work’.”



