A teenage sex slave was raped 43,200 times in the hellish four years she was forced to sell herself on the streets of Mexico.
Karla Jacinto estimated she was forced
to have sex with 30 men every day for four years. The nightmare started
when she was just 12 years old.
“I had to close my eyes so that that I
wouldn’t see what they were doing to me, so that I wouldn’t feel
anything,” Jacinto, now 23, CNN. “I started at 10 a.m. and finished at
midnight.”
Jacinto is just one of thousands of
Mexican girls how have been kidnapped and forced to work in the county’s
underground human trafficking network. Many of the girls are abducted
and taken to the tiny town of Tenancingo before they are forced into
prostitution across the nation, experts said.
Karla Jacinto said she was raped 43,200 times in the four years she was forced to work as a sex slave in Mexico. | CNN
Jacinto met her would-be pimp when she
was 12, she said. She was waiting for a subway in Mexico City when he
wooed her with candy and asked for her phone number.
He called a week later, and picked her up in a luxury car. After more courting, he convinced her to move in with him.
“I lived with him for three months
during which he treated me very well,” she said. “He loved on me, he
bought me clothes, gave me attention, bought me shoes, flowers,
chocolates, everything was beautiful.”
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But there were red flags, too: The man’s
cousins would come to their apartment with new women every week. When
Jacinto finally asked what the family did for a living, the man told her
he was a pimp.
“A few days later he started telling me
everything I had to do — the positions, how much I need to charge, the
things I had to do with the client and for how long, how I was to treat
them and how I had to talk to them so that they would give me more
money,” she said.
After the sick training, the pimp took
Jacinto from city to city, forcing her to sleep with clients in
brothels, dirty motels and private homes. Sometimes, he’d even send her
to streets known to be prostitution hotspots.
The young Jacinto was forced to have sex
with 30 men a day and had no days off. In the four years she was
enslaved, she saw at least 23,200 clients, she said.
Her once affectionate and kind pimp turned brutal: He once beat her up because she came home with a hickey from a customer.
“He started beating me with a chain in
all of my body. He punched me with his fists, he kicked me, pulled my
hair, spit at me in the face, and that day was when he also burned me
with the iron,” she said. “He told me I like being a whore.”
Jacinto gave birth to a baby girl when
she was 15. The father was her pimp, she said, and he used the infant as
blackmail. If Jacinto wasn’t obedient, he would hurt her daughter, she
said.
She was eventually rescued in 2008 during a sting operation in Mexico City. She was 16.
Since then, Jacinto has become an
anti-sex trafficking advocate. She told her story to Pope Francis during
a July visit to the Vatican and has spoken in front of the U.S.
Congress about Mexico’s horrific sex slavery industry.
“These minors are being abducted, lured,
and yanked away from their families,” she told CNN. “Don’t just listen
to me. You need to learn about what happened to me and take the
blindfold off your eyes.”
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