Colombian intelligence agents uncovered and dismantled an international human trafficking network, local media reported Monday.
Colombia’s Technical Investigation Team (CTI), the investigatory branch of the Prosecutor General’s Office, captured two women and one man in the town of Anserma, in central Caldas Department, believed to have been trafficking women and youths from Colombia’s coffee region to various Central American countries.
The arrests were facilitated by information received from two members of the network who were captured in Guatemala City days ago.
“With the information obtained through the reporting of the incident, CTI investigators established where the young women were in Guatemala […] informed the Guatemalan police, who rescued the five young women on site where they were enslaved and subjected to prostitution, and repatriated two of them with Colombian national collaboration of the IOM (International Migration Organization),” local media reported the CTI as saying.
Those arrested were Rosa Aliria Mesa Osorio, Paola Andrea Camacho Rendon and Narciso Dias Mejia. The two women are being held in the Villa Josefina female prison in Manizales, the capital of Caldas, and the man is under house arrest due to ongoing treatment for a terminal illness.