Police busted a sex trafficking ring that deceived minors from Colombia’s coffee region and brought them to Bogota where they were sexually exploited, reported local media Friday.
Colombian police arrested three members of the alleged human trafficking organization known as the “Paisitas”. The Paisitas recruited minors from the country’s rural coffee region by promising them modelling contracts, fame and fortune. Upon arriving in Bogota however, the minors were forced into sex slavery.
The Paisitas principally worked out of the Kennedy and Bosa localities of Bogota, located in the west of the city, where the group kept a series of brothels for the trafficked minors to work in.
According to newspaper El Espectador, local police were tipped off last July that a man named “Victor,” real name Joseph Alex Ramirez, was pimping minors between the ages of 15 and 17 in the Kennedy and Bosa areas. The tip off initiated a preliminary investigation into Victor and his sex trafficking ring. Ultimately, Victor was arrested, along with two female accomplices.
Through the investigation authorities learned that Victor had connections in a town located in the Caldas department west of Bogota. It was in Caldas that collaborators Leydi Lorena Ospina and Yolanda Acevedo Arias allegedly recruited young girls and put them on buses to Bogota for the group’s criminal exploits. The two women were subsequently arrested for “the induction of prostitution of a minor.”
Three minors were saved from the group’s brothels following the arrests, and are now under the treatment and supervision of specialists from the Colombian Institute of Family Welfare.