TRAFFICKING OF PERSONS IN BELIZE - OAS

was also a man born in Armenia, but with United States papers that came with
a group of five Armenians. He couldn’t explain what brought them to Belize
during the secondary inspection. He had traveled all the way from Armenia,
through Moscow, Honduras and Guatemala.
It is common for a group to have someone with United States papers to guide
them in order to keep free from suspicions.
Officers said that they checked very closely those situations that could be hiding
human trafficking. “If I see a very young woman with somebody older or with a
strange appearance, we try to investigate”, said one officer. Nevertheless there
are no guidelines or protocols to detect these situations, neither a list of clues or
signs that officers should watch out for, in order to prevent human trafficking.
Officers from the migration post said it loud and clear: “They cross illegally from
Guatemala every single day, but we don’t catch them always”. There are cases,
every day, of people pretending to cross the legal border posts while others just
go across it, by foot or crossing the river because there isn’t enough
surveillance. The means are scarce- there are not boats to control the river, no
watching points, radios, warlike talkies or rapid response equipments- to watch
such a difficult and permeable geography.
Any way, we were told that 15 arrests are made weekly, of persons that pretend
to enter the country without even going through the migration office. If this is the
number of detected cases, it’s clear that there are much more that occur without
being detained. “Human trafficking doesn’t go through formal migration posts, it
doesn’t need to. We need training and a computerized system to process data.
If somebody lets us know that 40 miles from here there is a group of people
crossing the border, we can’t do a thing, we can’t reach that spot. We need to
have an adequate equipment to face these situations”, said an officer.
In accordance to the data, it is very clear that Benque’s Migration post is an
entering point in Belize. In January 2004, 20.396 people entered and 13.268 left
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