Written for Response by Paul Jeffrey  

     When the bus from Mexico pulls across the river into Tecun Uman and begins to release its daily cargo of deportees, the brothel owners gather along the sidewalk to survey the dazed migrants, searching the crowd for young women they can take back to their businesses. That's how Alicia Maldonado became a prostitute.
      Maldonado had started north from her native El Salvador when she grew tired of being beaten by her husband, a man her father had forced her to marry when she was 14. She set off to the United States, dreaming that she could get a job picking strawberries or working as a maid. Yet her dream came to a traumatic halt when she was grabbed by Mexican federal police just south of Mexico City. They robbed her and raped her, and then turned her over to the country's immigration authorities who held her for three days without food. She was then put on a bus that carried her south across the border into Guatemala. When she stepped down from the bus in Tecun Uman, she had only the clothes on her back.
     A bar owner offered her food and a place to stay in exchange for work. In Tecun Uman, work for stranded migrant women means selling sex. The sweltering town along the Suchiate River--which forms part of the border between Mexico and Guatemala--has more than 80 legal brothels and countless clandestine ones. In all, more than 1,000 women as prostitutes, most of them, like Maldonado, women who set off with hopes and dreams toward the north and yet today find themselves trapped in what for many amounts to slavery.
     Maldonado's room is just large enough for a bed. Yet that's all that matters. What few personal belongings she has acquired go underneath. There are no decorations on the grimy walls. When the door is shut the room quickly becomes stifling hot. Her only escape is the bar out front, where she passes the day awaiting clients who pay her five dollars for a few minutes of commercial sex. She gets half the money, the rest goes to the bar's owner.
     Many of the sex workers in Tecun Uman become indebted to the bar owners through an elaborate system of financial deceit. The bar owner may charge them an exorbitant amount for their room and board, and many fine their workers who leave the premises for any reason. As a result, some women end up caught in their jobs by debt. If they try to escape, the bar owners bribe the local police to find them and bring them back. "Many of the women are trapped, unable to leave because they've become indentured slaves, literally prisoners of the bar owners," reports Ademar Barilli, a Brazilian priest who works with migrants in Tecun Uman. 
     According to María del Refugio Rojas, a Catholic nun in Tecun Uman, "The women are forced to work from 9 am until two in the morning or later. The next day they've got to be back in place. They're not allowed to read or do anything with their hands, they just have to sit there waiting for clients. That's frustrating, it's psychologically hard, it's enslaving." 
     Rojas and five other Oblate sisters came to Tecun Uman in 1995 and began working quietly, according to Rojas, at "raising the women's consciousness, helping them to be liberated and to demand their rights." Not surprisingly, several of the town's bar owners have forbidden their employees from talking with the nuns. "They'll lock the women in their rooms when we come around," Rojas reports. "They threaten them, tell the women that if they talk with us that they'll kill them, that they'll throw them in the river."

The poorest among the poor
     Under pressure from the U.S. government, in the last decade Mexico has become a filter to keep third-country nationals out of the United States. That means getting into Mexico is the first serious obstacle for many migrants, and Tecun Uman has become a funnel for the flow of people making their way north toward the United States. Everyday, hundreds cross the river on homemade boats, dreaming of the future they'll have when they finally make it north. Yet their attempts at "crossing the beast"--making it safely through Mexico to the U.S.--often fail, and they are deported to Tecun Uman to either try it again or return home.
     Maldonado's experience isn't unusual for the roughly ten percent of migrants who are women and who face tougher choices when they're detained in Mexico and deported back into Guatemala.
     Her dream derailed, Maldonado says she had no choice but to go to work as a prostitute. She doesn't like her work, but says she had few other options. "There's no work for me back in El Salvador, and getting to the U.S. is too dangerous right now." So she sent for her small daughter, who now lives in a nearby town with a woman Maldonado pays to care for the child. Maldonado gets one day a week away from the bar, a time she joyfully spends with her daughter.
     Her other escape from the daily grind comes when Rojas or one of the other nuns stop by to visit. The Catholic sisters offer friendship to the women, as well as literacy training and workshops in sewing, hair styling, and other vocational skills. Every Tuesday, when the town's registered sexual workers line up for a compulsory exam at the town's medical center, the nuns are there to listen, counsel, and greet new arrivals, some of who are as young as 14 years old. They also offer frequent workshops at the clinic on topics ranging from self-esteem to AIDS.
     Rojas' order works with prostitutes--and street girls at risk of becoming prostitutes--in 16 countries around the world. That's the order's calling, the sisters' vocation as religious. Much of the time it means prowling the streets and bars, patiently listening, providing a human space in an inhumane world.
     It can also mean speaking out. Working in cooperation with the human rights office of the local Catholic diocese, last year the nuns helped blow the lid off a child-smuggling operation operating in the area. A ring of Guatemalans was buying children from prostitutes in Tecun Uman and other poor women in the area, fixing them up with false papers and selling them for adoption to foreign couples.
     Maldonado says she wouldn't sell her child, but she admits knowing other women who have. "They cried when they did it, but they felt their children just might find an environment of love somewhere else," reports Maldonado. "Maybe their child could realize the dream that they had, to make it to somewhere where they could live a better life."
     Since Maldonado and most of the prostitutes in Tecun Uman aren't legal residents of the country, it's easier for people in power--from bar owners to law enforcement authorities--to violate their human rights. A series of international accords have condemned the conditions of forced labor and slavery confronted by many women migrants. These take a variety of forms, ranging from forced domestic work to mail-order marriages. Prostitution is a common facet of the lucrative and growing international trade in migrants. According to a 1995 report on "Trafficking in Women" by the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration, "The sex industry is a particular target for traffickers, since it offers huge profits for the traffickers at the expense of trafficked migrant women, who often experience serious violations of their basic human rights."
     The women of Tecun Uman illustrate the accuracy of lengthy documents prepared for the United Nations and other international organizations concerned with migrant trafficking. Yet while such documents get discussed in well-attended forums at fancy hotels around the world, Maldonado commutes from her small and stifling bedroom to the rickety chair in the bar where she waits for her next customer. Asked about her dreams, Maldonado talks animatedly for a moment about how she'd like to live somewhere safe and beautiful with her daughter. Then she looks around the bar and grows quiet, withdrawing into herself.
     Rojas says the other sexual workers in Tecun Uman are "the poorest among the poor." She says that almost all have been "abandoned, mistreated, and beaten. Many married really young and had children. They tried to immigrate to better their situation, to leave behind their extreme poverty. Yet then they end up here, with no alternatives, often with no hope. There's no one to talk with them, listen to them, lend them a hand in a difficult situation."
      By the end of 1997, more than 200 women had come to the nun's refuge on the edge of town, staying for several days of rest even though they often had to pay hefty fines to the owners of the bars where they work. Some of them decided to return home to their country of origin, and the sisters paid the fare.
     Mariana Caceres spent a month living with the nuns and studying hair styling. Yet then she returned to work at a bar when the owner promoted her to manager. Although her employer--who owns several bars--has prohibited his employees from talking to the nuns, Caceres welcomes the sisters and lets them speak freely with the women while she keeps an eye out for her boss. "They're the only ones in this town who care for us as human beings," declares Caceres. "Everyone else just sees us as objects to be used."